In What Sense Is Life Suffering?

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“Life is suffering” may be a Noble Truth, but it feels like a deepity. Yes, obviously life includes suffering. But it also includes happiness. Many people live good and happy lives, and even people with hard lives experience some pleasant moments.

This is the starting point of many people’s objection to Buddhism. They continue: if nirvana is just a peaceful state beyond joy or suffering, it sounds like a letdown. An endless gray mist of bare okayness, like death or Britain. If your life was previously good, it’s a step down. Even if your life sucked, maybe you would still prefer the heroism of high highs and low lows to eternal blah.

Against all this, many Buddhists claim to be able to reach jhana, a state described as better than sex or heroin - and they say nirvana is even better than that. Partly it’s better because jhana is temporary and nirvana permanent, but it’s also better on a moment-to-moment basis. So nirvana must mean something beyond bare okayness. But then why the endless insistence that life is suffering and the best you can do is make it stop?

I don’t know the orthodox Buddhist answer to this question. But I got the rationalist techno-Buddhists’ answer from lsusr a few months ago, and found it, uh, enlightening. He said: mental valence works like temperature.

Naively, there are two kinds of temperature: hot and cold. When an environment stops being hot, then it’s neutral - “room temperature” - neither hot nor cold. After that, you can add arbitrary amounts of coldness, making it colder and colder.

But scientifically, there’s only one kind of temperature: heat. Apparent “neutral” at room temperature is a fact about human perception with no objective significance. If you start at “very hot” and take away heat, at some point your perception switches from “less hot” to “more cold”, but you’ve just been taking away heat the whole time. The real “zero heat” isn’t room temperature. It’s absolute zero, which feels colder than we can possibly imagine.

In the same way, naively, there are two kinds of emotion - joy and suffering. When a situation stops being bad, then it’s neutral - “just okay” - neither joy nor suffering. After that, you can add arbitrary amounts of joy, making yourself happier and happier.

But scientifically (according to the Buddhists) there’s only one kind of emotion: suffering. Apparent neutral is a fact about human perception with no objective significance. If you start at “very bad” and take away suffering, at some point your perception switches from “less suffering” to “more joyful”, but you’ve just been taking away suffering the whole time. The real “zero suffering” isn’t neutral / blah / just okay. It’s nirvana, which feels more blissful than we can possibly imagine.

In this model, the statement “life is suffering” is equivalent to “temperature is heat” and literally true. An ignoramus might boggle at this: all temperatures are heat? What about fifty degrees below zero on a winter’s night in Alaska? Sorry, that’s heat too - 228 degrees Kelvin. It’s colder than the reference temperature you dubbed neutral, but that was always fake. Likewise, it seems surprising that all life is suffering: even when you’re having sex? Even when you’re on heroin? But to Buddhists, both of those states are some number of degrees worse than the absolute zero suffering of nirvana.

Why should we believe this model?

First, regardless of whether we believe it or not, I find it helpful in understanding what Buddhists are asserting. It removes my urge to have tedious arguments where I accuse them of being anti-human and forgetting that life includes good things.

But also, it does seem to match some of the other ground we’ve covered about what people notice during meditative experiences - for example, in Jhanas And The Dark Room Problem. The neuroscientists say the brain tries to minimize prediction error. But a natural way to minimize prediction error is to sit quietly in a dark room and never expose yourself to any unpredictable stimuli at all. Why isn’t this maximum bliss? The qualiologists propose that you’re just bad at sitting in a dark room. If you were good at it - that is, a trained meditator who could calm their brain down enough to pay full attention to the lack of stimuli - it would be amazing. This is why trained meditators are always talking about all the cosmic bliss that they feel. And from here it’s a short hop to the symmetry theory of valence, where the unpleasantness of mental states tracks a sort of irregularity or asymmetry in brain activity.

The emotion “happiness” is a form of brain activity which is more regular and symmetrical than usual - maybe the most regularity and symmetry we can get in the normal course of things. But ice is a form of matter which is colder than usual - yet if you drop it into liquid helium, it will add heat, not subtract it. Thus the insistence among meditators that happiness is an obstacle and you should seek nirvana instead.