According to Buddhist dogma, life is suffering. This is counter-intuitive, because some things feel good, right? Doesn’t pleasure feel good?
Yes. The following are both true:
- All fabrications in your umwelt have a positive suffering aspect.
- Adding fabrications to your umwelt can decrease your total suffering.
To understand how this is possible, I am going to use a well-understood example: sound masking.
Masking
I used to work in a noisy open office full of people talking. This was kafkaesque because I worked as a computer programmer. I had to focus. People talking and dogs barking—yep, there were untrained dogs that barked at every visitor—interrupted my focus and made it hard to think about the software I was writing.
To mitigate this problem, I put on music. When I listened to music, the office felt quieter, even though in absolute terms the volume of sound going into my ears had increased. Auditory masking isn’t unusual, and it isn’t limited to music. Adding the sounds of rain falling and fans blowing air can decrease the perceived volume of noise too.
The brain is a predictive machine. Mild static gets adapted to at the low level, and is predicted away before they hit the cortex. But the static was part of the original signal, and therefore masks some annoying sounds in a bottom-up process.
Top-down patterns reduce prediction error too. When you know how a song’s going to go, that can get predicted away too at the high level, in a top-down process.
How does this relate to pleasure? If unpredictable signals are going through your brain, then adding predictable signals can drown out some of the percieved surprise. This is perceived as positive pleasure relative to the reference point.