I haven’t read Ligotti, but based on what you say, I would disagree with his view. This section discusses a similar idea as you mention about why animals might even suffer more than humans in some cases.
In fairness to the view that suffering requires some degree of reflection, I would say that I think consciousness itself is plausibly some kind of self-reflective process in which a brain combines information about sense inputs with other concepts like “this is bad”, “this is happening to me right now”, etc. But I don’t think those need to be verbal, explicit thoughts. My guess is that those kinds of mental operations are happening at a non-explicit lower level, and our verbal minds report the combination of those lower-level operations as being raw conscious suffering.
In other words, my best guess would be:
raw suffering = low-level mental reflection on a bad situation
reflected suffering = high-level mental reflection on low-level mental reflection on a bad situation
That said, one could dispute the usefulness of the word “reflection” here. Maybe it could equally well be called “processing”.
Great post. :)
I haven’t read Ligotti, but based on what you say, I would disagree with his view. This section discusses a similar idea as you mention about why animals might even suffer more than humans in some cases.
In fairness to the view that suffering requires some degree of reflection, I would say that I think consciousness itself is plausibly some kind of self-reflective process in which a brain combines information about sense inputs with other concepts like “this is bad”, “this is happening to me right now”, etc. But I don’t think those need to be verbal, explicit thoughts. My guess is that those kinds of mental operations are happening at a non-explicit lower level, and our verbal minds report the combination of those lower-level operations as being raw conscious suffering.
In other words, my best guess would be:
raw suffering = low-level mental reflection on a bad situation
reflected suffering = high-level mental reflection on low-level mental reflection on a bad situation
That said, one could dispute the usefulness of the word “reflection” here. Maybe it could equally well be called “processing”.