§3-1. Being in Pain.............................................................................................................................................. 1

§3-2. Why does Persistent Pain lead to Suffering?.............................................................................................. 2

§3-3. The Machinery of Suffering....................................................................................................................... 4

Physical vs. Mental 'Pain'................................................................................................................................ 5

Feeling, Hurting, and Suffering....................................................................................................................... 6

§3-4. Overriding Pain........................................................................................................................................... 7

Prolonged and Chronic Suffering................................................................................................................... 8

Grief................................................................................................................................................................ 9

§3-5. Critics, Correctors, Suppressors, and Censors.......................................................................................... 10

Excessive Switching...................................................................................................................................... 12

Learning from Failure................................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.

The Power of Negative Thinking................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.

§3-6. The Freudian Sandwich........................................................................................................................... 15

§3-7. Controlling our Moods and Dispositions................................................................................................. 16

§3-8. Emotional Exploitation.............................................................................................................................. 18

QUESTIONS..................................................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.

Questions:........................................................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.

§3-1. Being in Pain

“Great pain urges all animals, and has urged them during endless generations, to make the most violent and diversified efforts to escape from the cause of suffering. Even when a limb or other separate part of the body is hurt, we often see a tendency to shake it, as if to shake off the cause, though this may obviously be impossible.” —Charles Darwin[1]

What happens when you stub your toe? You’ve scarcely felt the impact yet, but you catch your breath and start to sweat—because you know what’s coming next: a dreadful ache will tear at your gut and all other goals will be brushed away, replaced by your wish to escape from that pain.

How could such a simple event distort all your other thoughts so much? What could make the sensation called pain lead one into the state we call suffering? This chapter proposes a theory for this: any pain will activate the goal “Get rid of that Pain”, and achieving this will be the end of it. But if that pain is intense and persistent enough, this will arouse yet other resources that tend to suppress your other goals—and if this grows into a large-scale “cascade,” there won’t be much left of the rest of your mind.

Of course, sometimes a pain is just a pain; if it doesn’t last long or it’s not too intense, then it won’t escalate into suffering. Besides, you can usually muzzle a pain for a time, by trying to think about something else. Sometimes you even can make it hurt less by thinking about the pain itself: just focus your attention on it, evaluate its intensity, and try to regard its qualities as interesting novelties. But this only provides a brief reprieve because, whatever diversions you try, pain contines to gripe and complain, like a nagging, frustrated child; you can think about something else for a time, but will soon again be distracted to its demands.

Daniel Dennett: “If you can make yourself study your pains (even quite intense pains) you will find, as it were, no room left to mind them: (they stop hurting). However studying a pain (e.g., a headache) gets boring pretty fast, and as soon as you stop studying them, they come back and hurt, which, oddly enough, is sometimes less boring than being bored by them and so, to some degree, preferable."

In any case, we should be thankful that pain evolved, because it protects our bodies from harm, first by making one try to remove its cause, and then by helping the injured part to rest and repair itself by keeping one from moving it. Here are some other ways in which pain protects us from injury.

Pain makes you focus on the body-parts involved.
It makes it hard to think about anything else.
Pain makes you move away from its cause.
It makes you want that state to end, and teaching you, for future times, not to repeat the same mistake.

Yet instead of being grateful for pain, people often complain about it. "Why are we cursed," pain’s victims ask, "with such unpleasant experiences?" And although we often think of pain and pleasure as opposites, they have many similar qualities:

Pleasure makes you focus on the body-parts involved.
It makes it hard to think about anything else.
It makes you draw closer to its cause.
It makes you want to maintain that state, while teaching you, for future times, to keep repeating the same “ mistake.”

All this suggests that both pleasure and pain engage some of the same kinds of machinery; both constrict one’s range of attention, both have connections with how we learn, and both reduce the priorities of almost all one’s others goals. In view of these similarities, an alien from outer space might wonder why people like pleasure so much—yet display so little desire for pain.

Alien: Why do you humans complain about pain?
Person: We don’t like pain because it hurts.
Alien: Then explain to me what “hurting” is.
Person: Hurting is simply the way pain feels.
Alien: Then please tell me what you mean by “feel.”

At this point the conversation might stop, if that person is one of those who insist that there’s no way to explain what feelings are:

Dualist Philosopher: Science can only explain a thing in terms of other, yet simpler things. But subjective feelings like pleasure or pain cannot be reduced to smaller parts because, by nature, they’re indivisible.

However, we won’t agree with that. We’ll argue that feelings do have parts—and that, by recognizing their complexity, we can indeed find ways to explain what feelings are made of, and how they work.

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§3-2. How does Pain lead to Suffering?

We often speak of hurting, pain and suffering as though they were more or less the same, and differ mainly in degree. However, while the effects of transient discomforts are brief, the longer that pain remains intense, the longer those cascades will continue to grow, and your efforts to think will deteriorate—so that goals that seemed easy in normal times get increasingly harder to achieve, as each more and more systems become distressed and start to transmit disturbing requests. Then we use words like suffering, anguish, and torment to describe what happens when persistent pain comes to disrupt so many of your other plans that you can barely think about anything but how this condition is impairing you.

In other words, it seems to me that a major component of suffering is the frustration that comes with the loss of your options; it is as though most of your mind has been stolen from you, and your awareness of this only makes things seem worse. For example, I have heard suffering likened to a balloon that keeps dilating inside one’s mind until there's no more room for its usual thoughts. This image suggests, among other things, that one has lost so much ‘freedom of choice’ that one feels as though one has become a prisoner. And sometimes one is unable fail to think of any fitting analogy.

"I'm so something that I can't remember what it's called."—Miles Steele (age 5)

Here are a few of the sorrows and torments that come when suffering imprisons us:

Anguish of losing mobility.
Resentment of not being able to think.
Dread of becoming disabled and helpless.
Shame of becoming a burden to friends.
Remorse at dishonoring obligations.
Dismay at the prospect of failure.
Mortification of seeming abnormal.

Terror of further decline and death.

Of course, we also lose some “freedom of choice” when we get into any particular mental state, because we are partly constrained by whatever goals this activates. We never have enough time to do all the things we want to do—and every new idea or ambition may conflict with some previous ones. Most times, we don’t mind those conflicts much, because we feel that we’re still in control—partly because we usually know that if we do not like the result, we still can go back and try something else.

However, when an aching pain intrudes, all our projects and plans get thrust aside, as though by an external force[2] —and then all we have left are desperate schemes for finding ways to escape from the pain. Pain’s imperatives are useful when they help us to deal with emergencies—but when our pain cannot be relieved, then it turns into catastrophe.

The primary function of Pain is to compel one to remove what is causing it—but in doing this, it tends to disrupt most of a person’s other goals. Then, if this results in a large-scale cascade, we use words like ‘anguish’ or ‘suffering’ to describe what remains of its victim’s mind.

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 still may seem the same to yourself because 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.

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

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§3-3. 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

Let’s examine an instance of what takes place when one becomes a victim of pain.

Yesterday Joan tripped on a step. She didn't suspect that she’d injured herself—but today there’s a terrible pain in her knee. She's been working on an important report, which she plans to deliver tomorrow. “But if this keeps up,” she hears herself think, “I won't be able to take that trip.” She tries to concentrate on her work, but then decides to take a pill that might bring some help. However, a stab of pain keeps her from getting up, and instructs her not to use that leg. Joan clutches her knee, catches her breath, and tries to think about what to do next—but the pain so overwhelms her that she cannot focus on anything else.

“Get rid of Me,” Joan’s pain insists—but how does Joan know that it comes from her knee? We know that each person is born equipped with connections that run from each part of the skin to ‘maps’ in several parts of the brain, such as these in the sensory cortex and cerebellum. [3]

However, we seem to lack any maps like this to represent places inside our skins, and this could be why we find it so hard to locate pains that come from our internal organs; presumably, no such maps evolved because, before the advent of modern medicine, we would not have had much use for them. We had no way to repair or protect an abdominal organ except by guarding one’s entire belly, so it would not have useful to know more than that one was having a bellyache; similarly, it would not have helped to recognize that a pain came from one’s hypothalamus because we had no remedies that applied to specific places inside our brains. (We’ll discuss this more in §§Qualia.)

As for the sense of pain itself, our scientists know quite a lot about the first few events that result happen a part of the body is traumatized: first, the injured cells release chemicals that cause a special type of nerve to send signals to the spinal cord. Here is a typical attempt to describe what happens after that:

The sense of pain originates when special nerves react to high temperature, pressure, etc. Then their signals rise up to the thalamus, which relays them to other parts of your brain—in ways that seem to involve hormones, endorphins, and neurotransmitters. Eventually, some of those signals reach your limbic system, and this results in emotions like as sadness, anger, and frustration.

However, to understand why persistent pain can lead to what we call hurting