The example most salient to me here is Buddhism. The Buddha, famously, thought that suffering originates in something like “thirst,” “greed,” “craving,” “desire,” or “attachment.” If you let go of that thing, you let go of suffering, and attain perfect peace.
So, I think it’s worth pointing out that this is a fairly surface-level understanding of dukkha. It’s not a bad place to start, but also thinking that this is the extent of the thing it is about will result in confusion about Buddhist practice.
A deeper understanding is that dukkha is a fundamental motion of being a living thing. At its heart, I’d describe it as the continual pressure to optimize for something within a negative feedback loop, and so your idea of caring is definitely still in the realm of the origin of dukkha.
The only way to actually free yourself from it, then, is to stop the feedback, and this is at the far end where Buddhist practices end up: training techniques to shut down feedback within the brain so it only feeds forward.
I’d then describe the idea of liberation from dukkha as two fold. One was is to shut down feedback all together in meditation. The other is to shut down the secondary feedback cycle that creates meta-dukkha: suffering about suffering. The latter takes one a long way down the path, but then it’s even further to the former.
Caveat: I’m not a Buddhist scholar or a teacher, just a Zen practitioner who is also a member of the LessWrong/Rationalist community, so any confusion here on the finer points is my own.
This seems to be speaking in a different world than the main post. “stopping feedback” seems to my mind to suggest to be ambivalent amongst outcomes when the post is about how distinctions remain even if stuckness is abolished.
The bit in the comment about negative feedback loop, I understood as the person has an expectation how things are going to go and the frequent/central outcome is that something different or short of that happens and this makes for negative feedback. The feedforward setup is then that in a given state one can favour some actions over others (say jump if see red and run if see blue) but there is no success or failure because the result isn’t even looked at.
So, I think it’s worth pointing out that this is a fairly surface-level understanding of dukkha. It’s not a bad place to start, but also thinking that this is the extent of the thing it is about will result in confusion about Buddhist practice.
A deeper understanding is that dukkha is a fundamental motion of being a living thing. At its heart, I’d describe it as the continual pressure to optimize for something within a negative feedback loop, and so your idea of caring is definitely still in the realm of the origin of dukkha.
The only way to actually free yourself from it, then, is to stop the feedback, and this is at the far end where Buddhist practices end up: training techniques to shut down feedback within the brain so it only feeds forward.
I’d then describe the idea of liberation from dukkha as two fold. One was is to shut down feedback all together in meditation. The other is to shut down the secondary feedback cycle that creates meta-dukkha: suffering about suffering. The latter takes one a long way down the path, but then it’s even further to the former.
Caveat: I’m not a Buddhist scholar or a teacher, just a Zen practitioner who is also a member of the LessWrong/Rationalist community, so any confusion here on the finer points is my own.
This seems to be speaking in a different world than the main post. “stopping feedback” seems to my mind to suggest to be ambivalent amongst outcomes when the post is about how distinctions remain even if stuckness is abolished.
The bit in the comment about negative feedback loop, I understood as the person has an expectation how things are going to go and the frequent/central outcome is that something different or short of that happens and this makes for negative feedback. The feedforward setup is then that in a given state one can favour some actions over others (say jump if see red and run if see blue) but there is no success or failure because the result isn’t even looked at.