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Comment by projektir | Hacker News Reader

> Suffering is a conscious decision

Do you think your cat won't suffer is you stop feeding it? Do you think it's making a conscious decision to suffer if it's hungry?

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it might be more accurate to describe suffering as an optional subconscious process. You suffer by default, but you can choose to not suffer with the right amount of mindfulness. As for the cat, again, the cat might not have the mental fortitude to set aside the suffering.

Interesting argument, with a broken premise. There's still debate on what level of consciousness animals have [0]. Is a cat conscious enough to predict that tomorrow it will have less food and save some for tomorrow to avoid feeling that hunger? Does a human have that degree of consciousness to do exactly that? Can a human differentiate itself from an animal by deciding to act instead of reacting like I proposed? Isn't that the one of the key differences between humans and animals?

You know that animals are known to eat their own young [1]? Do you think its a conscious decision? Or they are just on auto-mode like a person that is less mindful is?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness [1] https://www.livescience.com/2053-animals-eat-offspring.html

My premise is that an animal in my care, if left hungry, will suffer, just like I would suffer. The cat's degree of consciousness, or whether or not it belongs to a species that eats its young, is not relevant to that premise. If you think that is a broken premise, I don't know what to tell you, but you might perhaps really enjoy reading Hume.

I was talking about suffering, pain and choice IN humans, you brought animals into the equation. It's a comment on HN so sorry for not specifying that the article and my comment were regarding humans only. Bringing animals in was the broken premise. If it is your responsibility to feed the cat, then yes the cat will suffer. I don't even understand your point, where does the cat get a choice to do anything at all? But that is also nonsensical since cats can't do anything about it but react which was my point to begin with.

I am attempting to reject an absolute statement that I find dangerous by showing a very basic and boring counterexample. If suffering is a conscious decision, it is such in all cases where suffering occurs, and suffering occurs in animals.

"Suffering in humans" is not concrete. You would need to create a distinction between "suffering in humans" and "suffering in animals" and explain where it differs and what is special about it and I don't see any such definition, so I am going to go with "suffering in general".

Many people here are talking about physical pain, which animals can also suffer from, so it doesn't seem obvious to me that your definition of "suffering" would be some kind of a special definition that shares nothing with suffering in animals.

You are likely trying to say some kind of a thing where humans are special and have special mental controls and so when a human feels pain they have more means of control about it than an animal can. This is all well and good but then we get into issues like children or people with limited cognitive capacity. The line between human and animal quickly becomes thin and we're back to square one, the square where saying that suffering is a choice is egregiously wrong and the statement must be qualified.

It seems to me that you're trying to move some goalposts around.

Ok next time I will write a research paper and post it here as a comment defining cat and human suffering and then after that you will ask but what about suffering in mollusks: "Suffering in humans and cats is not concrete!". I know that HN attracts a crowd that likes to cherry-pick any sentence and treat it as a line of code just to put out a contrarian point of view but come on. Moving goalposts? Nobody mentioned animals you were the one that moved the goalpost.

To be able to be mindful you need consciousness first, to have that you have to be a human. Sorry, either don't move the goalpost and bring animals in, or prove that animals are capable of managing their stimuli with mindfulness.

I'll break it down to you. You receive an input (emotion) and with mindfulness you realize that you ('you' the human, not 'you' the cat) do have a say on how to act based on it. That is all.

> If suffering is a conscious decision, it is such in all cases where suffering occurs

This is the weak point in your argument.

If I have a flat tire, I can get it fixed. I didn’t consciously choose to get a flat tire. But if I don’t fix it, the next day I will have a flat tire I consciously chose to have.

The way I see it plenty people s seem to live in what The Bhagavad Gita (a book on yoga and consciousness) describes as 'animal nature', in that they do not necessarily know that they're thinking and that they are constantly moved by the thought stream. They are very reactionary to stimuli.

You may not be able to choose the content of your thoughts exactly, but you may be able to change how they work on you.

I do not know how to scientifically quantify or test this but it is a reported by scores of people and can be understood experientially.

The idea isn’t that humans don’t suffer, or that suffering isn’t real.

The idea is that this very conversation could lessen your suffering for the rest of your life.

If you talk to your cat about stoicism, they might suffer less during starvation, yes.

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