Suffering happens all too readily IMHO (or am I misjudging this?) for evolution to not have taken chronic attention-allocational conflict into account and come up with a fix.
What’s the problem we’re thinking evolution might be trying to fix here?
The problem isn’t that suffering feels bad. Evolution isn’t trying to make us happy. If the hypothesis in the OP is true and suffering is the instinct that leads us to move away from situations that place conflicting demands on how we allocate attention, and people don’t do well in those situations, then suffering might easily be a solution rather than a problem.
No, I didn’t mean that the badness was bad and hence evolution would want it to go away. Acute suffering should be enough to make us focus on conflicts between our mental subsystems. It’s as with pain, acute pain leads you to flinch you away from danger, but chronic pain is quite useless and possibly maladaptive since it leads to needless brooding and wailing and distraction which does not at all address the underlying unsolveable problem and might well exacerbate it.
Our ancestors didn’t have the benefit of modern medicine, so some causes of chronic pain may have just killed them outright. On the other hand, not all of the things causing chronic pain today were an issue back then. The incidence for both back pains and depression was probably a lot lower, for example.
Fixing the problem requires removing chronic pain without blocking acute pain when it’s useful. This problem isn’t necessarily trivial. If chronic pain was rare enough, then trade-offs making both chronic and acute pain less likely may simply not have been worth it.
Our ancestors didn’t have the benefit of modern medicine, so some causes of chronic pain may have just killed them outright. On the other hand, not all of the things causing chronic pain today were an issue back then.
I was actually using pain as an analogy for suffering. I know that chronic pain simply wasn’t as much of an issue back then. Which was why I compared chronic pain to chronic suffering. If chronic suffering was as rare as chronic suffering back then (they both sure seem more common now), then there is no issue.
Are the current attention-allocational conflicts us modern people experience somehow more intractable? Do our built in heuristics which usually spring into action when noticing the suffering signal fail in such vexing attention-allocational conflicts?
Why do we need to have read your post, then employed this quite conscious and difficult process of trying to figure out the attention-allocational conflict? Why didn’t the suffering just do its job without us needing to apply theory to figure out its purpose and only then manage to resolve the conflict?
Fixing the problem requires removing chronic pain without blocking acute pain when it’s useful.
I guess you can look at it as a type I—type II error tradeoff. But you could also simply improve your cognitive algorithms which respond to a suffering signal.
Why do we need to have read your post, then employed this quite conscious and difficult process of trying to figure out the attention-allocational conflict? Why didn’t the suffering just do its job without us needing to apply theory to figure out its purpose and only then manage to resolve the conflict?
It’s a good question. I don’t have a good answer for it, other than “I guess suffering was more adaptive in the EEA”.
Acute suffering should be enough to make us focus on conflicts between our mental subsystems.
I get your point, and I agree. At the moment I believe suffering fails to focus our attention in the right place because evolution hasn’t had either the time or the capacity to give us the exact correct instincts.
I vaguely recall an experiment where someone (I don’t recall who) made a horse suffer in the sense we’re describing here. They trained it to do X when it was shown an ellipse with the vertical direction longer, and do Y when it was shown an ellipse with the horizontal direction longer, and gradually showed it ellipses that were more and more circular, so it had no way to decide which one to do. It did the “brooding and wailing and distraction” you’re talking about.
What’s the problem we’re thinking evolution might be trying to fix here?
The problem isn’t that suffering feels bad. Evolution isn’t trying to make us happy. If the hypothesis in the OP is true and suffering is the instinct that leads us to move away from situations that place conflicting demands on how we allocate attention, and people don’t do well in those situations, then suffering might easily be a solution rather than a problem.
No, I didn’t mean that the badness was bad and hence evolution would want it to go away. Acute suffering should be enough to make us focus on conflicts between our mental subsystems. It’s as with pain, acute pain leads you to flinch you away from danger, but chronic pain is quite useless and possibly maladaptive since it leads to needless brooding and wailing and distraction which does not at all address the underlying unsolveable problem and might well exacerbate it.
Our ancestors didn’t have the benefit of modern medicine, so some causes of chronic pain may have just killed them outright. On the other hand, not all of the things causing chronic pain today were an issue back then. The incidence for both back pains and depression was probably a lot lower, for example.
Fixing the problem requires removing chronic pain without blocking acute pain when it’s useful. This problem isn’t necessarily trivial. If chronic pain was rare enough, then trade-offs making both chronic and acute pain less likely may simply not have been worth it.
I was actually using pain as an analogy for suffering. I know that chronic pain simply wasn’t as much of an issue back then. Which was why I compared chronic pain to chronic suffering. If chronic suffering was as rare as chronic suffering back then (they both sure seem more common now), then there is no issue.
Are the current attention-allocational conflicts us modern people experience somehow more intractable? Do our built in heuristics which usually spring into action when noticing the suffering signal fail in such vexing attention-allocational conflicts?
Why do we need to have read your post, then employed this quite conscious and difficult process of trying to figure out the attention-allocational conflict? Why didn’t the suffering just do its job without us needing to apply theory to figure out its purpose and only then manage to resolve the conflict?
I guess you can look at it as a type I—type II error tradeoff. But you could also simply improve your cognitive algorithms which respond to a suffering signal.
It’s a good question. I don’t have a good answer for it, other than “I guess suffering was more adaptive in the EEA”.
I get your point, and I agree. At the moment I believe suffering fails to focus our attention in the right place because evolution hasn’t had either the time or the capacity to give us the exact correct instincts.
I vaguely recall an experiment where someone (I don’t recall who) made a horse suffer in the sense we’re describing here. They trained it to do X when it was shown an ellipse with the vertical direction longer, and do Y when it was shown an ellipse with the horizontal direction longer, and gradually showed it ellipses that were more and more circular, so it had no way to decide which one to do. It did the “brooding and wailing and distraction” you’re talking about.