“Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.”
The motivation of this post is to address the persistent conflation between suffering and pain I have observed from members of the EA community, even amongst those who purport to be “suffering-focused” in their ethical motivations. In order to best address the problem of suffering, it is necessary to be clear about the difference between suffering and mere pain or ordinary displeasure.
The parable of the second arrow
In the Buddhist parable of the second arrow, the Buddha illustrates the distinction between suffering and pain with the tale of a man struck by two arrows. The first arrow represents the pain that life inevitably brings. The second arrow, however, represents the suffering that arises from his reaction to the pain. The Buddha teaches that while the first arrow (pain) is unavoidable, the second arrow (suffering) is optional, and that by letting go of the resistance to the pain (aversion), one will not suffer the sting of the second arrow.
Defining pain and suffering
Pain: An unpleasant physical sensation or emotional experience.[1]
Suffering: The unsatisfactoriness that arises from craving, aversion, and clinging/attachment to sensations and experiences; dukkha.
I feel it is important to clarify at this point that, while the above definition of suffering derives from historically-Buddhist teachings about dukkha and its cause, I am not endorsing this definition because it is Buddhist but rather because I believe it best identifies suffering as it can actually be observed in phenomenal experience. For those who are skeptical (possibly deeply so) about the claims and teachings of Buddhism, I ask that you consider the distinction I am advocating with reference to your own experience(s) of pain and suffering. While both pain and suffering are phenomena that “feel bad” experientially, I maintain that the sensations and experiences to which the terms/concepts “pain” and “suffering” respectively refer are actually distinct as differentiated by the above definitions. As a tradition, Buddhism is almost entirely concerned with suffering, its cause, its cessation, and the way to its cessation, so I do not consider it far-fetched to think that the way(s) in which it describes suffering are quite useful in distinguishing it as it is to be found in actual experience.
Additionally, a distinction between pain and suffering has not only been made in the context of Buddhism. For examples of papers in the context of Western academic philosophy which argue for such a distinction, see Kauppinen (2019) and Massin (2017). Further, empirical work which investigates the effects of meditation on responses to painful experiences, such as Zeidan et al. (2011), Grant et al. (2011), and Perlman et al. (2010), as well as studies investigating the effectiveness of therapeutic techniques like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), such as Thorn et al. (2011), Ehde et al. (2014), and Wetherell et al. (2011), suggest that in changing perceptions of and reactions to pain, individuals may experience a reduction in suffering, even when the physical sensation of pain remains. Thus, even outside the context of Buddhism, it seems there is strong evidence for there being a difference between pain and suffering as actually experienced.
Defining these terms clearly and accurately is crucial in differentiating between two concepts that are often conflated. By clearly defining pain and suffering, we can better understand their relationship and address suffering more effectively with the identification of its root causes.
The relationship between pain and suffering
Pain is not the cause of suffering. As illustrated by the parable of the second arrow and made clear in the above definitions of the terms, the cause of suffering is not pain but rather the reaction of craving, aversion, and clinging/attachment to sensations and experiences (which may or may not be painful or unpleasant).
It is sometimes said that “suffering = pain * resistance.” While I believe this formula is useful insofar as it makes a distinction between pain and suffering and indicates that resistance or aversion to pain results in suffering, I do not think it entirely captures the truth of the matter in that it suggests that suffering would not arise in the absence of pain. As my definition of suffering indicates, craving pleasure, even in the absence of pain, will result in suffering.
There can be pain without suffering. If pain is experienced without attachment and aversion, there is no resulting suffering. If the Buddha were to stub his toe, there would be pain, but he would not suffer as a result.
Suffering can occur without pain. Consider, for example, a drug addict, who suffers because they crave the pleasure of a high and/or are averse to sobriety, or the stereotypical rich-but-miserable millionaire, who may have a relatively pain-free life but suffers regardless.
Examples of the conflation of suffering and pain
I was moved to write this post as a result of reading Magnus Vinding’s book Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications, where, while I agree with much of the thrust of the book, I perceived a consistent failure to distinguish between suffering and pain or displeasure. Here, I will provide examples of this conflation, from Vinding and those he quotes and cites on the subject. I take the ubiquity of this conflation from Vinding and his sources to be an indication of the extensivity of the conflation in suffering-focused literature at large, although I am certainly interested to know if anyone is aware of sources that make a careful distinction between suffering and pain in arguing that suffering and its reduction is what we (should) care about.
To start, Vinding defines suffering as “an overall bad feeling, or state of consciousness.”[2] If he means to specifically pick out suffering and not pain or displeasure with his use of the term “bad,” then this is not necessarily wrong, but I believe this to be too imprecise to be useful as a working definition of suffering. Would Vinding consider a state of consciousness to be suffering(ful) merely by virtue of being quite painful? If so, this ignores the genuine possibility of experiencing pain without suffering.
Here are some other examples, from those whom Vinding cites:
Karl Popper: “I believe that there is, from the ethical point of view, no symmetry between suffering and happiness, or between pain and pleasure.”[3]
David Pearce: “[N]egative utilitarianism… challenges the moral symmetry of pleasure and pain.”[4]
Richard Ryder: “At some point, … justification [for a moral theory] must end. But where? I believe it ends upon the reality of pain.”[5]
Vinding notes that “Ryder defines pain ‘broadly to cover all types of suffering whether cognitive, emotional, or sensory’.”[6] Defining pain to include all kinds of suffering is surely as much of a mistake as defining suffering to be just pain or displeasure, because in both cases one is entirely eliding the differences between the two as they are observed in experience.
“So did utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick, who considered it a fundamental ethical principle that ‘all pain is to be avoided’.”[7]
“Both [Mancini and Pearce] predict it will become technically feasible to abolish pain and suffering, and they both explore genetic engineering and direct brain stimulation as viable and complementary options toward this end.”[8]
These examples illustrate a general trend in suffering-focused literature to conflate suffering with pain. I think this is a crucial mistake; if we really care about reducing suffering in expectation, then we should be careful to distinguish the two, so as to avoid misspending our resources and efforts on approaches that do not actually address suffering as distinct from pain or displeasure.
The importance of this distinction
If you care about reducing suffering, it’s quite important to be precise in identifying and distinguishing what you actually care about.
Having this distinction in mind is critical in order to develop ethical policies and effective interventions. For instance, as previously mentioned, CBT and mindfulness practices have been shown to reduce suffering by altering the mental response to pain rather than addressing the pain itself. If (the alleviation of) suffering is what we care about, this distinction guides us to focus on the root causes of suffering in our ethical considerations, rather than merely alleviating pain. Recognizing that suffering often lies in an aversive mental reaction to pain rather than the pain itself enables more precise scientific research and more effective strategies for reducing overall suffering.
Without recognizing the distinction, one may think alleviating pain causes a reduction in suffering. Perhaps it is usually the case that more moments of suffering, or moments of “greater suffering,” tend to accompany the arising of increasingly severe pain, and it may be that by alleviating the severe pain, there is a reduction in the associated suffering because of a tendency to be less averse to less painful experiences. However, as I have argued, it is not the pain itself which causes suffering, so approaches like pain alleviation are merely palliative and not an effective cure that addresses the cause of suffering itself.[9]
Conclusion
Understanding the distinction between pain and suffering is crucial for developing effective strategies to reduce suffering. By directly addressing the craving, aversion, and clinging which cause suffering, we can create more compassionate and impactful interventions.
I encourage you to reflect on your own experiences of pain and suffering. Notice how your reactions contribute to your suffering and consider how distinguishing between pain and suffering can help you develop a deeper understanding of your experiences and suffer less. By being precise in identifying and distinguishing what you care about, we can collectively create more effective strategies to alleviate suffering.
Thanks to Kaj Sotala, Jonathan Leighton, and Jack Auen for feedback on drafts of this post.
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This definition is quite close to the International Association for the Study of Pain’s definition of pain.
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Vinding, Magnus. Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications. Center for Reducing Suffering, 2020, p. 13.
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Vinding, Magnus. Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications. Center for Reducing Suffering, 2020, p. 30.
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Vinding, Magnus. Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications. Center for Reducing Suffering, 2020, p. 31.
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Vinding, Magnus. Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications. Center for Reducing Suffering, 2020, p. 79.
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Vinding, Magnus. Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications. Center for Reducing Suffering, 2020, p. 79.
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Vinding, Magnus. Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications. Center for Reducing Suffering, 2020, p. 79.
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Vinding, Magnus. Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications. Center for Reducing Suffering, 2020, p. 240.
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In fact, we might take this as an indication that the best we can do in the case of suffering of non-human animals, whom lack the cognitive capacities required to develop mindfulness, let go of clinging, and attain the cessation of suffering, is to provide them with less painful circumstances of existence. I do not expect a chicken, for example, to be able to practice meditation, so ending factory farming still seems like the best way to reduce chicken suffering in expectation. However, I do expect pretty much any cognitively mature human to be able to learn how to reduce or cease suffering by addressing its fundamental cause through the development of mindfulness.
I wonder whether “suffering” is an adequate translation. I get the feeling that the Buddhist sutras and our common vulgate are talking past each other. See for example MN144, in which Channa slits his wrists to end his pain, and the Buddha says he was sufficiently enlightened that he will not be reborn. Channa complains: “Reverend Sāriputta, I’m not keeping well, I’m not getting by. The pain is terrible and growing, not fading; its growing is evident, not its fading. The winds piercing my head are so severe, it feels like a strong man drilling into my head with a sharp point. The pain in my head is so severe, it feels like a strong man tightening a tough leather strap around my head. The winds slicing my belly are so severe, like a deft butcher or their apprentice were slicing open a cows’s belly with a meat cleaver. The burning in my body is so severe, it feels like two strong men grabbing a weaker man by the arms to burn and scorch him on a pit of glowing coals. I’m not keeping well, I’m not getting by. The pain is terrible and growing, not fading; its growing is evident, not its fading. Reverend Sāriputta, I will slit my wrists. I don’t wish to live.” If that’s “not suffering” then “not suffering” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
I think asking people like Daniel Ingram, Frank Yang, Nick Cammeratta, Shinzen Young, Roger Thisdell, etc. on how they experience pain post awakening is much more productive than debating 2500 year old teachings which have been (mis)translated many times.
It seems a bit misguided to me to argue “well, even in the absence of suffering, one might experience such severe pain that one might prefer non-existence to continuing to endure that pain, so this ‘not suffering’ can’t be all it’s cracked up to be”—would you rather experience suffering on top of that pain? With or without pain, not suffering is preferable to suffering.
For example, with end-of-life patients, circumstances being so unpleasant doesn’t mean that they may as well suffer, too; nor does “being an end-of-life patient” being a possible experience among the space of all possible non-suffering experiences make not suffering any less valuable.
Acknowledging that not suffering is preferable to suffering, even in the presence of pain, doesn’t trivialize the reality of pain, which still feels bad!
My point is that in English “experience such severe pain that one might prefer non-existence to continuing to endure that pain” would be considered an uncontroversial example of “suffering”, not as something suffering-neutral to which suffering might or might not be added. I understand that in Buddhism there’s a fine-grained distinction of some sort here, but it carries over poorly to English.
I expect that if you told a Buddhist-naive English-speaker “Buddhism teaches you how to never suffer ever again” they would assume you were claiming that this would include “never experiencing such severe pain that one might prefer non-existence to continuing to endure that pain.” If this is not the case, I think they would be justified to feel they’d been played with a bit of a bait-and-switch dharma-wise.
So basically the Buddhist word that gets translated to English as suffering means something like “second-order (and higher) effects of pain (and other emotions)”, while the natural meaning of the English word is more like “all effects of pain”.
The question is whether those are two different words in the original language, or it was a bait-and-switch from the very beginning.
I’ve seen dukkha translated as something more like “unsatisfactoriness” which puts a kind of Stoic spin on it. You look at the cards you’ve been dealt, and instead of playing them, you find them inadequate and get upset about it. The Stoics (and the Buddhists, in this interpretation) would recommend that you instead just play the cards you’re dealt. They may not be great cards, but you won’t make them any better by complaining about them. Dunno if this is authentic to Buddhism or is more the result of Westerners trying to find something familiar in Buddhism, though.
Sure, but I think that’s just because of the usual conflation between pain and suffering which I’m trying to address with this post. If you ask anyone with the relevant experience “does Buddhism teaching me to never suffer again mean that I’ll never experience (severe) pain again?”, they’ll just answer no. I don’t think it’s reasonable to think of this as a “bait-and-switch” because the dhamma never taught the end of pain, only the end of suffering; it’s not the dhamma’s fault if novices think the end of suffering means an end to pain.
I think this text sounds quite misleading, though maybe it’s a problem of translation: (emphasis mine)
I’d guess it’s a problem of translation; I’m pretty confident the original text in Pali would just say “dukkha” there.
The Wikipedia entry for dukkha says it’s commonly translated as “pain,” but I’m very sure the referent of dukkha in experience is not pain, even if it’s mistranslated as such, however commonly.
The argumentation how “pain is not the cause of suffering” seems to me basically like a clever verbal argument with too many implied assumptions:
suffering can only have one direct cause (i.e. it cannot be the case that both pain and/or aversion cause suffering)
suffering cannot have indirect causes (i.e. it cannot be the case that pain causes aversion, which in turn causes suffering)
if something is true in an extreme situation, it is a valid conclusion for the average situation (if a superhuman meditator can feel “meh” about any kind of pain, the same is true about everyone)
Interestingly, I had a debate with someone on an earlier draft of this post about whether or not pain could be considered a cause of suffering, which led to me brushing up on some of literature on causation.
What seems clear to me is that suffering causally depends on craving/aversion, but not on pain—there is suffering if and only if there is craving/aversion, but there can be suffering without pain, and there can be pain without suffering.
On Lewis’ account, causal dependence implies causation but not vice versa, so this does not itself mean that pain cannot be considered a cause of suffering. However, given that suffering occurs if and only if craving/aversion occurs, I’m pretty comfortable pointing to craving/aversion as “the” cause of suffering.
I’m actually fairly sympathetic to a view which holds pain as an indirect cause of suffering in that it seems pretty natural to say that e.g. aversion arose in response to pain, at least in specific instances where there is pain, aversion (to the pain), and then suffering. However, I’m not sure I would make the claim that “pain causes aversion” in general, as it is quite possible for pain to occur without aversion then occurring.
I’m curious as to what part of my argument you perceived as invalidly inferring from extreme to average situations?
There are counter-examples to the claim, for example people liking spicy food.
But if you e.g. stab someone with a knife, not many people are going to say “thank you” or remain indifferent about it. I think that in such situation, saying “pain caused aversion” is a fair description of what happened.
It is interesting to know that a level 100 Buddhist monk could get stabbed with a knife and say “anyway, pain and pleasure are merely sensations, I can choose to react on them or to ignore them, and I am choosing to ignore this one”, but that is an exception rather than the rule. I feel it is wrong to focus on the 1 in a million case where X does not lead to Y, when in the remaining 999999 cases it does.
And it’s kinda the point of why pain exists, that it is a signal to avoid something. So when people feel pain, and a desire to avoid that pain arises… that’s the mechanism working as intended. It is good to know that a mechanism designed by evolution can be “hacked”. But by default, it works.
It is expected from civilized people to exercise some self-control, including emotional, to improve their lives. Even small kids are told to stop screaming if they need to be vaccinated or have a blood sample taken. I am not avoiding an appointment with my dentist, even if I know that some pain is going to happen there. And yet, if I was given a choice between “pain” and “no pain” with everything else being equal, I would obviously choose “no pain”.
It is easier for me to imagine a person who would choose “pain” instead (e.g. because they are curious about the experience) than a person who really has no preference whatsoever. How would a person with no preferences about pain survive in long term? Pain is often a signal of some damage to the body. So even if I could somehow become emotionally indifferent to pain, I would probably still want to avoid painful situations for rational reasons. (Not sure whether “avoiding painful situations for rational reasons” also counts as “aversion”.)
We cannot realistically expect a significant part of population (let’s say, 10%) to become advanced meditators to the level that they actually become indifferent to pain. So… for practical purposes, “pain causes aversion” describes the situation correctly, for a vast majority of people.
I want to address a common misconception that I see you having here when you write phrases like:
Importantly, “not being averse to pain,” in the intended sense of the word aversion, does not mean that one is “indifferent to pain,” in the sense of (not) having intentions and preferences. When I speak of “craving” or “aversion,” I am referring to a very specific kind of mental action and experience which results in suffering, not to intentions and preferences. Craving/aversion is the kind of desire which finds the way things presently are fundamentally unacceptable. Craving is like an attempt to grab at sensations and experiences, and aversion is like an attempt to hold them at arm’s length.
So, it isn’t the case that someone who has let go of craving/aversion and therefore suffering is completely indifferent to pain or that they won’t take action to alleviate the pain. If you stab a non-sufferer, they’ll still e.g. go to a hospital and have the wound treated. They’ll still have a general preference for pleasure over pain and take actions in accordance with those preferences; they just won’t seek pleasure or avoid pain in the sense of “I am not ok without this pleasure, or with this pain”—that’s craving and aversion. Pain still serves its important functional role, without the extra mental (re)actions of aversion and suffering.
This is also why I prefer to use terms like craving, aversion, and clinging to terms like “desire.” Sometimes you hear the Buddhist teaching formulated as “the cause of suffering is desire” and “stop desiring in order to stop suffering,” but I think the layperson is likely to misinterpret this as “so I can’t have any intentions or preferences,” due to the common usage of the word “desire” as “intending” or “preferring.” For example, see this LW comment thread which discusses the use of the word “desire” in this context, or Daniel Ingram’s discussion (and eschewal) of “no-preference models” of awakening.
Similarly, one could mean by “aversion” something like “dispreference” and describe someone who simply intends to alleviate pain as being averse to that pain, but this is not “aversion” as used in the Buddhist context to refer to the cause of suffering, tanha. While “aversion” may still be misinterpreted in such a manner, I think it’s less likely to be misunderstood than terms like “desire.” Same for “craving”—I think people are generally already familiar with “craving” in experience in the sense of “I must have that which I crave, I am not ok without having that which I crave.”
On one hand, yeah, Buddhism has a lot of new concepts, and if you don’t translate them, it sounds like incomprehensible mumbo jumbo, and if you do translate them, the translated words do not have the same connotations as the original ones. So there is now way to make the listener such as me happy.
On the other hand, it kinda sounds like if I told you “hey, I have a chocolate cookie for you”, and then added that I actually use very idiosyncratic definitions of “chocolate”, “cookie”, and “you”, so you shouldn’t really expect to get anything resembling a chocolate cookie at all, maybe not even anything edible, and maybe actually you won’t get nothing. But if I disclose it this way, it’s not really motivating.
If we tried to avoid sneaking in connotations, it might be something like: “Buddhism uses words for many concepts you don’t know, let’s just call them ‘untranslatable’ for now. So, we have figured out that untranslatable-1 causes untranslatable-2, but if you do a lot of untranslateble-3, then instead of untraslatable-2 you get untranslatable-4, and we would like to teach you how to do that.” And if someone asked “okay, this sounds confusing, but just to make sure, untranslatable-2 is bad and untranslatable-4 is good, right?”, the answer would be “well, not in the sense that you use ‘good’ and ‘bad’; perhaps let’s say that untranslatable-2 is untranslatable-5, and untranslatable-4 is not that”.
Then the question is whether the idiosyncratic words are only ever explained using other idiosyncratic words, or whether at some point it actually connects with the shared reality. And if it’s the latter, how do all those words ultimately translate to… normal English.
The point is that the words ground out in actual sensations and experiences, not just other words and concepts. What I’m arguing is that it’s not useful to use the English word “suffering” to refer to ordinary pain or displeasure, because there is a distinction in experience between what we refer to as “pain” or “displeasure” and what is referred to by the term “dukkha,” and that “suffering” is best understood as this dukkha. That we commonly say things like “he suffered the pain” is an indication of this distinction already existing in English, even if there is a tendency to messily equivocate between the two.
You say:
Which, if this is just a semantic argument, then sure. But OP’s conclusion is goal-oriented:
When I think of effective strategies here, I think of developing jhana helmets[1] which would imitate the mind state of blissful-joy-flow state. Although this causes joy-concentrated-collectedness, it’s argued that this puts your mind in a state where it can better notice that aversion/craving are necessary for suffering (note: I’ve only partially experienced this).
Although I think you’re expressing skepticism of craving/aversion as the only necessary cause of suffering for all people? Or maybe just the 99.9999% reduction in suffering (ie the knife) vs a 99% reduction for all? What do you actually believe?
For me, I read a book that suggested many different experiments to try in a playful way. One was to pay attention to the “distance” between a my current state (e.g. “itching”) and a desired state (“not itching”), and it did feel worse the larger the “distance”. I could even intentionally make it feel larger or small and thought that was very interesting. In one limiting case, you don’t classify the two situations “itching” “not itching” as separate, so no suffering. In the other, it’s “the difference between heaven and hell”, lol. This book had >100 like these (though it is intended for advanced meditators, brag brag).
those jhana helmet people have pivoted to improving pedagogy w/ jhana retreats at $1-2k, I think for the purpose of gathering more jhana data, but then it became widely successful
I agree that emotional reaction can make the pain much worse. But I think that if you already are a reasonable sane adult, removing the emotional reaction would reduce the badness maybe by half. Even very experienced meditators can be overwhelmed by pain, if it is strong enough.
Reducing by half is still something worth doing. But I think we already are trying to get people there—the concepts of self-control, “no pain no gain”, stoicism, etc., are well-known even outside Buddhism.
I think you’re right about all the claims of fact. The Buddha won’t suffer when he feels pain. But unenlightened beings, which is all the rest of us, particularly animals, will.
So taking pain as a proxy for suffering is pretty reasonable for thinking about how to reduce suffering. Equating suffering to pain is not, since there are lots of psychological effects that cause suffering in the absence of pain.
A really sophisticated analysis will guess how much suffering this particular pain cuases, but it is pretty fair to guess that on average, the suffering is pretty close to proportional to the pain. You think something with the semantics of roughly “wow I wish this weren’t happening and I could find a way to stop it. This is horrible.”. This is suffering. You probably tend to think this with intensity and frequency driven by the pain provoking this thought.
I’ve thought about this a fair bit, and have studied both buddhism and the brain mechanisms underlying pain and suffering.
But the example of the Buddha goes to show that humans have the capacity to not suffer even in painful circumstances, even if right now they do. It’s not like “unenlightenment” is something you’re forever resigned to.
I agree that in most cases where someone suffers in the presence of extreme pain, they’re likely to suffer noticeably less if that pain is alleviated, but I don’t think this means “the best way to alleviate suffering is to reduce pain as a proxy for it,” since what’s actually causing the suffering is not the pain but the aversion to it.
The diagnosis is roughly correct (I would say “most suffering is caused by an internal response of fleeing from pain but not escaping it”), but IMO the standard proffered remedy (Buddhist-style detachment from wanting) goes too far and promises too much.
Re: the diagnosis, three illustrative ways the relationship between pain, awareness, and suffering has manifested for me:
Migraines: I get them every few weeks, and they’re pretty bad. After a friend showed me how to do a vipassana body scan, on a lark I tried moving my attention to the spot inside my skull where the migraine was most intense. To my relief, this helped the suffering greatly; the pain was caused by the migraine but the suffering was caused by trying futilely to not feel the pain, and staring directly at it was a good remedy.
Mental health: I’m chronically depressed and anxious. (I am not asking for advice about it, and there’s a unique causal element so your advice is less likely than usual to help.) One thing I figured out is that I can “wallow” in it: optimize for feeling it as intensely as possible. For example, if I’m feeling miserable I’ll intentionally lie in bed in the dark listening to my saddest music. This genuinely helps make things more bearable, and helps the worst moods pass faster, compared to the approach of trying to distract myself from the feelings or to force a contrary feeling.
Psychedelics: The worst hour of my life was spent on a bad acid trip, feeling nauseous and wanting to escape that feeling, and getting stuck in a “turning away from awareness” motion (reflected in visual hallucination by trying to mentally push my visual field up and to the left, only for it to reset to its actual location several times per second). That was a tremendous mistake.
However, my depression sometimes manifests as anhedonia, i.e. true detachment from desire, and that’s really not all it’s cracked up to be. I’m not suffering when I lie around all day with anhedonia, but I’m not getting any positive valence from it, and meanwhile I’m stagnating as a person. And I genuinely do not see how to wallow in anhedonia, to turn my awareness inward and find something to engage with. I’ve tried. It just seems like nobody’s home in that state.
A key, I suspect, is happiness set point. A person who takes up Buddhism or a similar practice, and starts to experience their preferences less strongly, ends up hovering more stably around their happiness set point without the highs and lows that come with excitement, anticipation, triumph, disappointment, etc. Lows hurt more than highs, so this mental motion is a net improvement. Most people have a pretty good happiness set point, so it feels like a good end result. (And in most cases people stop before ceasing to have preferences entirely; there’s probably even a golden mean where they’re more effective in the real world than either their natural state or a zen-wireheaded extreme.)
But I don’t see much proof that detachment from desire moves one’s happiness set point, so advertising it as a cure for unhappiness feels like the same sort of error as talking about how everyone—even poor people—should buy index funds. (Which is to say, it’s good advice on the margin for the majority of people, but for some people it’s irrelevant, and the correct first advice is more like “how to get a job, or a better job” or “how to budget” or “how to cheaply refinance your credit card debt”, etc.)
And also, I’m dubious that [intentionally reducing the intensity of your good moments] is actually helpful in the same way that [intentionally reducing the intensity of your bad moments] is? Sometimes you happen to know that a good thing is going to happen with very little risk of failure. In that case, it seems strictly better to want and desire and expect that good thing.
In short, I highly recommend turning towards experiences of pain rather than fleeing from them; but I think the Buddhist thesis is questionable.
The message of Buddhism isn’t “in order to not suffer, don’t want anything”; not craving/being averse doesn’t mean not having any intentions or preferences. Sure, if you crave the satisfaction of your preferences, or if you’re averse to their frustration, you will suffer, but intentions and preferences remain when craving/aversion/clinging is gone. It’s like a difference between “I’m not ok unless this preference is satisfied” and “I’d still like this preference to be satisfied, but I’ll ultimately be ok either way.”
Not directly related, but I also get bad migraines. Would you kindly be able to point me towards somewhere I can read something useful about the vipassana body scan? Maybe I am overthinking it but the top hits when I searched looked low value.
Good question! I picked it up from a friend at a LW meetup a decade ago, so it didn’t come with all the extra baggage that vipassana meditation seems to usually carry. So this is just going to be the echo of it that works for me.
Step 1 is to stare at your index finger (a very sensitive part of your body) and gently, patiently try to notice that it’s still producing a background level of sensory stimulus even when it’s not touching anything. That attention to the background signal, focused on a small patch of your body, is what the body scan is based on.
Step 2 is learning how to “move” that awareness of the background signal slowly. Try to smoothly shift that awareness down your finger, knuckle by knuckle, keeping the area of awareness small by ceasing to focus on the original spot as you focus on a new spot. Then try moving that spot of awareness gradually to the base of your thumb, and noticing the muscle beneath the skin.
Use Case α is harnessing that kind of awareness to relax physical tension and even pain. The next time you have a paper cut or a small burn, once you’ve dealt with it in the obvious objective ways and now just have to handle the pain, focus your awareness right on that spot. The sensation will still be loud, but it won’t be overwhelming when you’re focusing on it rather than fleeing from it. Or the next time you notice a particularly tense muscle, focus your awareness there; for me, that usually loosens it at least a little.
Step 3 is the body scan itself: creating awareness for each part of your skin and muscles, gradually, bit by bit, starting from the crown of your head and slowly tracing out a path that covers everything. This is where a guided meditation could really help. I don’t have one to recommend (after having the guided meditation at the meetup, I got as much of the idea as I needed), but hopefully some of the hundreds out there are as good as Random Meditating Rationalist #37 was.
And Use Case β, when you have a migraine, is to imagine moving that awareness inside your skull, to the place where the migraine pain feels like it’s concentrated. (I recommend starting from a place where the migraine seems to “surface”—for me, the upper orbit of my left eye—if you have such a spot.)
There’s something quite odd about how this works: your brain doesn’t have pain receptors, so the pain from the migraine ends up in some phantom location on your body map, and it’s (conveniently?) interpreted as being inside your head. By tracing your awareness inside your skull, you walk along that body map to the same phantom location as that pain, so it works out basically the same as if you were in Use Case α.
Hope this helps!
I did so in my article on Tranquilism, so I broadly share your perspective!
I wouldn’t go as far as what you’re saying in endnote 9, though. I mean, I see some chance that you’re right in the impractical sense of, “If someone gave up literally all they cared about in order to pursue ideal meditation training under ideal circumstances (and during the training they don’t get any physical illness issues or otherwise have issues crop up that prevent successfully completion of the training), then they could learn to control their mental states and avoid nearly all future sources of suffering.” But that’s pretty impractical even if true!
It’s interesting, though, what you say about CBT. I agree it makes sense to be accurate about these distinctions, and that it could affect specific interventions (though maybe not at the largest scale of prioritization, the way I see the landscape).
Lukas, thanks for taking the time to read and reply! I appreciate you reminding me of your article on Tranquilism—it’s been a couple of years since I read it (during my fellowship with CLR), and I hadn’t made a mental note of it making such a distinction when I did, so thanks for the reminder.
While I agree that it’s an open question as to how effective meditation is for alleviating suffering at scale (e.g. how easy it is for how many humans to reduce their suffering by how much with how much time/effort), I don’t think it would require as much of a commitment as you seem to expect in the median case. Personally, I think it’s likely that the median person would be able to make substantial progress in reducing suffering as a layperson, i.e. without becoming a monastic. Even if attaining a total and forevermore cessation of suffering is substantially more difficult/attainable by substantially fewer people in one lifetime, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that most people could suffer at least 50 percent less with dedicated mindfulness practice. I’m curious as to what might feed an opposing intuition for you! I’d be quite excited about empirical research that investigates the tractability and scalability of meditation for reducing suffering, in either case.
(By the way, would it be alright if I ping you privately to set up a meeting? I’ve been a fan of your writing since becoming familiar with you during my time at CLR and would love a chance to pick your brain about SFE stuff and hear about what you’ve been up to lately!)
My sense is that existing mindfulness studies don’t show the sort of impressive results that we’d expect if this were a great solution.
Also, I think people who would benefit most from having less day-to-day suffering often struggle with having no “free room” available for meditation practice, and that seems like an issue that’s hard to overcome even if meditation practice would indeed help them a lot.
It’s already sign of having a decently good life when you’re able to start dedicating time for something like meditation, which I think requires a bit more mental energy than just watching series or scrolling through the internet. A lot of people have leisure time, but it’s a privilege to be mentally well off enough to do purposeful activities during your leisure time. The people who have a lot of this purposeful time probably (usually) aren’t among the ones that suffer most (whereas the people who don’t have it will struggle sticking to regular meditation practice, for good reasons).
For instance, if someone has a chronic illness with frequent pain and nearly constant fatigue, I can see how it might be good for them to practice meditation for pain management, but higher up on their priority list are probably things like “how do I manage to do daily chores despite low energy levels?” or “how do I not get let go at work?.”
Similarly, for other things people may struggle with (addictions, financial worries, anxieties of various sorts; other mental health issues), meditation is often something that would probably help, but it doesn’t feel like priority number one for people with problem-ridden, difficult lives. It’s pretty hard to keep up motivation for training something that you’re not fully convinced of it being your top priority, especially if you’re struggling with other things.
I see meditation as similar to things like “eat healthier, exercise more, go to sleep on time and don’t consume distracting content or too much light in the late evenings, etc.” And these things have great benefits, but they’re also hard, so there are no low-hanging fruit and interventions in this space will have limited effectiveness (or at least limited cost-effectiveness; you could probably get quite far if you gifted people their private nutritionist cook, fitness trainer and motivator, house cleaner and personal assistant, meditation coach, give them enough money for financial independence, etc.).
And then the people who would have enough “free room” to meditate may be well off enough to not feel like they need it? In some ways, the suffering of a person who is kind of well off in life isn’t that bad and instead of devoting 1h per day for meditation practice to reduce the little suffering that they have, maybe the well-off person would rather take Spanish lessons, or train for a marathon, etc.
I’ll send you a DM!
If you have any specific studies in mind which show this, I would be interested to see! I have a sense that mindfulness tends to be studied in the context of “increasing well-being” in a general sense and not specifically to “decrease or eliminate suffering.” I would be quite interested in a study which studies meditation’s effects when directly targeting suffering.
I really appreciate you raising this point in detail; I think it’s something I haven’t included enough in my own considerations. Having enough free time and energy for meditation practice is indeed a kind of privilege.
I’m going to chew on this some more, but one initial thought I’ve had is that the general quality of life needed as a prerequisite to devoting enough time and energy to meditation practice may be lower than one may expect, at least by Western standards. For example, in a place like India, there seems to be a good amount of people in difficult circumstances that nonetheless make time for meditation and spiritual pursuits. However, I agree that in the limit, if all of your waking moments are focused on simply acquiring enough food today, it seems much less reasonable to prescribe meditation as the solution for their suffering.
I find the description “The unsatisfactoriness that arises from craving, aversion, and clinging/attachment to sensations and experiences” a bit hard to understand. But it seems similar to “preference frustration” which occurs when one can’t satisfy a strong desire. Is this the intended meaning?
It seems somewhat plausible that preference frustration is indeed identical to suffering, but I’m not convinced. When I’m suffering from pain it also is the case that I don’t want to be in pain, so a preference is frustrated. However, it also seems that I don’t want to be in pain because I suffer from pain. So in this case, preference frustration would be explained with suffering. This in turn would mean they can’t be identical, since explanation is irreflexive: “x because x” is false for any x.
I would object more directly to your proposal that pain is “an unpleasant physical sensation or emotional experience”. People with depression have an unpleasant emotional experience, but they clearly aren’t thereby in pain. The IASP definition you referred to seems more appropriate: “An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage”. Depression feels nothing like tissue damage, so it’s not pain. Since both pain and depression (and other emotional experiences like anxiety) can cause suffering, this is another point for your argument that pain is not the same as suffering.
I wouldn’t say suffering is merely preference frustration—if you’re not attached to your preferences and their satisfaction, then you won’t suffer if they’re frustrated. Not craving/being averse doesn’t mean you don’t have preferences, though—see this reply I made to another comment on this post for more discussion of this.
I don’t know if I would say depression isn’t painful, at least in the emotional sense of pain. In either case, it’s certainly unpleasant, and if you want to use “pain” to refer to unpleasantness associated with tissue damage and “displeasure” to refer to a larger category of sensations which includes both pain and other “unpleasant-but-not-‘painful’” experiences such as depression, I don’t really have an objection—my point is still that suffering is distinct from ordinary displeasure.
I’m not sure I understand this distinction. Say I have a strong desire to eat pizza, but only a weak craving. I have a hard time imagining what that would be like. Or a strong craving but a weak desire. Or even this: I have a strong desire not to eat pizza, but also a strong craving to eat pizza. Are perhaps desires, in this picture, more intellectual somehow, or purely instrumental, while cravings are … animalistic urges? One example I can think of in these terms would be addiction, where someone has a strong desire not to smoke and a strong craving to smoke. Or, another example, someone has a strong craving to laugh and a strong desire to instead keep composure.
Does then craving (rather than desire) frustration, or aversion realization, constitute suffering? This is perhaps more plausible. But still, it seems to make sense to say I have an aversion to pain because I suffer from it, which wouldn’t make sense if suffering was the same as an aversion being realized.
I think this is likely in part due to “desire” connoting both craving and preferring. In the Buddhist context, “desire” is often used more like “craving,” but on the other hand, if I have a pizza for dinner, it seems reasonable to say it was because I desired so (in the sense of having a preference for it), even if there was not any craving for it.
I think people tend to crave what they prefer until they’ve made progress on undoing the habit of craving/aversion, so it’s understandable that it can be hard for such a person to imagine having a strong preference without an associated craving. However, the difference becomes clearer if/when one experiences intentions and preferences in the absence of craving/aversion.
Perhaps it would be informative to examine your experience of preferring in instances other than e.g. eating, where I think there is more of a tendency to crave because “you need food to survive.” For example, if you’re writing and considering two ways of articulating something, you might find you have a strong preference for one way over another, but I imagine there might be less craving in the sense of “I must have it this way, not another.” Perhaps this isn’t the best example possible, but I think careful consideration will reveal the difference in experience between “desire” in the craving sense and “desire” in the preferring sense.
ETA: Another example I thought of is selecting a song to listen to if you’re listening to music—you might want to listen to one song vs. others, but not necessarily have a strong craving for it.
No, because craving something results in suffering, even if you get that which you crave, and being averse to something results in suffering, even if you avoid that to which you’re averse.
I think it makes more sense to say there’s an aversion to pain because pain feels bad; since suffering is not a necessary consequence of pain, it doesn’t make sense to say that you’re averse to pain because it results in suffering. The causal chain is aversion->suffering, not the other way around.
I don’t buy that even Buddha himself could avoid the suffering from the most severe forms of pain, which are also the ones that matter most—which makes it pretty arrogant to claim that suffering is optional imo.
Which of the following claims would you disagree with?
Craving/aversion causes suffering; there is suffering if and only if there is craving/aversion.
There are practices by which one can untrain the habit of craving/aversion with careful attention and intention.
In the limit, these practices can result in totally dropping the habit of craving/aversion, regardless of circumstance.
The Buddha practiced in such a manner as to totally stop craving/aversion, regardless of circumstance.
Therefore, the Buddha would not be averse to even the most extreme pain and therefore not suffer even in the most painful circumstances possible.
It’s more fair to say that there are practices by which, with much time and effort, one can partly untrain the habit of craving/aversion.
The assumption that these can be completely dropping the habit is entirely theoretical. The historical Buddha’s abilities are lost to history. Modern meditators can perform immense feats of pain tolerance, but I personally haven’t heard one claim to have completely eradicated the habit of suffering.
Therefore suffering is optional in the sense that poverty is optional. If you’ve got the time and energy to do a ton of work, you can reduce it.
This is not super helpful when a broke person is asking you for money.
Suffering isn’t optional in the usual sense of the word. You can’t just switch it off. You can reduce it with tons of work. (which, BTW, animals can’t even comprehend the possibility of—and most humans haven’t).
As I said, your inverse point, suffering without pain, is much more valid and valuable.
I believe Daniel Ingram makes such a claim by virtue of his claim of arhatship; if he still suffers then he cannot reasonably claim to be an arhat. He also has an anecdote of someone else he considers to be an arhat saying “This one is not suffering!” in response to a question at a retreat. I think it’s often the case that someone who has found the end of suffering doesn’t go around proclaiming it widely for various reasons.
More directly, I know a complete cessation of craving/aversion and therefore suffering is possible because I have experienced it; I do not suffer. I hesitate to make this claim publicly because I’m not interested in getting into debates about whether or not I actually do not suffer—I know so, and that’s enough for me. However, if it’s helpful to know that the complete cessation of suffering is actually attainable by a kind of existence proof, I do not mind speaking simply about what I know in my own experience(s).
I’m pretty suffering-focused in practice for EA-related actions (mostly donations), so I was hoping you’d say more. So:
This was probably the first intervention that came to mind for me as well when seeing your claim that distinguishing pain and suffering matters in the EA-action-guiding sense; unfortunately it’s already a thing, e.g. HLI recommending StrongMinds. I’d be interested if you have any other ideas for underexplored / underappreciated cause areas / intervention groups that might be worth further investigation when reevaluated via this pain vs suffering distinction? (This is my attempt to make this distinction pay rent, albeit in actions instead of anticipated experiences.)
Unfortunately, I don’t have much to point you toward supporting that I’m aware of already existing in the space. I’d generally be quite interested in studies which better evaluate meditation’s effects on directly reducing suffering in terms of e.g. how difficult it is for how many people to reduce their suffering by how much, but the EA community doesn’t seem to currently be focused on this very much. I am still supportive of existing organizations with a direct focus on reducing suffering; I just wanted to make the point that such organizations would do well to recognize the distinction between suffering and pain in order to ensure their efforts are actually aimed at suffering and not merely pain on the margin.
I see. You may be interested in a contrary(?) take from the Welfare Footprint Project’s researchers; in their FAQ they write
They define their terms further here. To be fair, they focus on non-human animal welfare; I suppose your suffering vs joy distinction is more currently actionable in human-focused contexts e.g. CBT interventions.
wow thanks for trying to make this distinction here on LessWrong. admirable.
i don’t seem to have the patience to do this kind of thing here, but i’m glad someone is trying.
if you have any interest in visiting MAPLE, lmk. ? (monasticacademy.org)
You’re welcome, and thanks for the support! :)
Re: MAPLE, I might have in interest in visiting—I became acquainted with MAPLE because I think Alex Flint spent some time there? Does one need to be actively working on an AI safety project to visit? I am not currently doing so, having stepped away from AI safety work to focus on directly addressing suffering.
no anyone can visit! we have guests all the time. feel free to DM me if you want to ask more. or you can just go on the website and schedule a visit.
Alex Flint is still here too, altho he lives on neighboring land now.
‘directly addressing suffering’ is a good description of what we’re up to?
Thank you for the post! I basically agree with what you’re saying, although I myself have used the term “suffering” in an imprecise way—it often seems to be the language used in the context of utilitarianism when talking about welfare. I first learned the distinction you mention between pain and suffering during some personal development work years ago, so outside the direct field of philosophy.
I would add a couple of things:
Pain is experienced “in the moment,” while suffering comes from the stories we tell ourselves and the meanings we make of things (“craving, aversion, and clinging” are part of this—for example, one story we tell ourselves could be: if I don’t get what I crave, I somehow won’t be OK). This means that if we’re fully experiencing the present moment, suffering falls away.
Although pain doesn’t directly cause suffering, there would be no suffering if there were no pain or chance of pain (I also believe there’d be no pleasure without pain as a comparison point)
The lower someone’s self-esteem, the less responsibility they take for their emotions and the more likely they are to believe that pain causes suffering, not that their own cognitive processes that they can change with effort cause their suffering—this is why I think interventions to help raise people’s self-esteem and personal responsibility levels (especially for emotions) are so important
It’s difficult to know if animals “suffer” or not since they seem to live much more in the moment than humans and likely contain less capacity to make up stories around pain to turn it into suffering. Even if they exhibit behavior that seems to indicate suffering, it’s hard to know if this isn’t just hardwired or from Pavlovian links. It’s probably good to err on the side of caution, though, and assume many animals can suffer (in addition to feeling pain) until proven otherwise.
Re: 2, I disagree—there will be suffering if there is craving/aversion, even in the absence of pain. Craving pleasure results in suffering just as much as aversion to pain does.
Re: 4, While I agree that animals likely “live more in the moment” and have less capacity to make up stories about themselves, I do not think that this precludes them from having the basic mental reaction of craving/aversion and therefore suffering. I think the “stories” you’re talking about have much more to do with ego/psyche than the “self” targeted in Buddhism—I think of ego/psyche as “the story/stories a mind tells itself about itself,” whereas “self” is more about modeling some sensations as “me or mine” and other sensations as “not me or mine.” I think non-human animals do not tell themselves stories about themselves to the same extent humans do, but do think they’re quite capable of making the self/other distinction in the relevant sense. I think it’s quite possible for craving/aversion to occur without having concocted such a story.
Thanks for the reply.
Regarding your disagreement with my point #2 - perhaps I should’ve been more precise in my wording. Let me try again, with words added in bold: “Although pain doesn’t directly cause suffering, there would be no suffering if there were no such thing as pain…” What that means is you don’t need to be experiencing pain in the moment that you initiate suffering, but you do need the mental imprint of having experienced some kind of pain in your lifetime. If you have no memory of experiencing pain, then you have nothing to avert. And without pain, I don’t believe you can have pleasure, so nothing to crave either.
Further, if you could abolish pain as David Pearce suggests, by bioengineering people to only feel different shades of pleasure (I have serious doubts about this), you’d abolish suffering at the same time. No person bioengineered in such a way would suffer over not feeling higher states of pleasure (i.e., “crave” pleasure) because suffering has a negative feeling associated with it—part of it feels like pain, which we supposedly wouldn’t have the ability to feel.
This gets to another point: one could define suffering as the creation of an unpleasant physical sensation or emotion (i.e., pain) through a thought process, that we may or may not be aware of. Example: the sadness that we typically naturally feel when someone we love dies is pain, but if we artificially extend this pain out with thoughts of the future or past, not the moment, such as, “will this pain ever stop?,” or, “If only I’d done something different, they might still be alive,” then it becomes suffering. This first example thought, by the way, could be considered aversion to pain/craving for it to stop, while the second could be considered craving that the present were different (that you weren’t in pain and your loved one were still alive). The key distinctions for me are that pain can be experienced “in the moment” without a thought process on top of it, and it can’t be entirely avoided in life, while suffering ultimately comes from thoughts, it falls away when one’s experiencing things in the moment, and it can be avoided because it’s an optional thing one choses to do for some reason. (A possible reason could be to give oneself an excuse to do something different than feel pain, such as to give oneself an excuse to stop exercising by amping up the pain with suffering.)
Regarding my point #4, I honestly don’t know what animals’ experiences are like or how much cognition they’re capable of. I do think, though, that if they aren’t capable of getting “out of the moment” with thoughts of the future or past, then they can’t suffer, they can only feel the pain/pleasure of the moment. For instance, do chickens suffer with thoughts of, “I don’t know how much longer I can take this,” or do they just experience the discomfort of their situation with the natural fight or flight mechanism and Pavlovian links of their body leading them to try to get away from it? Either way, pain by itself is an unpleasant experience and I think we should try to minimize imposing it on other beings.
It’s also interesting how much upvoted resistance you’ve gotten to the message of this post. Eckhart Tolle (“The Power of Now”) https://shop.eckharttolle.com/products/the-power-of-now is a modern day proponent of living in the moment to make suffering fall away, and he also encounters resistance: https://www.reddit.com/r/EckhartTolle/comments/sa1p4x/tolles_view_of_suffering_is_horrifying/