1. I’m compelled to avoid suffering, which is maladaptive; if I didn’t care about suffering, I’d get more of the other things I want.
2. Suffering is bad; I’m interested in suffering less whether or not it changes my behavior.
I’m not really clear on what you mean when you say “suffering isn’t aversive.” (ETA: I meant “pain isn’t aversive” or “pain doesn’t cause suffering.”) Intuitively, I’d expect it to mean that you fix both #1 and #2. Someone for whom suffering isn’t aversive could, for example, regularly experience extreme pain just to prove the efficacy of their techniques or earn a small stipend.
My understanding of brains suggests that this is probably not possible to maintain. So it would be very interesting to learn that it is possible. As far as I can tell no one has ever done the kind of stunt that would convincingly show they have this ability, which makes me a bit suspicious but could have other explanations.
Fixing #2 would be consistent with my understanding of brains. But in that case “pain is no longer aversive” would be inapt, since in fact pain is still causing avoidance. Moreover, in this case it seems hard to distinguish “stop suffering” from “become deluded about whether you are suffering,” and I’m not sure how I’d tell the difference.
I should note that I didn’t say that suffering wouldn’t be aversive, I said that pain isn’t aversive. My model is basically that suffering is aversion (to e.g. pain), so it wouldn’t make sense to say that suffering isn’t aversive. So I would reword your #1 as “I’m compelled to avoid pain, which is maladaptive”.
That said, based on what I’ve been able to observe so far, there are at least three things that happen:
1. Something like pain asymbolia, where pain that is currently being experienced ceases to be aversive both in a behavioral and experiental sense: its neither feels subjectively unpleasant, nor do I do anything to disengage myself from the situation with it.
2. An effect where, if #1 happens often enough, my anticipations about the unpleasantness of painful experiences update: the anticipation of a painful event ceases to be aversive (in both the experiental and behavioral senses).
3. An effect where anticipations which have not updated become less aversive, in such a way that I no longer experience the anticipations themselves as being unpleasant. This seems to be a special case of #1, since the pain from anticipated pain is by itself an instance of pain. However, this doesn’t necessarily affect my behavior with regard to moving towards the painful thing: the anticipation of something unpleasant still acts as a behavioral disincentive.
The last one probably needs some elaboration. As an example, there’s one somewhat unpleasant thing that I should be doing, which I’ve now been procrastinating on for several weeks. What stuff like Looking has achieved, is that I’m capable of holding the sense of I should be doing this but the thought feels unpleasant in my mind and keep staring right at it, as opposed to feeling compelled to drown it out of my mind completely, by e.g. engaging in entertainment that would dull my experience of it.
This seems indirectly useful, since if I’d be flinching away from the very thought of needing to do this thing, then I couldn’t even try to troubleshoot the issue. Now, I’m capable of at least holding the thought in my mind, which still hasn’t caused me to actually do the thing, but at least it has enabled me to try to figure out where the problem is, as well as helping me use the thought for structured procrastination (as opposed to my day being entirely wasted because I try to just play a game or something to get the whole thing out of my mind).
Someone for whom suffering isn’t aversive could, for example, regularly experience extreme pain just to prove the efficacy of their techniques or earn a small stipend.
There are a few studies documenting something like this, but the ones that I’m aware of seem to be few in number and have all the standard caveats related to psychological research. Still, e.g. this review seems plausible to me, because it reports studies which found that what it calls “open monitoring”-style meditation seemed to reduce pain sensitivity (even when its practitioners were not actively meditating) while “focused attention”-style meditation did not have the same kind of effect; of these two, “open monitoring” roughly means “Looking-style practices”, so the results are what I’d expect.
Those results look like they are in the placebo effect range, not the “qualitative change in the way that pain is processed” range.
Is your understanding that it should be possible to completely or almost completely eliminate the pain-suffering connection? If so, do you believe that any humans have actually achieved that?
(ETA: If the answers are “no” I don’t think that’s particularly damning. Mostly the relevant thing is that by default I’m not going to adjust me models of cognition based on this kind of report, worst case is that I miss out by failing to incorporate some evidence.)
The case of the Vietnamese monk who famously set himself on fire may meet your criteria. The Vietnamese government claimed that he had drugged himself, but it’s hard to imagine a drug that would allow you to get out of a car under your own power and walk to a seated position, and then light a match to set yourself on fire but still have no reaction as your flesh burns off.
Is your understanding that it should be possible to completely or almost completely eliminate the pain-suffering connection? If so, do you believe that any humans have actually achieved that?
I don’t have enough information to answer with any higher confidence than “maybe” to the first question. (For the second, I don’t know what it would mean in practice for it to be a thing that’s possible, but which no human has achieved—if nobody has managed to achieve it yet, including any of the monks who have the option of spending basically all their waking hours meditating, then it seems to be impossible for all practical intents and purposes.)
I’d like not to suffer for two reasons:
1. I’m compelled to avoid suffering, which is maladaptive; if I didn’t care about suffering, I’d get more of the other things I want.
2. Suffering is bad; I’m interested in suffering less whether or not it changes my behavior.
I’m not really clear on what you mean when you say “suffering isn’t aversive.” (ETA: I meant “pain isn’t aversive” or “pain doesn’t cause suffering.”) Intuitively, I’d expect it to mean that you fix both #1 and #2. Someone for whom suffering isn’t aversive could, for example, regularly experience extreme pain just to prove the efficacy of their techniques or earn a small stipend.
My understanding of brains suggests that this is probably not possible to maintain. So it would be very interesting to learn that it is possible. As far as I can tell no one has ever done the kind of stunt that would convincingly show they have this ability, which makes me a bit suspicious but could have other explanations.
Fixing #2 would be consistent with my understanding of brains. But in that case “pain is no longer aversive” would be inapt, since in fact pain is still causing avoidance. Moreover, in this case it seems hard to distinguish “stop suffering” from “become deluded about whether you are suffering,” and I’m not sure how I’d tell the difference.
Fixing #1 without fixing #2 would seem quite bad.
I should note that I didn’t say that suffering wouldn’t be aversive, I said that pain isn’t aversive. My model is basically that suffering is aversion (to e.g. pain), so it wouldn’t make sense to say that suffering isn’t aversive. So I would reword your #1 as “I’m compelled to avoid pain, which is maladaptive”.
That said, based on what I’ve been able to observe so far, there are at least three things that happen:
1. Something like pain asymbolia, where pain that is currently being experienced ceases to be aversive both in a behavioral and experiental sense: its neither feels subjectively unpleasant, nor do I do anything to disengage myself from the situation with it.
2. An effect where, if #1 happens often enough, my anticipations about the unpleasantness of painful experiences update: the anticipation of a painful event ceases to be aversive (in both the experiental and behavioral senses).
3. An effect where anticipations which have not updated become less aversive, in such a way that I no longer experience the anticipations themselves as being unpleasant. This seems to be a special case of #1, since the pain from anticipated pain is by itself an instance of pain. However, this doesn’t necessarily affect my behavior with regard to moving towards the painful thing: the anticipation of something unpleasant still acts as a behavioral disincentive.
The last one probably needs some elaboration. As an example, there’s one somewhat unpleasant thing that I should be doing, which I’ve now been procrastinating on for several weeks. What stuff like Looking has achieved, is that I’m capable of holding the sense of I should be doing this but the thought feels unpleasant in my mind and keep staring right at it, as opposed to feeling compelled to drown it out of my mind completely, by e.g. engaging in entertainment that would dull my experience of it.
This seems indirectly useful, since if I’d be flinching away from the very thought of needing to do this thing, then I couldn’t even try to troubleshoot the issue. Now, I’m capable of at least holding the thought in my mind, which still hasn’t caused me to actually do the thing, but at least it has enabled me to try to figure out where the problem is, as well as helping me use the thought for structured procrastination (as opposed to my day being entirely wasted because I try to just play a game or something to get the whole thing out of my mind).
There are a few studies documenting something like this, but the ones that I’m aware of seem to be few in number and have all the standard caveats related to psychological research. Still, e.g. this review seems plausible to me, because it reports studies which found that what it calls “open monitoring”-style meditation seemed to reduce pain sensitivity (even when its practitioners were not actively meditating) while “focused attention”-style meditation did not have the same kind of effect; of these two, “open monitoring” roughly means “Looking-style practices”, so the results are what I’d expect.
Those results look like they are in the placebo effect range, not the “qualitative change in the way that pain is processed” range.
Is your understanding that it should be possible to completely or almost completely eliminate the pain-suffering connection? If so, do you believe that any humans have actually achieved that?
(ETA: If the answers are “no” I don’t think that’s particularly damning. Mostly the relevant thing is that by default I’m not going to adjust me models of cognition based on this kind of report, worst case is that I miss out by failing to incorporate some evidence.)
The case of the Vietnamese monk who famously set himself on fire may meet your criteria. The Vietnamese government claimed that he had drugged himself, but it’s hard to imagine a drug that would allow you to get out of a car under your own power and walk to a seated position, and then light a match to set yourself on fire but still have no reaction as your flesh burns off.
I don’t have enough information to answer with any higher confidence than “maybe” to the first question. (For the second, I don’t know what it would mean in practice for it to be a thing that’s possible, but which no human has achieved—if nobody has managed to achieve it yet, including any of the monks who have the option of spending basically all their waking hours meditating, then it seems to be impossible for all practical intents and purposes.)