If I really think about it, I don't know why I posted this thread. I guess because I'm feeling absurd or weird thinking about this?

Yes, you're doing things because of the experience of feelings. But where do those feelings come from? You have no clue. They are just handed to you.

In fact, you're 100% slave to your feelings, because there's no rational reason to do anything else. The only control you have over it is to plan and think in a way to move towards even more pleasure.

To be honest, it appears to me that pain and pleasure are some universal forces in the universe, like gravity or electromagnetism. — bizso09

Yes you don't know why you feel what you feel just like you don't know why things move the way they do, general relativity and quantum mechanics and the standard models of cosmology and particle physics don't explain why things move the way they do, they only say how things move.

So you don't know why you feel but you know how you feel. And you can notice that different things have a different impact on how you feel, that different beliefs make you feel differently about the same thing, that different beliefs make you act in different ways which change what's around you and what you feel and what others feel, so you are not 100% slave to your feelings, because through thought and imagination you can change your beliefs and through that you can change how you feel and how others feel.

I would say desire and belief are universal forces rather than pain and pleasure, desires and beliefs have an impact on what you find painful and what you find pleasurable. Desire is what moves you, belief is what guides you, and they both impact how you feel. I like to see existence as an interaction between what you desire, what you believe, and what you experience, they all shape each other and define your life. But you are not a mere spectator to all that because you can change your beliefs through thought, which then changes everything.

The problem is we have incompatible beliefs and desires, some believe that climate change is man-made some don't, some believe it is urgent to do something about it some don't, some care about the future of the planet while some only care about the extent of their life and if they can have a good life by destroying the environment they feel good about doing so.

We don't all agree on what makes the climate change and to what extent, so we don't all agree on the severity of the problem nor on whether there is a problem at all, so a bunch of people don't believe there is a problem and a bunch believe that if there is a problem we will find out how to solve it in the future. Now what if it really is an urgent problem and we are driving ourselves into doom if we don't do anything drastic about it now? The problem then is, how can we all agree on whether it is an urgent problem that we ought to all tackle together now?

Many different models give many different predictions about future temperature rises, the climate of the planet is complex and we don't understand it that well, many claim to understand it but many of them disagree with each other, so we'll probably never agree on how severely the climate is going to warm in the near future. But there are some more direct observations that we can mostly all agree on, such as the extent and rate of deforestation throughout the world, the high amount of plastic in the oceans, the air pollution in cities, which all have a negative impact on our species and other species, and that's something we could change more easily.

But there are various forces at play who aren't motivated by living in harmony with other species in a sustainable ecosystem but by being "better than", the USA want to be better than China, China want to be better than the USA, various entities fear each other and will do anything to come out on top and the environment is to them a second thought that will be dealt with later once they have won. And this state of living in fear of the other is responsible for a whole bunch of problems on top of the destruction of the environment. So how do you convince the world to stop their mindless destructive race to be on top, how do you convince them to stop fearing each other and realize that they would have a better life if they all cared about each other instead of fearing each other?

To me the root problem again is fear, we fear others and so we will do anything to protect ourselves from each other, even if that includes driving ourselves to extinction. Fear is a useful tool to survive in a dangerous environment where predators can kill us, but on a global scale where we thrive fear is our worst enemy, natural selection could weed out those who can't stop fighting with each other but with modern technology they could kill us all before that. If we want to grow up as a species we need to overcome that fear, and if we don't then we will give up our seat to other species that better deserve it.

Yes, and I would add that an apparatus is a tool used to focus on and fixate a part of 'reality' in a certain way, so as to investigate it more closely in isolation to the rest, just like a concept.

They both allow us to uncover some order in the change that we previously didn't see, some regularities, relationships. But using them restricts us to thinking within the part of 'reality' that they fixate, so after we use them we must not forget to zoom out so as to see the whole again.

You satisfy your needs and wants because of how it makes you feel. Why did you make this thread? Because you felt the need to, you felt the want to do it. There is something that made you feel good about posting that thread and that's what made you do it.

You're saying we're all doing it and don't have a clue why, but sure we do, it's the experience of the feeling that makes us do it, when you don't experience the feeling it seems pointless, but when you experience the feeling you see precisely why you're doing it.

But that doesn't imply you are a total slave to your feelings like a robot is a slave to its inputs, you have some control over how you feel.

Fear isn't easy to overcome at all, it often creeps in insidious ways. If you try to help people by telling them how to act to overcome their fears, they might start fearing that if they don't act that way they will fear, and so they fear. If you have good intentions and believe you know the solution to overcome fear and force people to listen to you, they will feel oppressed and fear you rather than listen to you.

I think the first step is to know that we will succeed in overcoming fear. If we fear that we won't succeed then we fear. But there is a difference between knowing that you will succeed, and pretending that you will succeed while fearing that you won't. Often we fear but pretend not to to appear strong, and lie to ourselves, and that just causes suffering down the line.

It's already not easy to get into the state where you truly believe that you will succeed in overcoming fear. Then once you're there, overcoming your other fears is not just a matter of blindly believing that you have nothing to fear and being totally oblivious to your surroundings, maybe it would work but then you might die within 10 minutes. We don't just want to not fear, we want to live and not fear, live and not suffer.

My own error might be in trying to help others overcome their fears before I have succeeded in overcoming all of my fears myself. I have overcome a lot of fears but I still have a lingering fear of people, of being judged negatively and rejected. Even though I know the act of rejecting stems from a fear and a need to protect oneself, I haven't overcome my fear of rejection. Maybe that's what I need to find how to overcome to succeed.

If you want something practical, if you were next to me I would hold you in my arms and tell you that I'm here for you and I won't let you down, that you deserve love and that I want you to live.

so what youre basically saying is that, i gotta live if i wanna play guitar and fall in love, and if i dont want anything, suicide is the best option — Rhasta1

I'm not saying that, I say finding a point requires feeling a desire, and that it is meaningless to try to apply the concept of point to the whole of existence, I don't say that if you don't find a point you should kill yourself.

Why should you kill yourself if you don't find a point? Is life really so unbearable to you that you prefer not to live if you don't find a point? If you suffer then why don't you try to find what it is that makes you suffer? It's not the absence of point that makes you suffer, there's something at the source of that.

In another thread of mine I argue that fear and false beliefs are the source of most suffering. And I believe you hold false beliefs which you haven't uncovered that make you suffer.

Indeed what we desire shapes the world in many ways, through how we see the world, through how we feel, through what we do, which impacts what others see and feel and do. We separate 'reality' from 'imagination', but they both shape each other, they are a whole rather than two separate parts.

Some of the more vocal physicists do want to push the vision that all our existences can be summed up into neat mathematical equations, that it's just a matter of finding the correct ones. But their equations are fundamentally devoid of feeling and can never account for the experience of feeling, they are missing something fundamental. From being taught this vision many come to see their feelings as irrelevant, which as you say drives to despair and angst, instead of seeing what these equations say as irrelevant for their feelings.

We carry out science as if what is seen with the eyes gives us access to the fundamental stuff of existence and as if what we feel is a byproduct of that stuff, instead of noticing the fundamental character of what we feel in shaping everything. We focus on the seen and so construct a world where the seen is what matters rather than the felt, instead of focusing on the felt and constructing a world where the felt matters. And such a world could, I feel, be much more beautiful.

Oh, sure we do. It quickly becomes a site of ghastly decomposition. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out -- literally. — Bitter Crank

You see with your eyes what happens to others when their body dies. But what you see with your eyes is not all that is. If you look at me with your eyes you don't know what I feel or think, yet I feel and think, experience all kinds of things you don't see with your eyes. You're just assuming that everything that is stems from the world you construct out of what you see with your eyes, but that's a peculiar belief, which sadly has taken hold of many people, and led to a world where what matters is appearances and not what we feel.

Yes I understand. Are you satisfied with the answer "you live because you want to live"?

Everything you experience makes up your existence. Within that existence you have desires, things you want. It is wanting to not crash that gives rise to the point of turning on your headlights so that you don't crash. It is what you desire that gives rise to point, to meaning. You ask what is the point of your existence, so you are asking what desire you have that your existence helps you attain. If you do not desire anything then your existence has no point. If you desire anything then the fact you exist is what allows you to have that desire at all so that you may attain it.

You're focusing on the whole of existence and are asking what desire the whole allows you to attain, but everything you desire is part of the whole, and everything you may attain is part of the whole, so it is meaningful to speak of point and purpose within the whole but it is meaningless to speak of point for the whole, since there is nothing to put the whole in relation to, everything is part of the whole.

Then the question "what's the point of my whole existence?" is itself meaningless. With words you can construct sentences that are meaningless, that do not refer to anything you can experience. Another example of a meaningless question is "what is the smell of existence?". The concept of smell does not apply to the whole of existence just like the concept of point does not apply to the whole of existence, they apply to parts of existence.

We don't know what happens when our body dies, maybe our existence goes on in a different form or maybe it just stops. If it goes on the whole of existence would include what we experience after our body dies, and applying the concept of point to the whole of existence would still be meaningless. The whole of existence might be seen as a journey without a destination, but that doesn't make the journey not worth traveling, when you feel desires and follow them you find all the point you want.

Well, criminal justice and medicine and the declaration of human rights are all there to prevent suffering, yet there is immense suffering in the world, if only you look at how many people die from suicide or hunger or conflicts, so there's something fundamental we're not doing right. I'm not of the belief that all this is inevitable.

Life appeared pointless to Camus because he was depressed.

FIrst, you say "we all have a common ground," whereupon you immediately note that we dont even all have that in common, and then you go on to talk about suffering far more broadly in a way that again makes the idea of basing anything on suffering absurd. — Terrapin Station

We have it in common at first, it's intense suffering that drives you away from it.

"It seems also that we suffer when we interpret something as driving us away from what we desire" is a common ground too.

Then I put both together to conclude that we have in common to suffer when we interpret something as a threat to our survival

You say the idea of basing anything on suffering is absurd, so are you then saying the current judicial system and the declaration of human rights and medicine are absurd?

Additionally, the idea that no one should ever feel bad is flawed. Plenty of worthwhile things can only be had by feeling bad at some point in the process.

For example, working out at a gym. The end result of that is worthwhile. But it's going to make you feel bad, too, because you're going to be sore at times, you're not going to feel like going at times--you need to push yourself, etc. — Terrapin Station

It's not that no one should ever feel bad, but a bunch of people suffer a lot with nothing positive to make up for it. Working out can make you feel bad at times, but you wouldn't do it if it didn't make you feel good in any way, at some points you feel great.

You might say that beating someone up can be good for them, they will suffer temporarily but then it will make them stronger. But I'd say in most cases they just end up traumatized and living in fear, seeing other people as a source of suffering if that happens too much, become phobic or paranoid, maybe violent to others, causing suffering to others down the line.

There is the pain that pushes you forward and makes you feel good, and the suffering that leaves you behind and spreads suffering all around you.

I think there's a problem simply with hinging anything on suffering. Especially if we're defining it so broadly as "anything that makes someone feel bad." You can't formulate criminal justice, ethics, etc. on that. Any arbitrary thing could make any arbitrary person feel bad. — Terrapin Station

While different things make different people suffer, we do all seem to have a common ground, that of desiring to live (except in cases where someone suffers so much that they want to die). And it seems also that we suffer when we interpret something as driving us away from what we desire. For instance if you want to live and you believe you're about to die you are gonna be suffering, or if you want to feel accepted by the people around you and they reject you you're gonna be suffering.

So based on that common ground, you can formulate a system where people suffer when they perceive something as threatening their survival. In fact many of the laws of our current judicial system are based on that principle, for instance it is forbidden to steal because those who are stolen from suffer when that happens, and as a community we don't want to suffer so we have enacted laws to prevent that from happening. But then in a contradictory move we make suffer the one who has stolen. Maybe he came to steal because he felt his survival was threatened and so he suffered, but there was no law in place that prevented him from suffering, no one cared about his suffering, and then we make him suffer more.

We treat him as a criminal and make him suffer more, reinforcing in him the impression that others are the source of his suffering. And if he does it again we interpret it as meaning he is a bad person that needs to be locked away for a long time so as to prevent him from making others suffer. But no one cares about his own suffering which led him to making others suffer.

We currently have a system where some sufferings are taken into account and not others, and people are forced to adapt to that system. If they suffer the problem is with them and not with the system. This enforcement is a source of suffering in itself, perceived as a threat to survival for some. Now I believe if we were more attuned to what others feel rather than to blindly abiding to a system imposed onto us, we could resolve much more suffering than we presently can.

Our current judicial system is based on the idea that we can prevent some sufferings. And I'm saying that we can do much better than what we have now.

Ok, I'm not against such awareness, but I would also emphasize that we typically are not in a position to make anybody feel anything. — Jake

I would say that we are in a position to make someone feel something if we have come to an understanding of what they desire, believe, and how what they experience impacts what they feel. While we might not know to perfection what they experience, we can come to have a more accurate idea by interacting with them and seeing how they react to what we do.

Feelings and emotion, while they shouldn't be shunned, should always be treated with second thought. Misunderstanding our feelings is the primary reason we suffer, and not being honest to ourselves about the origin of such feelings. — Tzeentch

Yes blindly following our feelings can cause a lot of suffering. By taking into account our feelings and that of others I didn't mean to blindly follow them, but to not dismiss them as irrelevant, to not be blind to the sufferings of others. It is also not an easy question to know what others feel, for what we believe someone feels is not always what they feel, appearances do not always say much about the underlying feelings. That's why back and forth communication is important, to attempt to understand what each other feels as best as we can.

But what we feel is a lot dependent on what we believe. If I believe some thing will help me attain what I desire, I will feel good about that thing, while if I believe it will prevent me from attaining what I desire I will feel bad about that thing. And we have a lot of false beliefs, there are a lot of things we expect that turn out not to be what we expected, we act in ways that we believe will help us feel good while they end up making us suffer, because we didn't have an accurate idea of how the situation was going to evolve.

So it's both not easy to know what others feel and to know what is going to happen depending on what we do. But I think that with an accurate picture of what we and others feel and of how what we do impact what others feel, we can have a much better idea of how feelings evolve and how we can prevent people from suffering. Fundamental science only focuses on getting an accurate picture of what we see with the eyes and how that correlates with what we hear/smell/touch/taste/..., but if we treated what we feel as a fundamental constituent of the reality we are trying to model and then looked for correlations involving feeling, then potentially we could come up with an efficient way to prevent people from suffering, or at least a much more efficient way than what we have now.

True, but even if we have the power to not suffer, we still need to be aware of how what we do impact what others feel, otherwise this can become an excuse to make others endure anything and say "you're the one choosing to suffer, I can do whatever I please and don't have to take into account how you feel", and then we get wars and so on. By only focusing on changing our relationship with the situation rather than the situation itself, we might end up not suffering as we are driving our species into extinction, instead of changing course to live in peace while not suffering.

We don't have to suffer but we don't have to be complacent about what's going on around us. If I'm working on growing food for myself and the people I live with and someone comes up and beat me up and destroy all the food for no apparent reason, I can accept that as a fatality and not suffer about it, or I can suffer and tell to myself that there are bad people in the world and then live in fear, or I can suffer and try to eliminate the source of my suffering by beating him up, or I can suffer and try to understand what the hell it is that made him feel compelled to do that. If growing that food was a matter of life and death, not suffering in that situation would mean not caring about life.

I think that as long as we want to live and not want to die, we're gonna be suffering when faced with situations that threaten our survival. So we can choose to not care about life so as not to suffer, and probably drive ourselves to extinction, or we can choose to cherish life and attempt to resolve the situations that cause us suffering, by becoming aware of how we cause suffering to one another, by taking into account what others feel as well as what we feel.

Language is a limited tool to communicate, to show others what we experience, and to experience what others experience. How do I know whether the word 'car' elicits the same experience in you and in me? It probably doesn't. The same word makes different people feel different things, think about different things.

The ability to agree with each other tells us there is some consistency between our realities, but in some aspects our realities may be widely different, I may experience things that you don't and vice versa, so how do we communicate about it then?

There are things we seem to be able to communicate through looking into someone's eyes, through some behavior, that we can't communicate with words.

The way we use language rests on a bunch of implicit assumptions, yet we feel as if we can talk about the whole of reality by using words, but we're just fooling ourselves.

I don't agree with that widespread belief that life is pointless.

The very notion of point, of purpose, stems from wanting, from feeling a desire. Something has a point because you want it, when you don't want it you don't see a point. It's not that life is pointless, it's that it appears pointless to you when you don't feel desire.

Death does not make life pointless, unless your sole desire is to live forever. And even then you can escape that pointlessness by believing that death is a new beginning.

The quest for purpose is a quest for desire. When you don't feel love you ask what's the point of love? But when you feel love you see precisely the point.

We think that feelings are meaningless while it is feeling that gives meaning. Physicists want us to believe that we are a heap of elementary particles devoid of feeling, that feeling is an epiphenomenon, an accident that has no influence on anything, then you discard your feelings and you find life pointless, but see that they're wrong and focus on what you feel, and then you'll see the point.

If it has value to you then it has value to you. If it doesn't then it doesn't. There is nothing to prove. If you feel a flower has value to you, but someone else says that flower has no value to them, it still has value to you, and you don't have to prove it you just have to feel it.

I am eating this cake? Why?
Because I want to eat it. Why?
Because it tastes good and I want to eat what tastes good. Why?
Because it makes me feel good and I want to feel good. Why?
Because I like to feel good. Why?
I just like to feel good why do you keep asking why?

I do what I do because that's what I want, and so do you. Then you may ask why do we do what we want? But what we do is what we want to do on the moment, so there is no infinite regress and no "I don't know".

You don't just want what helps you survive, there is a bunch of stuff we do that don't help us survive. Why you want what you want amounts to the question of why are things the way they are and not different. You can't change what you want now and the way things are now, but you can change to some extent the way things are going to be.

I would say depression is the disconnect between you and your desires. When you don't feel depressed you have desires, goals you strive for. Feeling these desires is what gives meaning to the goals that stem from them, you have these goals because you want to attain them. But when you feel depressed you don't see the meaning in these goals anymore, you have stopped feeling the desires that gave them meaning, that gave rise to the very existence of these goals, you don't feel joy in moving towards them anymore, you aren't driven to them anymore.

But when you are depressed you suffer, you don't have a total lack of desire, a total lack of desire would be death, there is still something you want, you want to be where you are not, you want to get out of the state you are in, you want to stop feeling like you do, but you don't know how to, you don't find a way. You suffer, and all other goals are meaningless unless you can fix this suffering. You suffer because you don't know how to get where you want to be, because you don't know where that is. All you know is that it isn't where you are.

Getting out of depression is finding where you want to be and how to get there. 'There' is not simply a location in space, the world is not just what is seen with the eyes, it is more than that. Then if I had to give an opposite to depression I would say it is being where you want to be. And that depression is being disconnected from where you want to be.

Deep down any rational justification is based on a feeling. Whatever rationality we come up with to justify acting in some way to reach a goal, that goal itself came from a feeling, a desire. If the formulation of the goal was attained rationally then that goal is a rational step in order to reach an end goal which itself stemmed from a feeling.

So any group consensus on how we should act was deep down formed by a feeling and not by reason alone. Our deep desires do not have any rational justification, they just are. You can't rationally challenge someone's will to live. There are limits to reason.

What you can challenge is whether a group consensus is an efficient way to reach a goal stated by the group. But then both the group and you are faced with the limit of induction, how do you know the world isn't going to suddenly disappear the next second? How do you know the 'laws' of the universe aren't suddenly going to stop working the next second? So there's always some belief in any such consensus, that you can always rationally attack, but that's not always productive neither for the group nor for you.

Thanks for the reply. I would say depression and overpopulation are both the product of fear, because of fear we only care about ourselves and not others, we don't think about our impact on others and on the world but solely focus on getting what we want. So in a sense most of us act like parasites.

Fear helps us survive, helps us avoid situations that would threaten our survival, but it can also be our downfall. A society bound on fear leads us to suck the life out of our environment to protect ourselves from one another. We spend so much effort on protecting ourselves from one another, on putting up barriers between each other, rather than spending all this effort in helping each other which would be much more effective. As you say we struggle to survive while we could survive much more effortlessly if we were focused on others and not just on ourselves.

Money is the epitome of fear. When we do something for someone to get money in exchange, what we are effectively doing is helping someone and fearing he won't return the favor, so we force him to return the favor through money. Through money we don't help others because we want to help them, we help others to force them to help us back. It's a system based on fear and oppression, and since most of our relationships in society go through money that fear and oppression reflects on the whole of society and the whole of our lives.

Many people through history were onto something when they said the solution is to love one another. Fear leads us to dismiss love as something cheesy, but it's much more profound than it appears.

I think the very label of evil is responsible in itself for a lot of suffering. Apposing that label to someone is used to justify doing the worst atrocities to them.

If someone caused a lot of suffering to others, making him suffer only adds more suffering. Obviously we want to prevent him from creating more suffering, but we don't try to understand why is it that he came to do these things. We label as 'monster' or 'evil' as if to say, it can't be understood, it must be eliminated, it is not like us.

But what if he was like us? What if his motivations were like ours, attempting to suffer less, the only difference being in his faulty beliefs about how to achieve it?

From his appearance people say he was simply insane, but he said he was raped as a boy and that playing insane was his way to repel his aggressors so as not to suffer. Those we label as 'evil' are beings who feel, who suffer and who want to avoid suffering in their own way. And then they cause suffering. Suffering creates suffering in a vicious circle.

If you read Mein Kampf, in the first few dozen pages you can see Hitler as an intelligent and sensitive man who wanted others to be happy, who wanted to reduce the enormous suffering that he was seeing around him. But then in looking for the source of this suffering he came to the faulty conclusion that the source was certain people who he came to see as evil, 'devils incarnate', 'monsters', who would bring about the extinction of human civilisation, and that he had to do everything in his power to fight them.

His immense suffering and the suffering he saw around him led him to see some people as 'evil', which justified doing the worst atrocities to them for in his view he was saving human civilisation, doing 'good'. Suffering creates suffering, labeling as evil ends up creating more suffering, the only way to stop that vicious circle is to see those we label as evil as beings who suffer immensely, and to attempt to understand them, what is it they see and what led them to their faulty beliefs. Then you don't change these false beliefs with more suffering but with love.

So to answer this question more directly:

It seems philosophers can serve a useful function by exploring the boundaries of the group consensus, because what is widely assumed to be true is not always so, and correcting such mistakes seems constructive where possible.

What are the limits of such a process? When should a potentially incorrect widely shared assumption be challenged, and when should it be left alone? — Jake

To me we shouldn't prevent any assumption from being challenged. You can't tell whether an assumption is incorrect unless you challenge it, and what if the solutions to problems we can't solve now were to be found in the assumptions we haven't challenged?

Ok, fair enough, but....

About an hour after I get what I want...

I'll start wanting something more. A new basis for comparison will be created, but the same old process will remain in tact. — Jake

Yes, probably, but it isn't wanting something that causes suffering, it is wanting something and believing you can't have it.

In the long text in the link I've posted at one point I argue that it is desire that gives meaning, having something you want and believing you can attain it. If you didn't want anything you wouldn't do anything, you wouldn't live. I argue also that change is the root of existence, for the absence of change is the absence of existence. So it doesn't have to be a problem to always want something, it is through wanting that we live and exist, experience all kinds of things. Many yearn for constancy, because they suffer or fear often and would like to feel good and safe once and for all, but absolute constancy is death. It's nice to have some constancy though, to be able to anticipate what's next to some extent.

But change doesn't have to be suffering, it is through change that we can experience all the beauty in the world, the amazing that makes life worth living when you see and feel it. But there is a whole bunch of suffering in the world too and that's what I'm working on solving.

Through thinking, I discovered that I am very happy on a sunny day in the woods, which is great, but...

Now I use those awesome beautiful peaceful days in the woods filled with glorious silence as a basis of comparison in evaluating my experience of the suburban neighborhood where I live, which I'm finding increasingly problematic.

We are the richest people ever to walk the Earth, thanks to thinking. And we're dissatisfied because we're comparing that to something even better, thanks to thinking. We have everything, and nothing, thanks to thinking. — Jake

Yes thinking is responsible for some suffering. But is it merely the comparison between the sunny day in the woods and your suburban neighborhood that makes you suffer, or is it the belief that you can't escape this suburban neighborhood to experience on a regular basis these beautiful days in the woods filled with silence?

I would say that it isn't the act of thinking that's responsible for this suffering, but the belief that you can't change how things are, that you can't get what you want, and I would argue that's a false belief. Maybe you believe that you can't escape this suburban neighborhood, and that belief is based on a bunch of other beliefs, but some of them are false and you haven't realized it yet.

Fear and false beliefs are a symptom of the underlying condition, the divisive nature of thought. If suffering could be remedied by editing our beliefs we would have long ago stumbled upon the correct beliefs and would now be living in a utopia.

The human condition arises out of the nature of what we're made of psychologically, thought, and everything else is a symptom. — Jake

I didn't say editing our beliefs was an easy process, it isn't precisely because beliefs determine how we think, what we do and how we feel. When you hold a false belief you don't see it is false. There are beliefs you hold you aren't aware of, that you may later on realize that you hold. It's not just a matter of picking new beliefs that make you feel good, even if they make you feel good that doesn't mean they won't hurt others through how they make you act, and that how you act won't end up making others hurt you through their own beliefs. It's really not easy at all.

You're saying suffering stems from the nature of thought itself, I would say that yes the act of thinking is responsible in itself for a lot of suffering, but I don't see it as the underlying cause, on the contrary through thinking you can come to make some sufferings disappear. We have desires, which implies to be somewhere we aren't, to experience things we are not experiencing, which requires the ability to differentiate between some experiences and others, and I wouldn't say there is thought involved in that, it's just something we do, and some sufferings stem from not experiencing what we desire, so I would say not all suffering stems from thought.

Not that it's good for those 300 million people, but if that number is correct, then less than 5% of people in the world suffer from depression. I would have actually guessed the number was higher than that. "95% of the people in the world do not suffer from depression" sounds like we're doing pretty good. — Terrapin Station

I haven't looked at how they came up with that figure, but I would say that probably many more people than that feel like shit on a regular basis. In any case if you have ever suffered from depression you know how terrible that is, so even if it was just a few people it would be something to address, and if it is 300 million people well that's a huge lot of suffering. The one suicide every 40 seconds isn't too good either, to get into the position of wanting to kill yourself and actually carrying it through, you have to be in a pretty intense state of despair and suffering.

In any event, are there any psych or other medical professionals who believe that depression is caused by particular beliefs rather than being a brain structural/electro-chemical issue that's not correlated to particular beliefs a la religious, political, philosophical, scienctific etc. views the individual might hold? — Terrapin Station

I think if you really don't want to die and you believe that you're about to die, you're going to be suffering, even if that's a false belief, and that the moment you realize you actually aren't about to die you would quickly feel much better. The beliefs we hold are correlated with how we feel. Many psychiatrists and medical professionals ascribe to the mainstream view that mental sufferings are due to disorders within the brain of the individual, but at this point I like to take the example of an encaged wild animal: is it stressed and does it suffer because it has a mental disorder, or because it is somewhere it doesn't want to be, because it wants to be somewhere it is not and doesn't know how to get out of its predicament? They look for disorders within the individual as if to say that their sufferings have nothing to do with the environment they are subjected to, but I would argue that a lot of our sufferings stem from our environment interacting with our desires and beliefs rather than simply from within ourselves. We try to find an issue within the brain but maybe that's not where the root issue lies.

The real problem is people do not want to lead a simple, peaceful life. Perhaps it is ambition, greed, ignorance, but in the end it's a choice. How many people would like to leave all they have behind in order to live happy and in harmony? Very few. Then there's those, who have put up the bars and walls of their own prison, who would like to, but think they can't.

In truth, most do not want to leave the comfort and luxury behind, and they will be unhappy as a consequence. They want careers, expensive cars and clothing, a big house, and preferably a little bit bigger and better than the neighbors. — Tzeentch

To me, the desire for luxury stems from the desire of having power over others, and the desire for power stems from an underlying fear, their fear of what will happen to them if they don't have this power over others. They see others as a threat, they fear them, and how they cope is by trying to be 'better than' through some standard, so as to feel better, more safe. But deep down these people isolated inside their ivory tower aren't happier, they still carry with them their fears at every moment.

And how do we changes someone who really doesn't want to change? — Tzeentch

If they don't want to change because they fear, then by helping them overcoming their fears, rather than forcing them to be something else. Feeling the need to force others stems from fear too, the fear not to succeed without forcing them. We won't change things by telling people how to be and what to do, but by eliciting in them the desire to change. To say this isn't possible would be a belief, and my belief is that it is possible.