Our concept of suffering probably includes both unpleasantness and desire/wanting
Most of my conception of suffering doesn’t feel captured by either of these.
I think suffering does not require unpleasantness (you might agree) - consider mental suffering that occurs in absence of {‘unpleasant’ experience, such as physical pain, or such as this post’s taste example}. I’d say suffering can occur in response to[1] those, as well as in response to other things. For example, watching a bug trying and unable to to roll back onto its legs can cause empathy/sadness, but there’s no ‘unpleasant sensual experience’ here, at least for me (I consider the visual experience to be neutral).
I don’t feel that ‘desire/wanting’ explains of mental suffering what ‘unpleasantness’ does not. I guess you could say that I want this situation to be different / not happening, and that would be true, but that doesn’t feel like the source of the sadness to me, nor do I feel that that ‘wanting’ is itself suffering.
(Note: I’m relying on my subjective sense of what ‘desire/wanting’ means, because they were undefined in the post)
If you want to address my view, I think it could be helpful to list some examples of suffering and identify the ‘desire/wanting’ in each of them.
I’m unsure if I consider both {the sensory experience of physical pain} and {the internal mental/psychological reaction to it} to be suffering, or if I consider only the latter to be suffering. I lean towards ‘only the latter’, though to not mislead anyone, I want to be clear that in my view extreme physical pain still causes extreme internal suffering for a large class of Earthen life forms.
Unpleasantness doesn’t only apply to sensations. I think sadness, like as an empathetic response to the bug struggling, involves unpleasantness/negative affect. That’s the case on most models, AFAIK. I agree (or suspect) it’s not the sensations (visual experience) that are unpleasant.
To add to this, there’s evidence negative valence depends on brain regions common to unpleasant physical pain, empathic pains and social pains (from social rejection, exclusion, or loss) (Singer et al., 2004, Eisenberger, 2015). In particular, the title of Singer et al., 2004 is “Empathy for Pain Involves the Affective but not Sensory Components of Pain”.
I’m not sure either way whether I’d generally consider sadness to be suffering, though. I’d say suffering is at least unpleasantness + desire (or maybe unpleasantness + aversive desire specifically), but I’m not sure that’s all it is. I might also be inclined to use some desire (and unpleasantness) intensity cutoff to call something suffering, but that might be too arbitrary.
You’re right that I didn’t define desire. The kind of desire I had in mind in this post basically just is motivational (incentive + aversive) salience, which is a neurological mechanism that affects (biases) your attention.[1] There might be more to this kind of desire, but I think motivational salience is a lot of it, and could be all of it. (There are other types of desires, like goals, but those are not what I have in mind here.)
Brody (2018, 2023) defines suffering so that an individual suffers when “she has an unpleasant or negative affective experience that she minds, where to mind some state is to have an occurrent desire that the experience not be occurring.” Unpleasantness and aversion wouldn’t be enough for suffering: there must be aversion to the experience itself. Whereas, instead, we could be averse to other things outside of us, like a bear we’re afraid of, rather than to the experience itself.
I have some sympathy for this definition, but I’m also not sure it even makes sense. If this kind of “occurrent desire” is just aversive salience, how exactly would it apply differently from when we’re afraid of a bear, say? If it’s not aversive salience, then what kind of desire is it and how exactly does that work?
It’s a different mechanism from the one for (bottom-up) stimulus intensity, and the one for (top-down) task-based attention control. From Kim et al., 2021:
Traditionally, the allocation of limited attentional resources had been thought to be governed by task goals (Wolfe, Cave, & Franzel, 1989) and physical salience (Theeuwes, 2010). A newer construct, selection history, challenges this dichotomy and suggests previous episodes of attentional orienting are capable of independently biasing attention in a manner that is neither top-down nor bottom-up (Awh, Belopolsky, & Theeuwes, 2012). One component of selection history is reward history. Via associative learning, initially neutral stimuli come to predict reward and thus acquire heightened attentional priority, consequently capturing attention even when non-salient and task-irrelevant (referred to as value-driven attentional capture; e.g., Anderson, Laurent, & Yantis, 2011).
Most of my conception of suffering doesn’t feel captured by either of these.
I think suffering does not require unpleasantness (you might agree) - consider mental suffering that occurs in absence of {‘unpleasant’ experience, such as physical pain, or such as this post’s taste example}. I’d say suffering can occur in response to[1] those, as well as in response to other things. For example, watching a bug trying and unable to to roll back onto its legs can cause empathy/sadness, but there’s no ‘unpleasant sensual experience’ here, at least for me (I consider the visual experience to be neutral).
I don’t feel that ‘desire/wanting’ explains of mental suffering what ‘unpleasantness’ does not. I guess you could say that I want this situation to be different / not happening, and that would be true, but that doesn’t feel like the source of the sadness to me, nor do I feel that that ‘wanting’ is itself suffering.
(Note: I’m relying on my subjective sense of what ‘desire/wanting’ means, because they were undefined in the post)
If you want to address my view, I think it could be helpful to list some examples of suffering and identify the ‘desire/wanting’ in each of them.
I’m unsure if I consider both {the sensory experience of physical pain} and {the internal mental/psychological reaction to it} to be suffering, or if I consider only the latter to be suffering. I lean towards ‘only the latter’, though to not mislead anyone, I want to be clear that in my view extreme physical pain still causes extreme internal suffering for a large class of Earthen life forms.
Unpleasantness doesn’t only apply to sensations. I think sadness, like as an empathetic response to the bug struggling, involves unpleasantness/negative affect. That’s the case on most models, AFAIK. I agree (or suspect) it’s not the sensations (visual experience) that are unpleasant.
To add to this, there’s evidence negative valence depends on brain regions common to unpleasant physical pain, empathic pains and social pains (from social rejection, exclusion, or loss) (Singer et al., 2004, Eisenberger, 2015). In particular, the title of Singer et al., 2004 is “Empathy for Pain Involves the Affective but not Sensory Components of Pain”.
I’m not sure either way whether I’d generally consider sadness to be suffering, though. I’d say suffering is at least unpleasantness + desire (or maybe unpleasantness + aversive desire specifically), but I’m not sure that’s all it is. I might also be inclined to use some desire (and unpleasantness) intensity cutoff to call something suffering, but that might be too arbitrary.
You’re right that I didn’t define desire. The kind of desire I had in mind in this post basically just is motivational (incentive + aversive) salience, which is a neurological mechanism that affects (biases) your attention.[1] There might be more to this kind of desire, but I think motivational salience is a lot of it, and could be all of it. (There are other types of desires, like goals, but those are not what I have in mind here.)
Brody (2018, 2023) defines suffering so that an individual suffers when “she has an unpleasant or negative affective experience that she minds, where to mind some state is to have an occurrent desire that the experience not be occurring.” Unpleasantness and aversion wouldn’t be enough for suffering: there must be aversion to the experience itself. Whereas, instead, we could be averse to other things outside of us, like a bear we’re afraid of, rather than to the experience itself.
I have some sympathy for this definition, but I’m also not sure it even makes sense. If this kind of “occurrent desire” is just aversive salience, how exactly would it apply differently from when we’re afraid of a bear, say? If it’s not aversive salience, then what kind of desire is it and how exactly does that work?
It’s a different mechanism from the one for (bottom-up) stimulus intensity, and the one for (top-down) task-based attention control. From Kim et al., 2021: