Thank you for sharing this expression with us Gregg:
      "But at the same time, an entity that cannot feel cannot feel pain and thus cannot suffer."

And, if I read you right, since many practitioners have echoed your compassion, just because we cannot feel a thing when we harm things we do not understand, does not mean they do not feel pain and wonder why we do not understand.

My research troubles me greatly, because what is "coming through" is the suggestion that *mental life cannot feel*. As in Terror Management Theory, mental activity can only apprehend the loss of its activity. I have so much evidence now I have lost the ability to categorize it. E Roy John said it fairly well.

Although our mental activity cannot suffer physically, it can instead suffer an untenable frustration (which seems to be a facsimile we mistake for physiological suffering). Damasio relates this in his books, suggesting the tectum/tegementum are like a crossroads or horizon of different perspectives where world and mind just meet:

(a) The "Mind" cannot feel
      But it cannot stand not to know about the natural world and how it feels; it must feel an inner sense of control of outer things
(b) And the body cannot understand why the Mind cannot feel
     Because all the body can *do* is feel. This physical body and the physical world we call Nature, do not have the luxury of retreating into a Mental World whenever they observe suffering, where we humans invent justification systems for why we needn't care about the Physical World (since we have a social Refugium constituted of hyperoptimistic fictions - a private world of heroes and villains and 'causes' for which Nature should be prepared to suffer and die)

So, the mind is anxious, and sends imperatives to the world along descending pathways - to its subordinated body and its 'domesticated' world - to report what a genuine world is like. The phantom limb phenomenon seems to evince this, as does "grief" (pain that will not go away because it is waiting for a report that will never come).

But the feeling body and its feeling world cannot be placated by mental promises that things will get better if they will just be patient; and so they send appeals along ascending pathways that nocireceptors can understand, in the hope the unfeeling Mind will on occasion pay attention to its physical body's infirmities. I see this every day, when I and those I love neglect physical needs until we have urgently completed computer tasks - as though the computer would suffer if we did not let our bodies suffer. Finally we walk away, and suddenly we are aware how desperately we need to urinate or eat - as though having anesthetized our bodily needs with a subcutaneous mental needle.

The troubling part about a psychologically subjective view, is that it is so objectively detached from physical needs and physical terrors. If your idea of survival is the undying persistence of your specific thoughts, then such a one cannot comprehend the nature of physical survival (for they do not need "thoughts" to fear death; we can be anaesthetized and the mind will not know when the body is panicking and pleading for us to stop hurting or killing it). Living things do not need to "know" a thing in order to appreciate it. Only a mental vigilance bases its sensory thresholds on "knowing", and discards the rest.

If your idea of awareness is cognitive, then you will favor the well-being of your thoughts, and exhibit a sedulous apathy for anything which is not as mentally reverent as you are. You will avidly defend the rights of any mental activity, ignore the rights of anything more physical than psychological (this is in my dissertation, empirically supported). And you will treat living matter as a kind of giant pantry or fuel depot for the global sowing and harvesting of insentient mental activity (sapience).

But awareness of pain does not require a central nervous system, and science has shown this again and again. Only approbation requires tribute or self-report; the central governance does not need to be informed of what the populace is already aware, before that neglected pluribus of cells can admit to each other that they are in agony (cellular signaling).

Only "meta-awareness" of pain requires a CNS. This is easily supported across domains. Yet meta-awareness is not awareness, just observation. Our capacity to notice "ourselves" is actually our capacity to ignore everything else (some of Shaffer's work is here Gregg) - and we see the terror of losing life from a distance, while we look forward to an eternity without having to deal with physical appeals for mercy. I have heard many people wish for the deaths of their beloved wards, just so they could be emancipated from feeling so worried about them or having to care for their survival. (The idea that companions are mental "property" isn't natural or survivable, it seems - for either party; a JD/PhD student helped me understand this). But we see this body as our property, not our companion. We do not feel anything for it unless it belongs to us.

      "...an entity that cannot feel cannot feel pain and thus cannot suffer..."

I really like that you phrased it this way. This is my research statement. That unfeeling entity is... the Mind (embodied in each of us, or disembodied as a concept).

We only *seem to* suffer psychologically - it's more like an indirect agitation or a missing feedback signal; but what I observe, is that the Mind uses this perspective so It may use living tissue like a human shield... to dominate and exact suffering from the physical world. The mind is not in danger of dying, it is only in danger of losing dominion over what must always die. Adorno called this the banality of evil. Concepts do not die. Stories do not die. Only their adherents die. When everyone who preserved the Concept has perished, the Concept can finally subside into silence and a buzzing random electrical activity, like flies without a lord over them anymore (Schopenhauer, ERJ). But no human concept 'cares' about humanity. It is a one-way reverence. If we worship our thoughts, we do not adore Life.

We set our experimental subjects' rights conveniently just beyond the reach of the majority of creatures -- who do not have vertebrae and self-rooting, allo-dominating brains like ours. But when we listen to the cries of invertebrates asking for a non-mentalized justice, we can just hear still, small voices asking us to please try and understand. But since a self-constructing story of selective meta-awarenesses is incapable of being directly affected by living things that aren't selectively expendable - our horizon of awareness is just beyond the horizon of caring. We cannot identify with living things, so we cannot understand their natural languages.

--Lonny

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