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.
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/