The Friction of Survival: Deconstructing the Myth of Cosmic Purpose
Why is there suffering in the world? Because there is. We don't like that answer; it sounds dismissive and arrogant. But what matters is not how the question is answered, but what it communicates to us.
"Why is there suffering? Because there is" is not a causal explanation. The He is rejecting a particular kind of explanation. The respondent is rejecting the expectation that suffering must have a purpose. There are really three different questions that people confuse. The first is What causes suffering? This is a scientific question. Pain is caused by tissue damage, prediction errors, social loss, threats to homeostasis, chronic stress, entropy, evolutionary trade-offs, and so on. The second is Why did evolution produce organisms that suffer? This is an evolutionary question. Because suffering functions as a regulatory signal that helps organisms survive, learn, and avoid threats. The third is What is the ultimate purpose or meaning of suffering? This is the question the respondent is rejecting.
His answer is There isn't one. So when he says, "Because there is." what he really means is Stop asking for a cosmic purpose behind suffering. There isn't one. That is actually a very Spinozist move. Spinoza says that people imagine final causes everywhere because they project their own purposive thinking onto Nature. They ask, "What is suffering for?" Nature answers nothing, because Nature has no intentions. The answer is attacking teleology, not explaining suffering.
But we are not satisfied with , "Because there is." So we, as clever childen, must invent a better question. Let ask, "Yes, but why does suffering exist in organisms?" And here you have been developing a much richer answer because our respondent doesn't want us to think he's arrogant or worse, stupid Suffering exists because living systems must resist entropy. To resist entropy they must regulate homeostasis. To regulate homeostasis they need signals indicating deviations from viable states. Those signals are experienced as hunger, thirst, pain, anxiety, grief, loneliness, fear, and so on.
So, now our answer is There is suffering in us because life itself is a process of continuously resisting entropy through homeostatic regulation, and suffering is one of the informational signals that make that regulation possible. That is a causal explanation.
We can the add something like this: humans suffer more than many animals because they possess predictive consciousness. They not only experience pain. They anticipate future pain, imagine death, compare reality with expectations, construct narratives. That creates a second layer of suffering. So the respondent's answer is not arogant incomplete. He successfully dismantles the religious question, "What divine purpose does suffering serve?" But he never replaces it with a scientific account of why suffering evolved. But we studied sufferin and now we know that suffering has no cosmic purpose. But it does have biological causes and evolutionary functions. We suffer not because the universe is teaching us a lesson, but because living systems require regulatory signals to remain alive while resisting entropy. Humans suffer additionally because our predictive brains generate expectations that reality continually violates.
That is a much stronger answer than "because there is" , isn't it?
We do not suffer because the universe is teaching us a hidden lesson, but because our predictive brains mistake the raw regulatory signals of our biological fight against entropy for a cosmic story that was never written.
