Do you value pain?

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Take me literally for I am an Aspie. I love my wife, my children and my grandchildren. They are my light and my joy.

I made no attempt to prove anything to you. I stated a fact. When a self acts it is not self-less. That is manifestly the case and self evident.

If you cannot reason logically, that is your problem, not mine.

ruveyn

You have eloquently summed up the philosophy of Mother Theresa.

ruveyn

That's enough. I'm sorry, you guys, I thought about it after I posted that last thing, and I realized I was being nasty to you both because I was annoyed, but by then it was too late to delete.

Ruveyn, I didn't notice your age, and I feel bad now, knowing you are a grandfather.

Sand, I know better than to call people names, please forgive me.

It doesn't actually matter that much if people don't want to see the beauty in pain that I do. Good night, ruveyn and Sand.

At the present moment my wife is severely affected by bone cancer which is extremely painful. To bring cowardice into that frightful malfunction displays an extremely twisted point of view which I do not appreciate.

I agree with Ruveyn that acts are selfish - even the two examples that Pilothea gave can be seen in a selfish light - you give the kidney to your sister because you want her to survive and be happy. Not giving the kidney could result in her death or at best a huge amount of physical pain and discomfort on her part, both of which would cause you a lot of suffering (because you love her). Giving your son the ice-cream cone puts him in a better mood so that you don't have to put up with a miserable/angry child, which would cause yourself further suffering. And this doesn't even add guilt into the equation.

I also don't like to talk of 'brave' or 'cowardly' actions. People do as they will do in a deterministic way. Who are we to judge one person as brave for giving up something and another as cowardly for not wanting to give up the same thing, when we can never determine the value of this thing, nor the reaction provoked upon its loss, from the perspective of each individual? Every sane decision we make is based upon a balance of factors, which will vary enormously between people.

Which is a very important function. Pain is one thing which stops us from destroying our bodies without realizing it.

There was a boy who congenitally couldn't feel pain, who jumped off a roof on his birthday, and died. He knew he wouldn't feel any pain, so he thought it wouldn't harm him.


http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/disp ... &id=243000


Of course, that is the problem with pain - when its cause cannot easily be avoided or repaired. I hope your wife receives the best medical care available and recovers soon.

"Pain is weakness leaving the body"

Atleast thats how i see it

Very neurotic.

ruveyn

merrymadscientist wrote:

That is the opposite of what impels a person to act heroically. People who save a life at the risk of losing their own don't sit back and analyze anything. They empathize and do what they feel that they have to do. While there may be no such thing as altruism in a true sense, there is love and compassion. These are very noble traits in a person. I think that can be judged as good, because it's uplifting to humanity to be able to serve one another in such a way.

I realize this is an aspie site and most aspies seem unable to empathize so I'm not saying you are bad for not understanding the suffering that comes along with love. You have to really ride out the experience to see the beauty in it. But aspies can analyze and be logical so there is no reason to be so harsh to those who engage in these acts. Can you understand this enough to realize that you don't have to understand it and agree that it's not simply masochism?

I have many of the characteristics of Asperger Syndrome but I empathize with everything - with people, dogs, cats, seagulls, mice, rats, ducks, hedgehogs, sparrows, rabbits, ants, bees, moths, muskrats, cockroaches, and even an occasional mosquito that's not aggressive. That doesn't mean I want to live with them, but if they might get hurt I try to protect them and get them out of the way of danger. If somebody on the street looks like he or she needs help and I can help I do so without their asking. And if I might get hurt in the process I do my best to protect both of us, but I Goddamn well do not seek to suffer or get hurt if I can help it. There is no joy in suffering nor any desire on my part to suffer or see anybody else suffer. Pain means something is very wrong and the sooner it can be stopped the better. Anybody who seeks pain or desires to suffer is psychologically damaged and needs to be cured.

While I don't think it is something that should be sought after, I also don't think it should be something to be avoided at all costs too.

Painful experiences such as death can lead to personal growth. There is a threshold which a person reaches where he/she thinks that he/she can not endure any more suffering. When there is nothing that can be done to alleviate this pain, you are stuck in it and you have two choices.

You can deny it and block out your emotions, or you can try to find meaning in it and accept it. If you choose to accept it you just grow out of it. You realize that there are a lot of things that just don't matter and then you look back at your old self like you were a little kid who just felt alone and cried a little too hard over it all.

The only personal growth that my death would encourage is the personal growth of the bacteria residing in my body and whatever insect scavengers find my corpus tasty. And I will feel no pain whatsoever.

To get more serious, any frustration will lead to new attitudes and perhaps new capabilities. As will success in any enterprise. In other words any result should move one forward in some way if the potential is there. Pain and suffering can also lead to great depression and perhaps death. Personalities differ but it is better to enjoy life than to suffer through it.

I may regret this, but here I go. Just one final post from me on this topic, because I am getting tired of it.

Of course you ought to try to enjoy life, I never claimed otherwise. But life is not all joy. There are things you must suffer. Tragedy, injustice, and yes, pain. If it seemed I was suggesting that you should intentionally seek out pain for its beauty, I'm sorry it sounded that way. I didn't mean that at all.

But when suffering is unavoidable:

1) You must suffer as well as you can.

2) If you can ease someone else's suffering, you should try.

3) If the process of easing their suffering causes you to suffer something for their sake, that is honorable.

4) When you do this for them out of love, that in my opinion is beautiful.

I hope I have finally been understood. That is as clear as I can make it. Henceforth, Philothea ceases to care what happens to this particular thread.

Of course you should help people who need help and if you get crapped on a bit that's too bad but maybe you feel what the hell, I don't mind so much if everything works out in the end. But there is nothing beautiful or admirable about getting crapped on. It's just stuff happens and you try to survive. I put this in rough language because it hits reality a bit harder and hopefully jars you out of the aesthetic nonsense of admiring suffering or pain. There's nothing admirable about it.

I know that people don't analyse their actions - in fact most actions are not consciously decided, but that doesn't mean that they are not deterministic. It is true that compassion can be considered noble, but like intelligence and attractiveness, one's ability to feel compassion is determined genetically and environmentally - one cannot decide or not to be a compassionate or good person, just as one cannot force oneself to become intelligent or good looking (although it is true there are things that can be done to help). We can judge these things as good, only in that they reduce suffering in others, but I dislike judging individuals based on their ability or not to be able to do these things - its not too far off judging people by their ability to be successful at school, or to socialise successfully.

Ironically I do understand the suffering that comes with love only too well, and this is why I have the opinion that I do. Its true that after the first time I really suffered I made it out to be a good, noble, heroic thing (and this wasn't masochism - I truly believed I was a better person for it). After the second I am under no more such illusions. Its true that I am stronger in some sense, but that strength is due to a loss of caring, a loss of enthusiasm and innocence in life and a gain in cynicism. As humans we have this need to believe that our suffering serves some purpose, to make sense of it all, and we will cling to any evidence we can find to justify this, because the alternative is too dispiriting to bear. That all that suffering was for nothing. But unfortunately, in general this is the truth.

p.s. I am sorry if I sound harsh, but I do not judge people negatively for having the views that you do - it is completely natural to want to find something good out of suffering, or to think that certain acts are courageous/cowardly, and certainly to want to do altruistic things for ones family (the selfish gene) or even friends (extension of selfish gene). Maybe I even envy you for not having suffered enough to want to give up on the whole thing.