Created: January 27, 2022
Modified: June 14, 2023
Modified: June 14, 2023
cessation of suffering
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- see:
- https://www.abolitionist.com/
- https://qualiacomputing.com/2018/11/07/anti-tolerance-drugs/
- suffering may seem inevitable. karma; suffering is unfulfilled desire, so as long as there is desire there will be suffering. We all exist on the hedonic treadmill: even if we succeed in making things better, we just adjust our expectations, and suffering creeps right back in (the balanced-utility trap)
- But even if we have evolved mechanisms to normalize utility, those mechanisms are not fundamental. We can break them.
- Fundamentally, there are physical and mental states in which people do not suffer: in the presence of euphoric drugs, or in real experiences of life getting better. So if we could always stay in such states, there would be no suffering. Imagine nanobots that keep your brain in a constant physical state at the molecular level, or more plausibly, that inhibit the mechanisms by which we develop tolerance to drugs.
- Buddhism and meditation provide instructions for the cessation of suffering. It mostly doesn't look like staying in what we think of as positive states (though meditation does tend to lead to more positive states, and Dan Brown at least taught that this can in the limit lead to the eradication of all negative states). Instead it looks like developing equanimity towards negative states; learning to experience them without grasping for them to change.