Ask HN: Why does consciousness suffer given it can be in bliss all day
Your consciousness has this property of being able to render any image, sound, feeling, emotion etc. But for some reason most of the contents of consciousness seems to be a lot of pain and fear for a lot of people. Why can't the life form couple with consciousness in a form where it's all bliss all day? Why do a mapping where there is a lot of pain, anxiety etc? Especially given a lot of reaction to events is all Physiological.
Pain, fear, and anxiety are deeply ingrained in human consciousness because they served critical survival purposes for human ancestors. These emotions heightened awareness of danger, encouraged caution, and motivated actions to protect oneself and others.
Some brain structures have evolved with a smaller amygdala, where fear is processed. Are you asking if it is possible for evolution to take this further where fear is non existent, while consciousness and executive function can still evaluate and action against danger rationally or logically?
Fundamentally (imho), there are two pathways for exploration on this topic: brain structure and chemistry, and stoicism, meditation, and understanding the human condition (which may include a spiritual component, such as buddhism). “To be, or not to be, that is the question."
Yes. Exactly. Can body react Physically to the events exactly like it as but at is and at the same time put the consciousness in bliss mode all day?
The paths to success are either pharma to adjust brain chemistry or mindfulness to improve emotional and executive function response around negative stimuli and events. I leverage the latter, but I fault no one who chooses a pharma intervention. There is no extra credit for making life harder than it already is.
"The horrors persist but so do we." Once you realize that no one is coming to save us but us, we all live a short, brutal experience on a spinning rock in space that will not matter once we die, it becomes straightforward to "saddle up" and optimize accordingly. I hope my input helps you with your lived experience. I have also found the below writings useful. Emotional pain management is a an acquired skill. I strongly encourage its development and cultivation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations
> A central theme to Meditations is the importance of analyzing one's judgment of self and others and developing a cosmic perspective:
> You have the power to strip away many superfluous troubles located wholly in your judgment, and to possess a large room for yourself embracing in thought the whole cosmos, to consider everlasting time, to think of the rapid change in the parts of each thing, of how short it is from birth until dissolution, and how the void before birth and that after dissolution are equally infinite.
> Aurelius advocates finding one's place in the universe and sees that everything came from nature, and so everything shall return to it in due time. Another strong theme is of maintaining focus and to be without distraction all the while maintaining strong ethical principles such as "Being a good man."
> His Stoic ideas often involve avoiding indulgence in sensory affections, a skill which will free a man from the pains and pleasures of the material world. He claims that the only way a man can be harmed by others is to allow his reaction to overpower him. An internal orderly and rational nature, or logos, permeates and guides all existence. Rationality and clear-mindedness allow one to live in harmony with the logos. This allows one to rise above faulty perceptions of "good" and "bad"—things out of your control like fame and wealth are (unlike things in your control) irrelevant and neither good nor bad.
Any specific program you recommend? Reading stoics is nice and all, but that alone won't make intellectual and emotional space coincide, I feel.
In fact having the suitable brain chemistry may make you a stoic, but can you influence that?
Seek out opportunities to suffer, or allow them find you. A night guard is also helpful if the stress causes you to grind your teeth while you sleep to where you might lose them otherwise. Live life, that's the program. When the suffering happens, that is your opportunity to put what you've learned into practice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTgv4iPgQ2o
> "You learn how to suffer. If you know how to suffer, you suffer much, much less. And then you know how to make good use of suffering to create joy and happiness. The art of happiness and the art of suffering always go together." -- Thich Nhat Hanh
I will try to write something more substantive for your inquiry.
We could be in perpetual bliss, but then we'd be passive. Members of the community that raise their 'discomfort' bar to whatever the current environment provides, become more proactive and thus increase their calories, social situation, ultimately their reproductive fitness.
We're in pain and fear because nature tuned us to ride this thin edge - unhappy but not too unhappy, in pain but not (usually) in debilitating pain. So we get off our butts and find a mate/home/food/safety in greater abundance (than our peers).
"Without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned."
The true answer is survival. But the more poetic answer is that quote. Or the plethora of others that offer similar sentiments.
Are you saying a person with a conscious experience have more survival advantage than one without conscious experience given everything else remains the same?
AFAICT debugging the subroutines responsible for the emotional set point isn't possible yet, so a definitive answer will have to wait 'til another day.
You are interpreting. And what you are describing is most likely not a function or the result of consciousness.
Pain and fear exist entirely as the return of the CNS. Your consciousness taps into this function to give those interpretations of sensations with external and internal origins properties that support your cognitive processing so that you can make sense (without necessarily creating order) of them in your past, current and future contextS and get to the roots of pains and anxieties to adequately handle them in order to refocus on thriving.
It's like that pain in my leg that dissolves when I stretch and massage it with a Lacrosse ball or something. Or that other pain in my neck and shoulders that disappears when I train through the pain and then massage and stretch those muscles. Some of the things I do to get rid of my pain go against conventional knowledge but I do them because I learned to listen to my intuition which in turn learns from those external and internal sensations and my minds cognitive processing of these sensations.
People with low (levels) of awareness or low consciousness - in most cases entirely the result of stress and or low stimulation - just drop a pill and never get to the roots of the issue causing the pain. That's true even for people with higher education. And many of them have painfully bad medical professionals in their area or "class" and or are treated badly because 'fascism' ...
So getting and or remaining in a state of bliss is quite possible. And you don't have to meditate into it. All you need to do is to learn to understand what your mind and body tell you via senses and consciousness and then find ways to act on this information by getting to the roots of your issues. ( Dreams don't have anything to to do with any of this, btw, not necessarily, because you are sleeping and your senses are mostly off and your consciousness is in an entirely different state )
No spirituality involved at all. If you do take some pills, use the resulting peace of mind to do the workout, the stretch, the processing of painful memories or thoughts. If you take the pill, don't add distractions.
But that's really just another interpretation ;], one that can probably make a few bucks wherever. Feel free to throw me a coin if you do use any of this commercially ;]
Your consciousness is also capable of convincing you that the table in front of you is only a simulation, that it doesn’t really exist.
Now, smack your simulated head into that simulated table as hard as you can, and your simulated body will explain that suffering is inherent to the act of living and no matter what your consciousness tries to do to delude itself, this will always be true. The consciousness, at best, is along for the ride, pondering the meaning (if any) of that suffering.