On the Ontology of Joy and Pain, Happiness and Suffering

I’d like to briefly examine the conceptual nature of pain and suffering as I’d often like to reference the way I view them. And for balance, let’s throw in joy and happiness, too!

Simply,

• Proto-pain is the experience associated with separation.
• Proto-joy is the experience associated with formation and unification.
• Pain is the experience associated with the propagation of proto-pain signals to the mind’s reflexive model of the separation events, resulting in new separative events on the level of mental representations.
• Joy is the experience associated with the propagation of proto-joy signals to the mind’s reflexive model of the formation events, resulting in new formative events on the level of mental representations.
• Suffering is the experience associated with an auto-propagating cascade or cycle of proto-pain within the system.
• Happiness is the experience associated with an auto-propagating cascade or cycle of proto-joy within the system.

The core ideas for this entry came from the idea that much suffering stems from runaway mental processes, essentially pain kept alive far beyond its useful signaling role, and from Ben’s use of the term ‘proto-pain’ to refer to the possibly unavoidable¹In this shard of the eurycosm sensation from which pain sprouts²It turns out Stuart R. Hameroff and Roger Penrose used it in 2016 in CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE UNIVERSE: AN UPDATED REVIEW OF THE “ORCH OR” THEORY..

When dealing with fundamental aspects of our experience of life, precise definitions without committing to a certain substance ontology can be difficult. I prefer to adopt phenomenological grounded views, yet then must I describe proto-pain from a subjective lens? I also lean toward panpsychist idealist lenses insofar as a panpsychist monism is experiential³I note that the ‘mental’ implied in trad idealism is more than simply experiential. Thus perhaps I should call it, experiential monism? Qualia monism?. Nonetheless, paying respects to the other minds problem, it’s not clear which systems and processes may be associated with experiences. I also use the phrasing, “experience associated with”, to hopefully abstract away from reliance on a particular theory of said association. Thus please project/filter separation and formation/unification experiences into whatever ontology of being you prefer.

On my view, I’m not sure whether there is some experience of proto-pain at the site of a cut on my skin. The generally experienced pain seems to be the conscious/mental phenomenon associated with the signal from the cut region. For the highly mindful, meditatively developed people, even the conscious phenomenon seems to be experienced more as proto-pain: thus, even what we regard as physical pain is likely a very localized instantiation of suffering as the pain signal is kept alive to call for attention and care. Proto-pain and suffering appear to be the foundational concepts of this view, with pain referring to a specific form of generally contained suffering.

I like how the definition of suffering fits cases of chronic pain, too. Another case is animals in factory farms: isn’t their form of suffering not due to runaway mental processes? The auto-propagating cycles of pain are due to their circumstances, yet the continued pain would seem to constitute suffering.

Joy and happiness seem to be naturally expressible as duals. I am not sure whether the term formation or unification seems more appropriate. Unification is often the formation of a larger whole, yet the tenor is different. These terms align with the notion of individuation, too, where one form that happiness takes is the ongoing formation of one’s being moment-to-moment: the important aspects of one’s individuality are in harmonious, homeostatic loops.

Separation can be seen as de-individuation⁴Kudos to Gemini 2.0 for the introduction of this term. She helped a lot with this post.. Radical growth can require transcendence, and it would seem that if one can contextualize the de-individualization in the context of a transformation into a new formation, then the growth proto-pains involved may not coalesce into pain and suffering.

Given I’ve read about it, I should note the similarity with the Qualia Research Institute and Andrés Gómez-Emilsson’s Symmetry Theory of Valence (joy and pain). Symmetries are invariants: they denote which processes allow formations to remain the same. Separation corresponds to a symmetry being broken and unification to a symmetry being formed. I find the language of patterns a la Ben’s usage to be more clear than the language of symmetries and harmonies⁵Moreover, as a pattern P in a system S to agent A generally involves a compression of S to A, there will be invariants and thus symmetries related to patterns..