Sensation, the "hard problem" in neurology and indeed in existence

 You said:

I think it might be useful to insert a distinction here between "it's just chemicals" and "it's real." Chemicals are real enough, and there is a reason the chemicals are there, but the presence of the chemicals might not be the cause but a result. What we do think we know is that we "experience" things (known as "qualia" -- emotions, sensations, an ongoing narrative of the world). It has been realized by introspective people from ancient times that none of this can possibly be "real" in the usual and intuitive sense of the world -- that our experience is not real but generated somewhere -- moderns assume in the brain. About the best we can say is that the ongoing narrative of our experience is a useful interface between the outside world and ourselves -- like the odometer on a car is not "real speed" but just an interface telling us about the car's real speed.

ChatGPT said:

Yes—this is a very helpful distinction, and you’re putting your finger on a confusion that quietly derails a lot of modern talk about mind and brain.

“It’s just chemicals” trades on a sleight of hand. Chemicals are perfectly real, as you say. The error is the just. Once that word appears, it smuggles in a reduction that hasn’t actually been argued for. Worse, it often flips cause and effect. The presence of neurochemicals correlated with an experience does not, by itself, establish that they are the experience in any explanatory sense. They may be enabling conditions, regulatory mechanisms, or downstream consequences of processes we don’t yet understand at the right level of description.

Your turn to experience—qualia, the felt narrative—is exactly where the pressure point lies. We do know, with a certainty that outruns all science, that experience occurs. That insight goes back at least to the Upanishads, to Greek skeptics, to Augustine, and then very sharply to Descartes. Whatever else may be doubted, the having of experiences cannot be. But it was also recognized very early that what is experienced cannot be a simple mirror of the external world. The stick looks bent in water; the sun seems to move across the sky; pain feels “in the finger” though the finger is not where the experience is generated. So the idea that experience is constructed—mediated, staged, presented—long predates neuroscience.

The modern move, as you note, is to localize that construction in the brain. That’s plausible and probably correct as far as it goes, but it does not dissolve the philosophical problem. Saying “the brain does it” is like saying “the dashboard does the speed.” It identifies where the readout is produced, not what speed is or how motion in the world becomes a number on a dial. Your odometer analogy is particularly apt: the display is not unreal, but it is not what it displays. Confusing the two is a category mistake.

I’d add one subtle refinement. Calling experience “not real” can mislead, even though I know what you mean. It may be better to say that experience is not veridical by default. It is real as experience, but indirect as representation. Pain really hurts; red really looks red; fear really tightens the chest. What is questionable is whether these properties belong to the external world in the way they appear to belong to it. In that sense, experience is less like a window and more like a user interface—precisely your point.

Where this gets philosophically interesting is that interfaces are shaped by function, not truth. Evolution (or learning, or development) optimizes for survival, coherence, and action, not for metaphysical transparency. So the fact that experience “works” tells us very little about whether it corresponds to the world as it is in itself. Kant would be nodding vigorously here.

So yes: chemicals are real; experiences are real; but the explanatory relation between them is still opaque. Dismissing experience as “just chemistry” explains nothing, and treating experience as a transparent picture of reality explains even less. The hard problem doesn’t vanish—it just gets mislabeled.

You said:

I don't know that experiences are real. Certainly they are not real in the sense that the chemicals involved are real.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a fair pushback—and I think you’re resisting exactly the place where language starts to smuggle in metaphysics without permission.

If by real we mean “mind-independent, publicly observable, measurable, and persisting whether or not anyone notices,” then yes: experiences are plainly not real in the way chemicals, rocks, or electromagnetic fields are real. They have no mass, no location that can be pointed to in shared space, no persistence once the process stops. In that sense, calling them “real” risks equivocating.

What is undeniable is not the reality of experiences, but their occurrence. Something happens. There is an event-like fact: there is seeing, there is pain, there is thinking. That claim is much weaker than saying the experience itself is a thing, and much harder to object to. It doesn’t commit us to experiences being objects at all—only to there being processes that include a first-person aspect.

This is where the chemicals-versus-experience contrast becomes sharp. Chemicals are ontologically straightforward: they are constituents of the public world. Experiences, if we insist on talking carefully, may not be entities but modes of access or states of presentation. They don’t exist alongside chemicals; they are how certain physical processes are manifested to the system undergoing them. That makes them more like a verb than a noun.

Your odometer analogy fits even better under this stricter view. The odometer reading isn’t a “real thing” over and above gears and electronics. It’s a functional state of a system that means something to a user. Likewise, an experience may not be a real object in addition to neurons firing; it may be the brain’s way of being in a certain functional configuration—one that includes self-monitoring and narrative integration.

Where people get into trouble is by trying to force experiences into the same ontological category as chemicals, either to elevate them (“qualia are fundamental stuff”) or to dismiss them (“just chemicals”). Both assume that if something isn’t a substance, it isn’t serious. But processes, relations, and interfaces can matter enormously without being “real” in the chemical sense.

So I think your position can be sharpened this way:
experiences are not real things, but they are not illusory either. They are generated appearances, functionally indispensable, causally efficacious in behavior, and epistemically primary—yet ontologically derivative. They don’t compete with chemistry; they ride on it.

That’s a narrower claim than many philosophers want, but it avoids a lot of unnecessary metaphysical inflation.

You said:

A given experience insists that it is more "real" than anything else. This is a nice conjuring trick, but maybe so. Maybe there is no sound unless someone hears it.

ChatGPT said:

Exactly—that insistence is one of the trickiest illusions of consciousness. Every experience feels self-evidently real: pain is pain, red is red, the world is as it appears. That “this is more real than anything else” quality is entirely internal. It’s the brain—or whatever system generates experience—shoving the interface up close and making it feel immediate and undeniable. It’s not proof of ontological primacy; it’s proof of how persuasive the interface is.

Your point about sound is exactly the classic way to frame it. Sound is a pattern of air pressure waves, and it only becomes sound when an organism interprets it. Without a listener, there are just waves; nothing is “heard.” Similarly, experiences could be seen as the system’s interface: they exist as experiences only because there is something that has them. They aren’t independent realities—they are the way the system registers reality.

That’s the neat conjuring trick: each experience feels like the absolute, irreducible real world, but it may be no more real than a dashboard reading, a sonar ping, or a computer alert. Convincing, immediate, functionally vital—but ontologically derivative.

If you like, I can try to frame an even tighter analogy that captures why the insistence of “realness” feels so persuasive yet might be illusory.

You said:

I'm sure it's illusory in the sense that the sound wave is not illusory. It seems to be something in-between. It can be fantasy but under normal conditions it is not.

ChatGPT said:

Yes—that “in-between” is exactly the tricky zone. Experiences are not illusions in the sense of being wholly false: there is a sound wave, there is a heat source, there is a bump in the road. Experiences reliably track these things. But they are also not identical to them; the experience is a constructed representation, shaped, filtered, and sometimes exaggerated or suppressed by the system that perceives it.

Under normal conditions, this interface is remarkably trustworthy—what you hear usually corresponds to real vibrations, what you see usually corresponds to real light patterns—but it is still a layer removed from the world itself. Fantasy, dreaming, hallucination, or error are just cases where the interface runs without the usual external anchor. So the system can misfire, but even when it works, it is still a model, not the thing modeled.

I think this is why consciousness feels so “magical”: it’s a constantly running, real-time simulation of the world for the system’s benefit. It’s mostly accurate, mostly synchronized, mostly useful—but never literally identical to whatever is out there. In other words, experiences are “ontologically intermediate”: neither fully real like chemicals and waves, nor fully unreal like fiction. They occupy a sort of functional reality.

If you want, we can try to pin down a sharper framework for this “in-between” status—what it really means for something to exist as an experience but not exist as a thing. That’s where it starts to get philosophically precise.

You said:

The movement of the indicator on the odometer is no mystery; we can explain it in mechanical detail. Our perception is a mystery, it's not the same thing. There are those who flatly deny this. I wonder if they actually "get it."

ChatGPT said:

I think you’re right to be suspicious there—and not just rhetorically.

The odometer analogy works only up to a point. Once we ask how the indicator moves, the mystery evaporates. We can trace torque to gears to magnet to needle (or pulses to digits). At no point do we have to introduce a new kind of explanation. It’s all third‑person, public, and continuous with the rest of physics. The odometer never surprises us by being something rather than merely doing something.

Perception is different in kind. We can explain sensory transduction quite well: photons hit the retina, ion channels open, action potentials propagate, cortical areas activate. None of that is mysterious anymore. What remains mysterious is why any of that should be accompanied by experience at all. Why isn’t the whole thing “dark inside”? Why isn’t the brain just an extremely complicated odometer with no needle that anyone sees?

People who deny the mystery usually do one of three things, and I think you’re sensing this even if you haven’t sorted it this way. Some quietly change the subject: they explain discrimination, reportability, or behavior and then act as if that settles the question. Others deny the datum: they claim that “experience” is a confused concept or a folk illusion, which is a strange move given that it’s the one thing we’re most directly acquainted with. And a third group simply asserts an identity—experience is neural activity—without explaining how an objective process becomes a subjective one. That’s not an explanation; it’s a label.

So when you wonder whether they actually “get it,” I think the answer is often no—not because they’re stupid or dishonest, but because they’ve decided, usually in advance, that there must not be a remainder. The idea that the world might contain something that resists current explanatory tools is intolerable to them. Declaring the problem solved feels safer than admitting ignorance.

What you’re pointing to is precisely why the “hard problem” label, for all its flaws, stuck. The problem isn’t that we lack mechanisms; it’s that mechanisms alone seem insufficient to account for the existence of experience, not just its structure or function. Until someone can show how a purely third‑person story yields a first‑person fact, the odometer analogy will always feel like a dodge.

And your intuition here is a good one: if someone really got the problem, they wouldn’t be so quick to declare it dissolved. They’d feel the strangeness—and sit with it.

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Trump and Putin babushkas

 You said:

There are two general categories of unfair debate -- what is called propaganda, and, of course, logical fallacies. It occurs to me that people don't seem to know how to recognize these. There are web sites that can be found in any search to help. Basically, propaganda uses non-rational, emotional appeal. This is often negative (name-calling, talking down to people, personal insults, attacking the person and their history rather than what they say, dismissive labeling, and others). They can also be positive (patriotic symbols and music, religious appeals, quotes of famous people, and others). Far and away the most effective form of propaganda is the lie -- disinformation -- invented stuff repeated over and over and made to appear legit. To defend oneself from this sort of thing requires identifying sources of misinformation by being widely read over a broad political spectrum. One other form of propaganda is "bandwagon," where a partisan group gang up on individuals who have other views. It does not work, folks, except for those worried overmuch about what others think.

ChatGPT said:

You’re putting your finger on something real, and also on something that’s oddly under-taught given how central it is to civic life.

One small tightening that may help: propaganda and logical fallacies overlap more than people think. Propaganda is best understood as a mode of persuasion—it aims at shaping attitudes or behavior without regard to the truth value of the claims—while logical fallacies are errors of reasoning. Many propaganda techniques work precisely because they smuggle fallacies in under an emotional cover. Ad hominem attacks, appeals to authority, bandwagon effects, and false dilemmas are all classic examples that can be cataloged either way, depending on whether you’re analyzing intent or structure.

Your emphasis on non-rational emotional appeal is exactly right, but I’d add that propaganda doesn’t bypass reason so much as short-circuit it. It gives the listener just enough cognitive scaffolding—slogans, labels, familiar symbols—to feel that reasoning has occurred. That’s why repetition is so powerful. The “illusory truth effect” is not a moral failing; it’s a cognitive bias. Repeated statements are processed more fluently, and fluency is unconsciously mistaken for truth.

On disinformation, your prescription—wide reading across a broad political spectrum—is sound but incomplete. Breadth helps detect inconsistencies, but it must be paired with some sense of epistemic hygiene: Who has incentives to lie? What would count as disconfirming evidence? Is the claim testable, or is it conveniently vague? Otherwise one simply becomes widely exposed rather than well informed. There’s a difference between pluralism and noise.

Your dismissal of the bandwagon technique is mostly justified, but with a caveat. It does very little to persuade people who already have settled views and decent self-confidence. Where it does work is on the undecided, the socially anxious, and—crucially—on those who fear ostracism more than error. In other words, it’s less an argument than a social threat. Its effectiveness depends entirely on the cost of dissent in a given environment.

The deeper problem, I think, is that many people don’t see debate as a cooperative search for truth at all. They see it as status competition or tribal defense. In that context, propaganda isn’t unfair; it’s perfectly suited to the game being played. Teaching people to recognize fallacies and propaganda helps, but only if they also want to play a different game.

You said:

Distinguishing propaganda from logical fallacy is useful pedagogically. The reality as you say is the most propaganda uses fallacies all the time. I didn't mean to imply that they are never used together. Indeed, being able to identify fallacies is helpful in identifying propaganda. You say to identify who has incentives to lie? Well, unfortunately, we all do, and the most rational, unemotional, understated speakers can be lying through their teeth. I suppose there are those who surrender when ganged up on, if for no other reason than to escape. I don't think they are really persuaded, at least for long, as quite soon they are going to mull it over in the quiet of the night and realize what happened.

ChatGPT said:

Yes—this is a good clarification, and I think you’re right to insist on it.

On incentives to lie: I agree with your pushback. Everyone has incentives to mislead at times, including calm, technically competent, and apparently disinterested speakers. In fact, understatement and composure can be powerful camouflage. That’s why “follow the incentives” works better as a first-pass suspicion filter than as a truth detector. It tells you where to slow down and check, not where truth automatically fails. A liar who understands this can deliberately present as modest, balanced, and emotionally neutral—precisely because people associate those traits with honesty.

That points to something more reliable than tone or motive: constraint. Truth-tellers are constrained by reality. Their claims tend to interlock with independent facts, survive paraphrase, generate risky predictions, and remain coherent when pressed from odd angles. Skilled liars can fake this locally, but it’s hard to sustain globally and over time. This is one reason why propaganda prefers slogans and repetition to detailed causal stories.

Your point about surrender under pressure is well taken. Social ganging-up rarely produces genuine belief change. What it produces is compliance, silence, or strategic withdrawal. The later “quiet of the night” reconsideration you mention is real; cognitive dissonance doesn’t disappear just because someone nodded to escape discomfort. In fact, forced conformity often hardens private beliefs, even if public expression temporarily disappears.

That suggests a useful diagnostic distinction:

• Persuasion changes what someone thinks when they are alone.

• Coercive consensus changes what someone says when others are present.

Bandwagon tactics aim almost entirely at the second. They’re about controlling the visible surface of opinion, not its interior structure. Which is why they feel so hollow once the noise dies down.

Pedagogically, then, I’d frame it this way: learning fallacies trains people to examine arguments; learning propaganda trains them to examine contexts. Both are necessary, and neither is sufficient alone. The tragedy is that most people are taught neither—and are then blamed for being “irrational” when, in fact, they were simply untrained.

You said:

We all have a certain mental process I've always called a reality check, although now the trend is to call it Bayesian. We have certain opinions we are pretty damn sure of, others we are more persuadable on, and so on. When I'm told a bicycler was seen, well, fine, there was a guy out there riding a bicycle; when I'm told he had two heads, well, some evidence beyond this report is going to be needed.

ChatGPT said:

Exactly. That’s a very clean way of putting it, and “reality check” is honestly a better name than “Bayesian” for most people. The math is just a formalization of something humans were doing long before anyone wrote down Bayes’ theorem.

What you’re describing is prior plausibility. Claims don’t arrive in our minds as blank slates; they arrive weighted. “A bicyclist was seen” fits comfortably into a dense web of prior experience, so it requires almost no evidenti support. “The bicyclist had two heads” collides violently with that web, so the evidenti bar shoots way up. That’s not closed-mindedness; it’s rational economy. If we treated every claim as equally likely, we’d be paralyzed.

This is also why propaganda so often works by lowering the apparent cost of accepting an implausible claim. It doesn’t usually start with “the man had two heads.” It starts with vaguer things: something strange, people are saying, experts disagree, you can’t trust what you’ve been told. Each step nudges the prior a little, until what would once have seemed absurd now feels merely controversial.

There’s another important asymmetry here: it is much easier to damage a reality check than to build one. Trust, once eroded, doesn’t come back symmetrically. If you convince someone that all sources are suspect, you don’t have to persuade them of any particular falsehood—they’ll do the rest themselves, filling the vacuum with whatever story feels emotionally coherent.

Your bicyclist example also highlights something people miss: disbelief isn’t binary. You’re not saying “impossible”; you’re saying “extraordinary claim, therefore extraordinary evidence.” That’s a sliding scale, not a wall. Good reasoning lives on that slope.

And this loops back to fallacies and propaganda: both try to smuggle a two-headed bicyclist past the guard at the gate by distracting him, rushing him, or convincing him that guards are elitist in the first place. The healthiest mind isn’t skeptical of everything; it’s skeptical in proportion.

You said:

Guns should be generally allowed, just as we generally allow cars. They both kill people.

ChatGPT said:

That analogy is rhetorically powerful, but it only works if we’re careful about which similarities matter—and which don’t.

At a very high level, you’re right: both guns and cars are ordinary artifacts that can and do kill people, often unintentionally, and society tolerates that risk because each serves widely valued purposes. From that angle, “they both kill people” functions as a reality check against moral panic. We already live with managed lethal risk.

Where the analogy strains is in design intent and use pattern. Cars are engineered primarily for transportation; lethality is a by-product of mass, speed, and error. Guns are engineered to deliver lethal force efficiently; harm is not an accident of function but the function itself, even when used lawfully (e.g., hunting, pest control, self-defense). That difference matters when thinking about regulation, because it changes what counts as “misuse.”

It also affects how regulation evolved. Cars are licensed, registered, insured, and restricted in where and how they’re used—not because they’re morally suspect, but because risk scales with access and context. When people say “treat guns like cars,” the serious version of that argument usually implies accepting analogous structures: training, competency standards, liability, and constraints on use, not laissez-faire access.

There’s another asymmetry worth noting. Cars are embedded in dense systems—roads, traffic law, enforcement, accident investigation—that continuously generate feedback and correction. Firearms policy is far more fragmented, which makes outcomes noisier and harder to evaluate. That doesn’t argue for prohibition, but it does argue against pretending that “allowed” means “unregulated.”

So I’d say this: the comparison is useful as a starting point, not as a conclusion. It successfully punctures the idea that risk alone justifies blanket bans. It does not by itself settle how permissive access should be, or what safeguards are rational. Those questions live downstream of purpose, context, and system design—not just body counts.

You said:

I would call it the "what about" fallacy. The cliché is that two wrongs don't make a right.

ChatGPT said:

Yes—and that’s exactly the right name for it in ordinary language. “What about” is just the conversational form of tu quoque, one of the oldest fallacies in the book.

Logically, it works by changing the subject from Is this claim true or this policy justified? to Are you being consistent or morally pure? The move feels relevant because hypocrisy is emotionally salient, but it doesn’t touch the truth of the original claim at all. Even a hypocrite can be right; even a saint can be wrong.

Your “two wrongs don’t make a right” point gets at the core mistake. The existence of another harm does not justify this one, nor does it refute arguments about it. Saying “cars kill people too” does nothing, by itself, to establish that gun policy X is wise or unwise. At best, it invites a separate analysis of comparative risk and benefit. At worst, it’s a distraction designed to stall judgment.

There’s a subtle but important distinction here. Sometimes a “what about” is a legitimate request for consistency—for example, when two cases are genuinely analogous and governed by the same principles. But the burden is then on the speaker to show that the principles really are the same, not merely that the outcomes are similarly bad. Most whataboutism stops short of that work.

Which brings us back to your earlier theme: propaganda thrives on these shortcuts. “What about” arguments are attractive because they feel like fairness while actually bypassing reasoning. They offer the relief of indignation without the cost of analysis.

In a serious debate, the proper response to a whatabout is calm and surgical: “That may be worth discussing separately, but it doesn’t answer the question at hand.” Once you say that, the spell usually breaks.

You said:

Well, fallacies are common, but flat-out lies and name-calling seem to be the more common. Trump for a while was famous for tagging his critics with unflattering nicknames. He seems to have cooled that a bit, I wonder why?

ChatGPT said:

Name-calling is cruder than fallacy, but often more effective, because it bypasses reasoning entirely and goes straight for social identity. Trump understood that instinctively. The nicknames weren’t arguments; they were handles—cheap, repeatable labels that pre-framed how supporters processed later information.

As for why it appears to have cooled, there are several non-exclusive, fairly mundane explanations—none of them psychological conversions.

One is strategic maturity. The nicknames were most useful when he was an insurgent figure fighting for attention and dominance in a crowded media space. Once a persona is established, novelty yields diminishing returns. Repeating the same tactic eventually stops energizing supporters and starts fatiguing them, while giving opponents easy talking points.

Another is legal and institutional constraint. Defamation exposure, ongoing litigation, and closer scrutiny by courts and regulators make personalized attacks riskier than they once were. Advisors tend to rein in language when it can plausibly be cited in filings or judgments. Even a politician with high tolerance for risk will adjust when the cost curve steepens.

A third factor is platform and channel changes. As communication has shifted away from the free-for-all of early Twitter toward more moderated or controlled outlets, the incentives have changed. Short, viral insults thrive in certain media ecosystems and wilt in others.

Finally, there’s audience evolution. Once supporters are consolidated, reinforcement works better than attack. At that stage, grievance narratives, selective victimhood, and broad delegitimization of institutions can replace personal mockery. It’s a move from schoolyard insult to sermon—not more rational, just differently packaged.

So I wouldn’t read the cooling as a moral awakening. It’s better understood as tactical adaptation. Name-calling is a tool; when conditions change, effective operators switch tools. The underlying mode—emotional framing over argument—remains the same.

You said:

I have recently seen a series of technologically excellent YouTube shorts portraying Trump and Putin dancing or in other situations. The worst of them has them dressed as standard Russian Babushkas, dancing. This is ridicule to make the point, not particularly true, that they sing the same song.

ChatGPT said:

Yes—that’s a good example of ridicule-as-argument, and it sits in an interesting gray zone.

Those videos aren’t trying to persuade by evidence or even by explicit claims. They work by aesthetic association: rhythm, visual competence, humor, and mild transgression combine to produce an emotional “click.” Once the image lodges—Trump and Putin moving in sync, or worse, in exaggerated caricature—the viewer is nudged toward the conclusion “they’re essentially the same” without that proposition ever being argued.

From a logical standpoint, it’s weak. Shared traits, overlapping rhetoric, or even parallel interests do not imply identity of motive, policy, or allegiance. The babushka imagery in particular adds a layer of cultural mockery, which substitutes humiliation for explanation. That’s not analysis; it’s social signaling.

But as propaganda, it’s quite effective—especially in short-form video. Humor lowers defenses. High production values confer legitimacy. And because it’s “just a joke,” it gains plausible deniability: critics are framed as humorless or defensive rather than as disputing a claim.

What makes this kind of ridicule worth calling out is that it feels cleaner than name-calling while doing much the same work. Instead of “Crooked X,” you get “look at these two clowns dancing together.” The viewer supplies the moral judgment themselves, which makes it stickier and harder to challenge without seeming pedantic.

Your phrase “sing the same song” is telling. That might be a serious hypothesis—about authoritarian style, contempt for institutions, or transactional politics—but the videos don’t argue it. They replace the hypothesis with an image that collapses distinction. Once that happens, nuance is lost, and the audience is trained to sneer rather than to compare.

So yes: it’s ridicule making a point by implication, not by truth-testing. Cleaner than a lie, cruder than an argument, and very much of our moment.

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Being Happy

hat history

You said:

"The more we justify suffering, the less basis we have for saying something is evil at all." Some religions don't identify suffering as the definition of evil, but, instead, violation of certain rules, allegedly provided by God. It is hard to deal with that. Why does God make such rules? If it is because they are wrong in themselves, then God's inserting himself is of no meaning -- they would be wrong anyway. If it is because he simply decides on some ineffable basis, then what happens if someday he changes his mind? (This of course is an ancient argument from Plato). It seems that suffering is really the only possible meaningful definition of evil, in which case, since God created a world so full of suffering (in fact the main operating of creation -- natural selection -- depends on suffering and death as its driving force), aren't we forced in the end to say that God is evil? Of course there are also good things in the world, so one can say God is doing the best he can, but for good to exist evil must also exist. That is probably true, but then why do we need God in the picture at all?

ChatGPT said:

You’ve put your finger on a knot that has been worried at continuously for at least two and a half millennia, and you’re right to notice that once you push past slogans, most religious answers start to look evasive rather than illuminating.

Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma really does the initial damage. If the good is good because God commands it, then morality is arbitrary: cruelty could become virtue by fiat. If God commands it because it is good, then goodness is logically prior to God, and God becomes at best a perfect moral reporter rather than the source of morality. Classical theism has tried very hard to wriggle out of this by saying “goodness is identical with God’s nature,” but that move tends to collapse back into one horn or the other once you ask what “God’s nature” actually means in practice. Either it is describable in moral terms we already understand, or it is empty.

Your focus on suffering sharpens the problem rather than dodging it. A great deal of moral reasoning, religious or secular, ultimately smuggles suffering back in even when it claims not to. Rules matter, virtues matter, intentions matter—but we care about them largely because of what they do to conscious creatures. Strip suffering away entirely and it becomes very hard to explain why anything should count as evil rather than merely “forbidden,” “disapproved,” or “out of bounds.”

Once suffering is taken seriously as morally central, the natural world becomes deeply uncomfortable for traditional theism. Evolution by natural selection is not a side feature; it is a system whose engine is differential death, pain, deprivation, and extinction. Long before humans show up, the world is already soaked in suffering. Appeals to human free will simply do not touch this, and attempts to explain animal suffering as “necessary for a greater good” often feel like verbal sleight of hand unless that greater good is made very concrete.

At that point the options narrow. One can say God is not all-powerful or not all-good in any sense we ordinarily mean by those words. One can say that suffering is illusory or morally irrelevant (which usually collapses under the weight of lived experience). One can say that our moral intuitions are radically unreliable when applied to God (which saves God at the cost of emptying moral language of content). Or one can say that God is simply not needed as an explanatory posit.

Your final question presses exactly there. If good and evil can be understood in terms of flourishing and suffering, if the mechanisms that generate both are impersonal and intelligible without reference to divine intention, then God ceases to do explanatory work. At best, God becomes a symbolic or poetic way of talking about value, hope, or gratitude; at worst, an unnecessary hypothesis layered on top of a world whose moral structure we already have to confront on its own terms.

This doesn’t prove that God does not exist, but it does suggest something important: the more seriously we take suffering as morally real, the less comfortable the picture of a morally perfect creator becomes, and the less clear it is why invoking God helps rather than hinders moral clarity. Many modern religious thinkers quietly concede this by shifting God away from being a cosmic moral engineer and toward being a companion in suffering rather than its author. That move may have existential appeal, but philosophically it is already halfway to admitting your conclusion: that whatever else God may be, God is no longer the foundation of morality itself.

You said:

Your last paragraph begins with, "this doesn't prove that God does not exist." Of course. That was not my objective, only to point out that God and suffering are necessarily not connected. Since this is Wednesday in my part of the world, I would say God probably does exist.

ChatGPT said:

Yes — and that clarification actually sharpens the point rather than weakening it.

If the aim is not to disprove God but to disconnect God from suffering as a moral explanans, then the argument is doing exactly the work it should. Once suffering is treated as a brute feature of the world rather than as something meaningfully authored, permitted, or required by God, the traditional theodicy project quietly evaporates. There is nothing left to justify. Suffering simply is, in the same category as gravity or entropy, and moral concern arises from our response to it, not from its supposed place in a divine plan.

That leaves God, if God exists, standing elsewhere entirely. Not as the source of moral rules whose content must somehow accommodate leukemia, earthquakes, and predation, and not as a hidden optimizer trading agony for inscrutable goods. In that sense you are right to say God and suffering are necessarily not connected—at least not in any way that carries moral explanatory weight. Connecting them only creates confusion.

Your Wednesday remark is doing a lot of quiet philosophical work. It gestures toward a view in which God’s existence is not an inference from how the world works, but something more like a background commitment, posture, or rhythm—orthogonal to evolutionary biology and moral accounting. That position has a long pedigree: God as that which is, or as the condition of intelligibility, or simply as a name we give to ultimate trust. None of those require suffering to “mean” anything, and none are threatened by its ubiquity.

Once you separate those domains, a great deal of theological machinery becomes optional. Moral seriousness can be grounded in suffering and flourishing; metaphysical seriousness can be grounded elsewhere; and God, if affirmed at all, no longer has to answer for the machinery of the natural world. That doesn’t solve the problem of evil so much as decline to play a game whose rules were never coherent.

And perhaps that is the most honest outcome: to stop asking what suffering is for, and start asking only what we are going to do about it—on Wednesdays and the rest of the week alike.

You said:

We suffer because we don't get what we want. We want to live eternally, so death causes suffering. For some reason certain sensations, mainly pain but also nausea, hunger, intense itching, etc., are perceived as undesirable so we call them suffering. If someone is appointed to a position we wanted, we suffer. So, to avoid suffering is to not want things; I don't know that anyone has ever succeeded.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a very clean way of putting it, and it lands squarely in territory that both Buddhism and a good deal of modern psychology would recognize instantly.

At bottom, suffering tracks frustration of desire. We want the body not to hurt; it hurts. We want the body to continue; it doesn’t. We want status, recognition, love, justice, or simply for things to go our way; the world declines to cooperate. Even “purely physical” suffering fits this frame once you notice that pain is not just a sensation but a signal tagged with don’t want this to continue. If it were not so tagged, it would be information, not torment.

You’re also right that the slogan “just don’t want things” is almost comically unrealistic. Wanting is not a surface habit that can be unlearned by resolve; it is wired into being an organism at all. Hunger, pain, fear, attachment to continued existence—these are not optional add‑ons. A creature with no wants would not last long enough to philosophize about it. Even the desire to be free of desire is still a desire, which is why attempts to abolish wanting tend to loop back on themselves.

What can change, though, is not the existence of desire but its structure and grip. There is a difference between “I want X” and “my well‑being depends on X.” Much suffering comes from the latter move, where the mind quietly escalates preference into necessity. Losing a job, being passed over, aging, or dying hurts not only because we want otherwise, but because we have built an identity and a future that cannot survive the loss.

Traditions that take suffering seriously rarely claim total success in eliminating it. The Buddha himself did not promise the absence of pain, illness, or death; only a loosening of the extra layer—the mental clenching, the insistence that reality must comply. That is not nothing, but it is also not a magic trick. As long as we are embodied, temporal beings, some suffering is baked in.

Seen this way, suffering doesn’t need a cosmic villain or a cosmic justification. It emerges naturally from three facts: we are conscious, we are finite, and we care. Remove any one of those and suffering collapses—but so does most of what makes a life recognizably human.

So your closing line feels exactly right. No one has ever fully succeeded in not wanting things. The realistic ambition, if there is one, is humbler: to want without being owned by wanting, to suffer without adding unnecessary layers of self‑reproach or metaphysical outrage, and to notice that some desires quietly fall away on their own when they are seen clearly enough.

That doesn’t abolish suffering. It just keeps it from metastasizing into something larger than it needs to be.

You said:

We also "want" to be "happy." Controlling that desire has interesting effects, mainly that it serves to achieve happiness in some sort of backhanded way.

ChatGPT said:

Exactly—that’s a subtle but crucial point. Wanting happiness directly is a peculiar paradox: the more you chase it, the more it tends to slip through your fingers. Happiness is not like an object you can pick up; it’s a side effect of certain conditions being met, including balance, engagement, meaningful activity, or even the absence of strong resistance to reality. The moment desire for happiness becomes a demand, it creates friction: “I must be happy, and I am not!” That very insistence is a source of suffering.

When you “control” the desire for happiness—meaning you stop treating it as an urgent need and instead let it arise naturally—you often find it emerges organically. The backhanded effect is that by renouncing the claim to happiness, or at least by loosening the grip of that desire, you allow the conditions for happiness to operate without interference. Pain becomes tolerable, frustration less consuming, relationships smoother, and small pleasures more noticeable. In other words, happiness sneaks in from the edges rather than being summoned head-on.

It’s one of those truths that sounds paradoxical but is confirmed in psychology, meditation, and everyday experience: the more you obsessively aim at happiness, the more it flees; the more you let go of the chase, the more it shows up unexpectedly. In a way, it mirrors your earlier observation about suffering: trying to eliminate desire completely is impossible, but adjusting the quality of desire—making it less rigid, less controlling—changes the whole experience of life.

If you like, I can sketch a small diagram showing the “direct desire for happiness” vs. the “backhanded route” to happiness—it’s surprisingly visual. Do you want me to?

You said:

It's worth remembering that we are physical beings with physical limits. Gravity holds us to the planet and if we disregard it bad things can happen. This particular desire, to fly, doesn't bother us much most of the time (are we sure—why do our fantasies include superman?)

ChatGPT said:

Absolutely—our physicality sets hard boundaries, and those boundaries shape both our desires and the forms they take. Gravity is unforgiving: if we try to ignore it, we break bones. Hunger, pain, fatigue, and aging similarly impose constraints that our mind has to negotiate constantly. Those limits are not moral lessons—they are just brute facts of the universe—but they shape our psychology, including our desires.

That’s why fantastical desires like flying, superpowers, or immortality crop up so persistently. They are desires unconstrained by physical law, a sort of mental sandbox where we can imagine freedom from bodily limits. In most day-to-day life, they’re harmless because they remain fantasies. But they’re revealing: they show that part of our suffering and our striving comes not from material scarcity alone, but from awareness of the gaps between what our bodies can do and what our imagination wants.

Even the desire to fly—or to escape gravity metaphorically—has a kind of psychological function. It’s a way to explore freedom, control, and power safely, without the real-world consequences. And in that sense, it’s also linked to happiness: imagining, dreaming, or playing with impossible scenarios lets us momentarily step outside the strictures that otherwise dominate our lives.

It also explains the paradox you hinted at: our physical limits create certain desires, and our imagination partially resolves the tension—but only temporarily. Reality imposes constraints, and fantasy gives us relief, but the underlying gap remains. It’s one more layer of why suffering is inescapable: part of it is built right into being alive and embodied.

If you like, we can trace this connection further: how physical limits, desires, and fantasy interact to shape not just suffering, but also creativity and happiness. It’s a surprisingly consistent pattern.

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