For a few weeks or so, I’ve been feeling somewhat amazed at how much less suffering there seems to be associated with different kinds of pain (emotional, physical, etc.), seemingly as a consequence of doing meditation and related practices. The strength of pain, as measured by something like the intensity of it as an attention signal, seems to be roughly the same as before, but despite being equally strong, it feels much less aversive.
To clarify, this is not during some specific weird meditative state, but feels like a general ongoing adjustment even when I feel otherwise normal (or otherwise like shit).
I can’t help but to wonder whether the difference in intuitions for/against suffering-focused ethics is a consequence of different people’s brains being naturally differently configured with regard to their pain:suffering ratio. That is, some people will experience exactly the same amount of pain, unpleasant emotions etc. during their life as others, but for some people the same intensity of pain will translate to a different intensity of suffering. And then we will have people who say things like “life *is* suffering and possibly a net negative for many if not most” as well as people who say things like “suffering isn’t any big deal and a pretty uninteresting thing to focus on”, staring at each other in mutual incomprehension.
Interesting, I wonder if there is a way to test it, given that it seems hard to measure the pain:suffering ratio of a person directly...
Is there a form of meditation that makes pain more aversive? Then we can have people who say “suffering isn’t any big deal and a pretty uninteresting thing to focus on” do that, and see if they end up agreeing with suffering-focused ethics?
While this is a brilliant idea in the sense of being a novel way to test a hypothesis, trying to reprogram people’s brains so as to make them experience more suffering strikes me as an ethically dubious way of doing the test. :)
I wouldn’t expect just a one-off meditation session where they experienced strong suffering to be enough, but rather I would expect there to be a gradual shift in intuitions after living with an altered ratio for a long enough time.
A possible approach would be to use self-reports (the thing that doctor’s always ask about, pain scale 1-10) vs revealed preferences (how much painkillers were requested? What trade-offs for pain relief do patients choose?).
Obviously this kind of relation is flawed on several levels: Reported pain scale depends a lot on personal experience (very painful events permanently change the scale, ala “I am in so much pain that I cannot walk or concentrate, but compared to my worst experience… let’s say 3?”). Revealed preferences depend a lot on how much people care about the alternatives (e.g. if people have bad health insurance or really important stuff to do they might accept a lot of subjective suffering in order to get out of hospital one day early). Likewise, time preference might enter a lot into revealed preference.
Despite these shortcomings, that’s where I would start thinking about what such a ratio would mean. If one actually did a study with new questionaires, one should definitely ask patients for some examples in order to gauge their personal pain-scale, and combine actual revealed preferences with answers to hypothetical questions “how much money would pain relief be worth to you? How much risk of death? How many days of early hospital release? etc”, even if the offer is not actually on the table.
Apparently there have been a few studies on something like this: “[Long-Term Meditators], compared to novices, had a significant reduction of self-reported unpleasantness, but not intensity, of painful stimuli, while practicing Open Monitoring.”
For a few weeks or so, I’ve been feeling somewhat amazed at how much less suffering there seems to be associated with different kinds of pain (emotional, physical, etc.), seemingly as a consequence of doing meditation and related practices. The strength of pain, as measured by something like the intensity of it as an attention signal, seems to be roughly the same as before, but despite being equally strong, it feels much less aversive.
To clarify, this is not during some specific weird meditative state, but feels like a general ongoing adjustment even when I feel otherwise normal (or otherwise like shit).
I can’t help but to wonder whether the difference in intuitions for/against suffering-focused ethics is a consequence of different people’s brains being naturally differently configured with regard to their pain:suffering ratio. That is, some people will experience exactly the same amount of pain, unpleasant emotions etc. during their life as others, but for some people the same intensity of pain will translate to a different intensity of suffering. And then we will have people who say things like “life *is* suffering and possibly a net negative for many if not most” as well as people who say things like “suffering isn’t any big deal and a pretty uninteresting thing to focus on”, staring at each other in mutual incomprehension.
Interesting, I wonder if there is a way to test it, given that it seems hard to measure the pain:suffering ratio of a person directly...
Is there a form of meditation that makes pain more aversive? Then we can have people who say “suffering isn’t any big deal and a pretty uninteresting thing to focus on” do that, and see if they end up agreeing with suffering-focused ethics?
While this is a brilliant idea in the sense of being a novel way to test a hypothesis, trying to reprogram people’s brains so as to make them experience more suffering strikes me as an ethically dubious way of doing the test. :)
I wouldn’t expect just a one-off meditation session where they experienced strong suffering to be enough, but rather I would expect there to be a gradual shift in intuitions after living with an altered ratio for a long enough time.
Regarding measurement of pain:suffering ratio
A possible approach would be to use self-reports (the thing that doctor’s always ask about, pain scale 1-10) vs revealed preferences (how much painkillers were requested? What trade-offs for pain relief do patients choose?).
Obviously this kind of relation is flawed on several levels: Reported pain scale depends a lot on personal experience (very painful events permanently change the scale, ala “I am in so much pain that I cannot walk or concentrate, but compared to my worst experience… let’s say 3?”). Revealed preferences depend a lot on how much people care about the alternatives (e.g. if people have bad health insurance or really important stuff to do they might accept a lot of subjective suffering in order to get out of hospital one day early). Likewise, time preference might enter a lot into revealed preference.
Despite these shortcomings, that’s where I would start thinking about what such a ratio would mean. If one actually did a study with new questionaires, one should definitely ask patients for some examples in order to gauge their personal pain-scale, and combine actual revealed preferences with answers to hypothetical questions “how much money would pain relief be worth to you? How much risk of death? How many days of early hospital release? etc”, even if the offer is not actually on the table.
Apparently there have been a few studies on something like this: “[Long-Term Meditators], compared to novices, had a significant reduction of self-reported unpleasantness, but not intensity, of painful stimuli, while practicing Open Monitoring.”