The Emotion Machine

might seem similar if (as we’ll try to show in Chapter §9) we can represent both of them as results that come from similar kinds of machinery. [Also, see §§Dignity of Complexity.]

People often use hurting, pain and suffering as though those conditions were almost the same, and differ mainly in degree. This chapter will argue that we need much better distinctions and theories for these.

???????????????????

§3-2. Prolonged Pain leads to Cascades

Our idea about how Suffering works is that any severe and prolonged pain leads to a cascade of mental change that disrupts your other plans and goals. By thus suppressing most other resources, this narrows your former interests—so that most of your mind now focuses on one insistent and overwhelming command: No matter what else, get rid of that Pain.

This machinery has great value indeed—if it can make you remove whatever’s disturbing you, so that you get back to what you were trying to do. However, if that pain remains intense after you’ve done all you can to relieve it, then it may continue to keep the resources that it has seized—and further to proceed to capture yet more—so that you can scarcely keep anything else ‘on your mind’. If left to itself, that spreading might cease—but so long as the pain refuses to leave, that cascade of disruption may continue to grow, and as those other resources get taken away, your efforts to think will deteriorate, and what remains of the rest of your mind may feel like it’s being sucked into that black hole of suffering.

Now, goals that seemed easy in normal times get increasingly harder to achieve. Whatever else you try to do, pain interrupts with its own demands and keeps frustrating your other plans until you can barely think about anything but the pain and the trouble it’s caused. Perhaps the torment of suffering comes largely from depriving you of your freedom to choose what to think about. Suffering imprisons you.

Neurologist: These ideas about disruptive cascades are suggestive, but have you any evidence that processes like these exist? How could you show that these guesses are right?

It would be hard to demonstrate this today, but when scanners show more of what happens in brains, we should be able to see those cascades. In the meantime, though, one scarcely needs more evidence than one sees in the diversity of the complaints from the victims of suffering:

Frustration at not achieving goals.

Annoyance at losing mobility.

Vexation at not being able to think.

Dread of becoming disabled and helpless.

Shame of becoming a burden to friends.

Remorse at dishonoring obligations.

Dismay about the prospect of failure.

Chagrin at being considered abnormal.

Resenting the loss of opportunities.

Fears about future survival and death.

This suggests that we learn to use words like ‘suffering’, ‘anguish’, and ‘torment’ to try to describe what happens when those disruption cascades continue: as each new system becomes distressed and starts to transmit disturbing requests, your normal thoughts get overcome, until most of your mind has been stolen from you.

Citizen: I agree that these all can come with suffering. But that doesn’t explain what suffering is. To be sure, resentment, remorse, dismay, and fear are all involved with reactions to pain—and can help to cause us to suffer. But why can’t we just regard ‘suffering’ as just one more kind of sensation?

When we talk about ‘sensations’ we usually mean the signals that come from sensors that are excited by conditions in the external world. However here, I think, we’re talking about signals that come, not from outside, but from special resources that detect high-level conditions inside the brain. Later, in section §4-3, we’ll suggest how such resources might actually work.

In any case, when suffering, it is hard to think in your usual ways. Now, torn away from your regular thoughts, you can scarcely reflect on anything else than on your present state of impairment—and awareness of your dismal condition only tends to make things worse. Pain, as we said, deprives you of freedom, and a major component of suffering is the frustration that accompanies the loss of your freedom of mental choice.

Of course the same is true, to a smaller degree, in our more usual states of mind: our thoughts are always constrained by the goals that we hold, which try to engage different processes. Those processes sometimes cooperate, but they also frequently clash and conflict. We never have enough time to do all the things that we want to do—and so every new goal or idea that we get may make us abandon, or put aside, some other ambitions we want to achieve.

Most times, we don’t mind those conflicts much, because we feel that we’re still in control, and free to make our own decisions—and if we do not like the result, we’re still ‘free’ to go back and try something else. But when an aching pain intrudes, those projects and plans get thrust aside, as though by an external force[32] —and then we end up with more desperate schemes for finding ways to escape from the pain. Pain’s urgency is useful to us when we need to deal with emergencies—but if it cannot be soon relieved, it then can become a catastrophe.

Indeed, suffering can affect you so much that your friends may see you being replaced by a different personality. It may even make you so regress that you cry out and beg for help, as though you’ve become an infant again. Of course, you may see yourself as still the same, and imagine that you still possess your old memories and abilities. But you won’t be able to use those well until you switch back to your regular Self.

The primary function of Pain is to make one remove whatever may be causing it. To do this, though, it needs to disrupt most of one’s other usual goals. Whenever this leads to a large-scale cascade, then we use words like ‘suffering’ to describe what remains of its victim’s mind.

???????????????????

The Machinery of Suffering

“The restless, busy nature of the world, this, I declare, is at the root of pain. Attain that composure of mind, which is resting in the peace of immortality. Self is but a heap of composite qualities, and its world is empty like a fantasy.”

—Buddha

“Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering—and it’s all over much too soon.”