In this chapter and the next, I will present various ideas on how to reduce suffering in a complex intelligent system acting in a complex world—such as humans. I derive various ways how information-processing should be changed, i.e. how the agents should be reprogrammed, based on the theory presented in this book. Since the systems in question, such as our brain, have largely learned their function from input data, an important part of such reprogramming is retraining the learning system by inputting new data into it.
The methods discussed here are not original at all: almost all come from Buddhist and Stoic philosophy or related systems. The goal here is to interpret them from a computational AI perspective, using the theory developed in this book. Thus, we gain more understanding on how they work, why they work, and what could be done to improve them.
The main starting point in this chapter is the frustration equation we just encountered (🡭). We can try to reduce suffering by changing any of the terms on the right-hand side of the equation, since that inevitably implies that the frustration on the left-hand side of the equation is reduced. We can see from the equation that the obtained reward should be increased, because it has a negative sign in the difference computed. In contrast, all the other terms on the right-hand side should be decreased because their contribution to frustration is positive.
Maximizing the obtained reward is really a very conventional way to try to reduce suffering, based on the wide-spread view that happiness comes from having achieved all your goals, and having got what you wanted.1 However, that is difficult for reasons which are rather obvious. Many resources are limited: not everybody can have the best cars, the best wines, and the best sex partners. There is fierce competition over such resources, and not everybody can win. Besides, expectations are adapted to the obtained level of rewards, so what used to feel good no longer brings happiness after a while, as discussed in Chapter 5 (🡭).
So, instead, we attempt here to reduce all the terms other than obtained reward in the frustration equation. In this chapter, we consider how it is possible to reduce two of those terms: the (perception of) expected reward, and the certainty attributed to the perception of reward loss. (The next chapter will consider reducing the remaining terms, as well as some further methods.) Such reduction also includes reducing self-needs as a special case, thus complementing the frustration equation by the logic of the flowchart in Fig. 13.1. Ultimately, such practices lead to reducing all desires and aversions. This approach may be rather unusual in the context of modern Western psychology and philosophy, but it is thoroughly standard in Buddhist and Stoic philosophy.
Let us first look at the term “perception of difference of expected and obtained reward”, i.e. perception of reward loss, in the frustration equation. This should be made as small as possible, ideally zero or even negative. As already mentioned, the most conventional way to reduce it would be to try to increase actually obtained rewards, but that is very difficult. So, we need to do something more clever. A well-known idea in Buddhist and Stoic philosophy is to lower your expectations—at least in the colloquial sense of the word. Then, your reward loss should be smaller, and will perhaps vanish altogether.
The expected reward is essentially a product of two things: the probability you assign to obtaining the reward, and the actual amount of the reward if it is obtained (considering the basic case where the amount of reward, if obtained, is fixed). Thus, reducing the expectation of a reward can be accomplished by either reducing the probability the agent assigns to it, or the value it sees in the reward. This can be compared to a lottery. Suppose your initial chance of winning a Porsche is 1%. Obviously, the lottery would be made less attractive if the probability of winning is lowered to 0.01%; it would also be less attractive if you realized that the Porsche is second-hand and not so cool after all. In both cases, your expected reward is reduced.
Most importantly, rewards in the real world are always a bit subjective, and so are the probabilities we assign to them. A new Porsche may feel like a great reward to one person, while it may matter very little to another; this is why we have to talk about perceived reward. People will also have very different guesses of the probability of winning it. Since these quantities are subjective, it is possible to change our estimates of them by changing our beliefs, perceptions, and associations, even if the actual physical reality remains unchanged.2
A key goal of Buddhist and Stoic systems is exactly such re-evaluation of the probabilities and rewards. To accomplish this, Buddhist philosophy talks about the “three characteristics of existence”, which are impermanence, no-self, and unsatisfactoriness. They map roughly to our concepts of uncertainty, uncontrollability, and unsatisfactoriness we discussed in the preceding chapter.3 Each of these characteristics gives a reason why the rewards are actually lower than what they would otherwise be, or what they appear to be, as will be explained next.
Uncontrollability, discussed in Chapter 11, is a key concept here. The level of controllability is clearly related to the level of expected reward. If you think the world can be controlled, you will expect to achieve high rewards, because you think you are able to take courses of action that give you the very highest rewards, and you are reasonably certain that you can achieve them. In contrast, if you think the world is uncontrollable, you assign a low probability to achieving any rewards, and the higher rewards may seem to be completely out of your reach. Then, your expectation of reward is smaller, and you are less likely to suffer from a reward loss, i.e. frustration. This is how considering the world to be uncontrollable reduces suffering.
To transform this logic into a practical method for reducing suffering, the trick is to acknowledge the fact that you have little control and there can never be very much control, and firmly believe in that fact. We saw earlier how the Stoic philosopher Epictetus emphasizes how little we can control (🡭). He continues by explaining that if we are mistaken about this point, suffering is inevitable:4
The things in our control are by nature free, unrestrained, unhindered; but those not in our control are weak, slavish, restrained, belonging to others. Remember, then, that if you suppose that things which are slavish by nature are also free, and that what belongs to others is your own, then you will be hindered. You will lament, you will be disturbed, and you will find fault both with gods and men.
Likewise in Buddhist philosophy, the original form of the no-self philosophy says that nothing is part of me, which is a way of saying that nothing can be controlled, as we saw in Chapter 11. Understanding this is crucial according to the Buddha:5
All [mental phenomena], whether past, future or present, internal or external, gross or fine, inferior or superior, far or near, should be seen with one’s own knowledge, as they truly are, thus: ’This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.’ (...) [S]eeing thus, [the disciple] grows wearied of form, wearied of feeling, wearied of perception, wearied of volitional formation, wearied of consciousness. Being wearied, he becomes passion-free (...), he is emancipated [from processes leading to suffering].
Here, I interpret “growing wearied” as signifying that the reward expectations are lowered, or little enjoyment anticipated. Thus, the point is that recognizing uncontrollability, or inexistence of self, reduces expectations of reward, which reduces suffering.
Buddhist philosophy emphasizes the importance of understanding “causality”. Such causality means that events in the world just follow from each other based on natural laws, for example those depicted in Figure 13.2. This thinking minimizes the importance of free will and the control that the agent can have over the world; it is related to what is called determinism in Western philosophy. I would think, therefore, that the Buddhist emphasis on what they call causality is just another viewpoint on uncontrollability; seeing such causality is one way of realizing that the world is uncontrollable. Stoic philosophers advocated the study of the natural sciences (which they simply called “physics”), with a similar goal.6 Such a philosophy could be criticized on the grounds that it might lead to total inaction; this point will be discussed at the end of this chapter.
Uncontrollability is closely related to the concept of uncertainty. Uncertainty feeds into uncontrollability: if the workings of the different objects in the world are uncertain, even quite random, the world cannot be very well controlled. Likewise, uncontrollability often leads to uncertainty of whether rewards will be obtained. So, in some sense, these are two sides of the same coin.
Buddhist philosophy focuses on the related concept of impermanence which can be largely seen as a special case of uncertainty. Impermanence means that the world is constantly changing, and usually in unpredictable ways.7 For example, any object that you may possess can break or get lost. Any enjoyment that you get is likely to be fleeting. In fact, even your feelings and opinions are impermanent: today you like one thing, but perhaps tomorrow you’re already bored with it and want something else; what you consider important today may have no significance to you next month. Obviously, impermanence thus interpreted leads to uncertainty.8
Going back to our frustration equation, the consequences of uncertainty are also very similar to the consequences of uncontrollability. The central point is that any future rewards are uncertain, i.e. unpredictable. Rewards and the circumstances leading to rewards can change, so an agent cannot really know whether it will get any reward after executing its plan. Thus, the agent should lower the probability it assigns to any future reward. If the agent acknowledges such uncertainty of the world, its expectations regarding rewards will be lowered, just like in the case of uncontrollability. Consequently, frustration will be reduced. (Later, I will talk about perceptual uncertainty, which has a different effect on suffering.)
It is quite paradoxical that Buddhist practice, which turns your attention to uncertainty and uncontrollability, tends to reduce stress and suffering. In Chapter 6 we saw that uncertainty and uncontrollability are usually thought to lead to more stress, not less. I think the paradox has a lot to do with one’s attitude to uncertainty and uncontrollability. Somehow Buddhist philosophy seems to result in a particularly appropriate attitude, related to their acceptance which will be considered in more detail in the next chapter.9
In Buddhist philosophy, the two characteristics of impermanence and no-self (roughly, uncertainty and uncontrollability) imply a third characteristic: unsatisfactoriness, which has many meanings and interpretations. On the one hand, it expresses the idea that whatever we try to achieve, we often fail due to uncontrollability and uncertainty. In this sense, it simply recapitulates the aforementioned properties. On the other hand, unsatisfactoriness can be seen as an extremely general characteristic, which is, in Buddhist philosophy, assumed to penetrate all phenomena and existence. In fact, in the original Indian texts, the single word dukkha is used to express such unsatisfactoriness as well as suffering, i.e. this very thing we are trying to reduce. One could express the relation between these two meanings by saying that all phenomena are unsatisfactory in the sense that they can produce suffering, one way or another.10
In Buddhist philosophy, it is recommended to acknowledge the unsatisfactoriness of all phenomena. This can be justified using our frustration equation: if the agent is strongly convinced about the unsafisfactoriness of all phenomena, its expectation of reward will be very low, and thus reward loss will be small and rarely even occurs. Thus, here we are talking about a very general, if a bit vague, strategy for lowering the expectations of rewards. Even in cases where it is not quite obvious to see how uncertainty or uncontrollability apply—perhaps you can get chocolate quite easily and there is little uncertainty about that—it is still possible to think that the phenomena concerned are unsatisfactory, for example, because there are various negative side effects hidden in them (more on this below).
As a training method of great generality, the Stoics suggested reviewing any plan of future action with the view of anticipating what could go wrong and how the plan will not lead to great enjoyment after all. Epictetus gives a famous example of going to a Roman bath:11
If you are going to bathe, picture to yourself the things which usually happen in the bath: some people splash the water, some push, some use abusive language, and others steal.
With this mindset, you will not expect much enjoyment, i.e., reward, and you will not be disappointed. Such a scenario could be analysed in terms of uncontrollability and unsatisfactoriness as well, but unsatisfactoriness may be a more natural viewpoint.12
In Chapter 13, we defined unsatisfactoriness in a more specific way. We complemented the properties of uncontrollability and uncertainty by two phenomena grouped under the title of “unsatisfactoriness”. First, we had insatiability: Chapter 5 discussed at length the idea that an intelligent system which is programmed to maximize reward will never be satiated or satisfied, by the very construction of the system. It will never find that it has had enough; in a word, the system is infinitely greedy. This points at one reason why simply getting a lot of rewards will not remove reward loss in a sufficiently intelligent agent: in the long run, getting more reward will increase the expectation of rewards. The second aspect of unsatisfactoriness in our framework was evolutionary obsessions (Chapter 5). Even the very goals pursued and the rewards obtained can be questioned. Perhaps the evolutionary system gives you a certain reward for drinking a sugary drink. But we know very well that such a reward is misleading: The drink is not good for you when all its effects are considered in the long run. In these two senses, rewards are often deeply unsatisfactory.
From this viewpoint of unsatisfactoriness, even if we could totally control the world and everything were certain, the result of our strivings would not be that great anyway because it would not produce a lasting satisfaction or pleasure. While uncertainty and uncontrollability are more about the probability of getting various kinds of rewards, unsatisfactoriness (both in our sense and the Buddhist sense) is really about the worth of the rewarding objects or events themselves, once the agent has obtained them. Even the very best chocolate, if you eat it every day, will ultimately leave you indifferent, and may ruin your health in the long run.
This latter logic of unsatisfactoriness actually works a bit outside of the frustration equation because it is not that the rewards or their probabilities (or any other terms in that equation) are changed: it is rather understood that even if the rewards are obtained, there are unpleasant side effects. The frustration equation is in a sense short-sighted: it only considers the direct, immediate effects of rewards or their simulation. In contrast, the ideas of insatiability and evolutionary obsessions bring a longer time scale into the picture, pointing out that obtaining rewards now may actually increase frustration and suffering in the long run. In particular, this logic of unsatisfactoriness reduces desires, so there is less opportunity for any frustration to arise, as will be considered in detail later in this chapter.
It may be easy to see how frustration is reduced by lowering any expectations of enjoyment, say when going to a public bath with Epictetus. However, it may be more difficult to see why the aforementioned attitudes would also reduce frustration due to aversion.
Let us consider aversion based on expecting that a bad thing is likely to happen, such as your neighbours starting a noisy renovation. Now, taking account of uncontrollability means you cannot really avoid the bad thing, at least not with any certainty. This means that the probability of the bad thing happening is larger than what you might have initially thought—your flat will be noisy for sure. Thus the expected reward is less than what you would have thought without taking uncontrollability into account. More precisely, it is more negative, since the probability of a negative reward is larger. Thus, frustration is reduced by reducing the expectation of reward by making the negative expectation even more negative.13
Likewise, thinking in terms of unsatisfactoriness (in the Buddhist sense) means thinking that the bad thing is likely to be really bad—the noise is probably going to be something quite unbelievable. Again, this reduces expected reward in the sense of making it even more negative, and what actually happens is less likely to give you a negative surprise and frustration. Thus, admitting both of those two characteristics, uncontrollability and unsatisfactoriness, lead to reduction of frustration.
A classical Buddhist account would further point out that impermanence means that the object of aversion will eventually disappear, which makes at least the feeling of aversion weaker. Clearly, it will give me some comfort knowing that the noise will not be there forever. This brings the property of uncertainty, of which impermanence is a special case, into the framework of frustration, although in a bit indirect way.14
Another term in the frustration equation that we can reduce is the certainty attributed to the perception. As we saw in Chapter 10, perception is uncertain. To recapitulate the main ideas: perception is based on limited data, thus necessitating unconscious inference, which may not always be much better than guessing. Perception is also subjective: different people can have different priors and thus different perceptions. Subjectivity is made even more serious by the strong selection of incoming information by attentional mechanisms. Since the computational capacity is always fundamentally limited, and the world is awesomely complex, it is not possible to build a perceptual system that always makes correct inferences, let alone one that perceives the “true” reality. This should imply a fundamentally skeptical attitude towards any perception: we should not make too strong conclusions based on sensory input.
Thus, we see that uncertainty has two different aspects. There is the objective unpredictability of the world: surprising and unexpected things can happen, the world is to some extent random—this is the kind of uncertainty we focused on earlier in this chapter when talking about impermanence. But here, we focus on the uncertainty in our perceptions and beliefs of the world, which I call here perceptual uncertainty. The point is that we don’t know with any great certainty what the state of the world is, since we have neither enough data nor enough computation to perceive it properly.15 Such perceptual uncertainty increases the effects of unpredictability and uncertainty that we saw earlier, since it makes the world even more unpredictable for the agent.
There is also a completely new aspect to perceptual uncertainty: it is relevant when evaluating the reward loss or frustration. After the agent has completed an action sequence in view of getting reward, it tries to evaluate the reward loss. Now, if the agent is wise enough, it will understand that it cannot know with certainty how much reward it got. A drink may have tasted good, but you don’t know if it was actually good for you. That is why in the definition of reward loss, we should really be talking about perceptions of rewards instead of any objective quantities; this is precisely what is done in the frustration equation.16 Since the reward loss is uncertain, any conclusion drawn from it should not be given too much weight, according to the basic principles of Bayesian inference.17 Many philosophers over the centuries have pointed out that what first appears to be a negative outcome may even turn out to be positive, and vice versa.18 Furthermore, since thoughts are derived from perceptions, the agent should be skeptical towards its own thoughts as well.
If the agent is programmed to take account of the fact that all its perceptions are uncertain, it would likely have weaker reward loss signals. Consider an agent that attempts to get some chocolate. Suppose that after executing a plan, the agent is able to eat some, but its program “understands” that it does not really perceive the amount of chocolate with any certainty; perhaps because it swallows all of it immediately without really taking a look. Intuitively, it does not then make a lot of sense to send a strong reward loss signal. Such a signal would be too much guesswork and would not provide a proper basis for learning better behaviour. In other words, since the system does not know for sure if there is frustration and how much, it should not send a strong frustration signal.19 Thus, taking account of the uncertainty of the perception of reward would reduce suffering.20
The perceptual kind of uncertainty has a central role in the later Mahayana school of Buddhism. While the “three characteristics” (impermanence, no-self, unsatisfactoriness) form the core of the Buddha’s original philosophy, later Buddhist philosophers found them somewhat simplistic. The emphasis shifted to the properties and limitations of perception and cognition, as opposed to characterizing the outer world. The inaccuracy of perceptions and beliefs became essential as part of the multifaceted concept of “emptiness”, widely used in Mahayana Buddhism—although rarely by the Buddha himself.21
Emptiness has many meanings. In the framework of this book, we can consider emptiness as an umbrella concept encompassing several of the ideas related to information-processing that we have seen in this book, in particular uncertainty, fuzziness, subjectivity, and contextuality. To summarize it in a single word well-known in Western thinking, we could call it “relativity”.22 What the different aspects of emptiness have in common is that fully appreciating them should make us take the contents of our minds less seriously.
In particular, concepts and categories are considered fundamentally flawed in Mahayana philosophy. It proposes that the objects in the world do not really exist as separate entities, but are just part of a complex flux of perceptions happening in our consciousness. In this sense, there are really no separate objects or crisp categories in the world; they are purely constructions of the mind. Zen texts use the parable of confusing the moon and the finger that is pointing at the moon. Here, I would interpret this in the sense that the finger is a category, perhaps expressed by a word, that merely points at a phenomenon in the real world, that is, the moon. Ceasing to think in terms of categories and concepts, based on a recognition of emptiness, is something that generalizes the idea of reducing the certainty attributed to perception, or in fact, to your cognitive processes in general. It reduces frustration according to the logic given above for recognizing uncertainty of perception. Yet, there may be some processes more specific to categories.
If you admit that you’re not sure about what category some object belongs to, any further associations and generalizations have to be given up as well. For example, if I think that what somebody else just did was rude, perhaps I should not be so certain about such inference. To begin with, maybe my perception was incorrect: I may have completely misunderstood what he was doing, or what his goal was. From the viewpoint of contextuality, I might consider if in this particular situation, his behaviour was actually just right—or maybe I am in a foreign culture and don’t know the rules. From the viewpoint of subjectivity, I might wonder if other people found his behaviour commendable and if it is just me who finds such behaviour rude. More generally, from the viewpoint of fuzziness, I might ask: How does one define rudeness anyway, is there a well-defined criterion?23 In particular, any valence that you would typically associate with a category cannot be considered certain anymore. You may associate rudeness with a negative valence, but if you’re not sure what is normal and what is rude, the negative valence cannot be generated anymore. What may be Epictetus’s most famous quote says: “Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.”24
In the frustration equation above, we didn’t have any terms explicitly related to self. Yet, self is obviously an extremely important concept from the viewpoint of suffering, as seen in Chapters 6 and 11. In our framework, self creates its own kind of frustration, by bringing aspects such as self-preservation, self-evaluation (or self-esteem), and control into play. As such, self-related suffering is covered by frustration equation as a special case. Many philosophical traditions such as Buddhism encourage reducing self-related thinking as a means to reduce suffering.
One case of self-related thinking concerns the self-evaluation system. In Chapter 6 it was proposed that a self-evaluation system constantly computes whether we have gained “enough” reward recently, looking at the relatively long-term performance of the system. (This long-term evaluation system is different from the one which computes the ordinary, short-term reward losses in the first place.) Such self-evaluation creates, as it were, another frustration signal on a higher level, in case the result of the self-evaluation is worse than some set standard.
Logically, there are three ways of reducing negative self-evaluations. The first is similar to the “conventional” approach we discussed above regarding ordinary frustration: it is to really gain a lot of reward, so that you surely reach the standard required. This is obviously easier said than done. Furthermore, such striving may not reduce suffering at all because gaining a lot of reward may increase the expectations in the future, resulting in insatiability on a “meta-level”.25 The second approach, in line with the main proposals in this chapter, is to lower the standard of expected reward. For example, the aforementioned philosophical viewpoint that everything is unsatisfactory should work here as well. If the system expects little reward even in the long run, the self-evaluation should not claim that the agent did not gain enough.
However, there is clearly a third option: shut down the system that evaluates your long-term success. Such a shut-down is possible by convincing yourself of the total futility of the self-evaluation. The Buddhist philosophy of no-self should be particularly useful here. Admitting the lack of control, even lack of free will, implies that there is little to evaluate: if the world gives us reward completely randomly, and we cannot influence it, what is the point in evaluating my actions and learning strategies? On a deeper philosophical level, if it is not me that actually decides my actions—but my neural networks, say—-who is to be evaluated? Perhaps my neural networks and my body could still be evaluated, but not “me” really. On the other hand, what if “my” actions are ultimately determined by the input data, or the environment?
Suppose an agent were somehow able to shut down its self-evaluation system. It could be objected that such an agent with no self-evaluation would no longer be functional. However, even if the long-term self-evaluation were completely shut down, the system could still achieve most of its goals, and it will even be able to learn. Learning might just be slightly impeded because the learning system would not be optimally tuned to the environment. Thus, only “learning to learn”, a kind of meta-learning, would be shut down, while the agent would be perfectly functional otherwise, even without self-evaluation.
I should emphasize another crucial point about self-evaluation. As long as self-evaluation is based on evolutionary fitness, including what I called evolutionary obsessions, it does not actually make a lot of sense for us. It is too often based on criteria that are not in line with what humans should strive at according to various ethical considerations. We need better criteria to decide if our actions were “good enough”; criteria that would be more in line with what we consider a good human life should be about.26
Reducing the survival instinct, or behaviour and information-processing aiming at self-preservation, would seem to be equally useful for reducing suffering. Again, it could be objected that it is not good for the agent: such reduction may increase the probability of injury and even death. If I had no survival instinct, I might just happily go and pat a tiger I see in the jungle. This is a valid point, but we could still try to reduce the intensity of suffering incurred. In fact, religions and spiritual traditions invariably propose some method to cope with fear of death and mortality. Fear of death may often be unreasonable: I may even suffer from seeing a tiger on TV. Therefore, a moderate reduction in survival instinct might have mainly positive consequences. One method would be to reduce the mental simulations of injury and death; we will get back to this point in the next chapter where we look at reduction of simulation by meditation.
If we see self as the source of control, and then we admit uncontrollability as discussed above, this can be seen as a way of reducing the power of the self to influence our thinking. As far as self is about control, giving up control is, figuratively speaking, giving up part of the self. More precisely, it is rejecting part of the power that self-centered processing has on us.
Such “reduction of self” is a general principle that can take many forms. One approach is limiting the number of things belonging to self. For example, I could consider things that I think belong to me: perhaps my family, my house, my job and so on. If I think of them as “mine”, I invest them with a certain power because I think I should be able to control them, as well as keep them intact. In other words, I think that they are in a sense part of myself; some would say I “identify” with them. Then, if anything bad happens to them, or anybody tries to take them away from me, I will have a strong negative emotion as if my self were threatened—and in a sense the intactness of my person or self is threatened.
It is clear how one can reduce suffering coming from such possessions: as a first approach, just own fewer things. If you have very few things which you consider yours, it is less likely that you will experience them breaking down, being stolen, or getting lost. Many spiritual traditions do recommend giving up most of your material possessions. Further, you can try to change your attitude towards such external parts of yourself. Epictetus proposes that you should think of all your possessions, your family etc., as not really belonging to you, but as things that have been given or lent to you:27
Never say of anything, “I have lost it”; but, “I have returned it.” Is your child dead? It is returned. Is your wife dead? She is returned. Is your estate taken away? Well, and is not that likewise returned?
Finally, the reduction of self can be approached from the viewpoint of reducing thinking in terms of categories. Typically, I divide the world into things that are part of myself, and things that are not part of myself. This is how I construct the category “self”. Like with other categories, it would be useful not to take this category too seriously, and understand its fuzziness and arbitrariness, or emptiness. “Self” can be seen as the ultimate category that should be deconstructed and given up. Such giving up of the whole category of self, in a sense, encompasses all the other aspects of no-self philosophy described above. If the very category of self does not exist, or, to put it simply, if self does not exist, what would be the point in self-preservation or self-evalution, or any attempt to control? Any such self-related thinking should vanish if the underlying category of “self” is given up. The Buddha said that when a monk is advanced enough, “any thoughts of ‘me’ or ‘mine’ or ‘I am’ do not occur to him”.28 This is the most general way of reducing suffering based on no-self philosophy.
While so far we have focused on reducing the frustration of desires, many philosophical traditions propose that desires themselves should be reduced—as always, this includes aversions. In Buddhist philosophy of the Theravadan school, it is traditionally the main focus of the training, and it is the main point of the Buddha’s teaching as expressed in the Four Noble Truths. After describing what suffering is (quoted 🡭), he proposed that it is born of desire, and that one can be liberated from suffering by eradicating desire following a path of meditative and other practices.29 Epictetus was equally clear about the importance of not having desires or aversions, especially towards things we cannot control:30
Remove aversion, then, from all things that are not in our control (...) But, for the present, totally suppress desire: for, if you desire any of the things which are not in your own control, you must necessarily be disappointed; and of those which are, and which it would be laudable to desire, nothing is yet in your possession.
Humans can indeed reduce frustration simply by giving up some unnecessary goals: you don’t really need a fancy car. It is possible to consciously decide not to strive for certain goals, and we can modify our desires to some extent without any special techniques. In our framework, this in particular means reducing intentions, i.e., commitment to plans, also called attachments in Buddhist terminology. (Intentions can, in fact, be easier to reduce than desires themselves, as may be intuitively clear and will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter.) Suffering will then be reduced since each goal could potentially lead to frustration. If there are no desires and no goals that need to be achieved, frustration will not appear and nor will suffering. As such, reduction of desires is a central mechanism through which reduction of frustration is possible.
Many ideas in this chapter can be seen as mental techniques serving the very goal of reducing desires. Consider, for example, reducing expected rewards as considered above: why would the agent want anything if it has arrived at the conclusion that the expected rewards are zero, or very small? Likewise, desires will be reduced by adopting the belief that many desires are pointless and even bad for you, they are just evolutionary obsessions. As such, reducing desires is closely related to the earlier ideas of facing uncertainty, uncontrollability and unsatisfactoriness, and in fact, in a traditional Buddhist account, the main justification for such philosophical attitudes is precisely that they reduce desires.31
There are also special techniques to reduce desires. One example is choosing to pay attention to good things that one already has, instead of things that one might obtain. This reduces desires and the tendency of insatiability; it is central in mental exercises based on gratitude.32 Further, Epictetus proposed a rather extreme form of contemplation of impermanence, namely contemplation of death:33
Let death and exile, and all other things which appear terrible be daily before your eyes, but chiefly death, and you will never entertain any abject thought, nor too eagerly covet anything.
Yet, there are also desires that are really “hot”, hard-wired, and difficult to modify, let alone reduce, based on the rather purely philosophical or intellectual considerations presented in this chapter. What is needed are special techniques to work on deeper levels of the mind than philosophical thinking. Meditation is one such method, as we will see in the next chapter.34
An objection could be raised at this point: the thinking discussed in this chapter seems depressing. One may ask whether it does not lead to complete inactivity, and, indeed, to some kind of depression. A diagnostic criterion of depression is “markedly diminished interest (...) in all, or almost all, activities”,35 which sounds a bit like having substantially reduced reward expectations, and having few desires. The fundamental question is: can such reduction of desires and expectations go too far? It is related to the question of how far should such lowering of expectations go. Is it enough to admit the actual levels of uncertainty and uncontrollability, or should we go further and consider things even more uncertain and uncontrollable than they really are, thus lowering expectations even more?
If our only goal were to reduce suffering in the agent, we could simply program it to assume that everything is completely uncertain and completely uncontrollable. Then, the agent would expect zero reward, or very little, in any state or from any action. It would have virtually no desires, which is a consequence of such a radical reduction of reward expectations. Is this a good way of programming an agent?36
Claiming that Buddhist training can lead to something akin to depression is, in fact, a well-known point of criticism, and similar arguments have actually been raised against Buddhism throughout its history. I think such criticism is not very relevant because it considers an extreme case, which is unlikely to be achieved by most people practising such systems. Perhaps the point is that most people living in a modern industrialized society simply have too many desires, and it would be better for them to have fewer of them. This would explain why people engaged in Buddhist training tend to get happier when they reduce reward expectations. It may be irrelevant to ask what might happen in the extreme case where they completely annihilate all their desires—which is a feat even most meditation masters are incapable of. Buddhist philosophy actually emphasizes the “middle way”, or moderation, which sounds like a good idea here as well. The situation might be different for Buddhist monks or nuns engaged in full-time practice for many years; but they are following a very special lifestyle, which is specifically designed to be compatible with having very few desires.37
On the other hand, there is certainly something fundamentally different between a depressive state and a mental state where the unsatisfactoriness of the world is seen from a Buddhist perspective. If an agent concludes that none of its desires are going to be fulfilled and it will never receive any reward, that gives in itself no reason for a negative feeling or valence. The agent would just rationally decide that no desires are worth pursuing, it would not engage in goal-oriented action, it would predict zero rewards in the future, and, in fact, it would suffer less since there is no frustration. If humans tend to get a negative feeling after seeing that the world is fundamentally unsatisfactory, it must be because there is another “higher-order” desire, presumably coming from the self-evaluation system treated in Chapter 6.
A depressed person, in particular, finds the very unsatisfactoriness of the world frustrating, and wants to find satisfaction or reward in various kinds of seemingly pleasurable objects and activities. In our framework, we would say that she is frustrated in terms of her self-evaluation, as she sees that she gets less reward in the long run than she “should” according to some internal standard. The self-evaluation system may indeed conclude—based on a superficial calculation—that if it is true that no goals will be reached and no reward will be obtained, there must be something wrong with the agent, and a negative meta-learning signal should be generated, which would be felt as suffering. However, I think an important point in the Buddhist philosophy of unsatisfactoriness is that if the self-evaluation system sends such a negative signal, it is simply malfunctioning. Clearly, the realization of the total unsatisfactoriness of everything should also influence the self-evaluation system. The self-evaluation system should set its expectations, or standards of “acceptable” reward level, very low, even zero. The self-evaluation system cannot rationally claim that the agent is not getting enough rewards if it believes itself that no rewards can possibly be obtained! As such, Buddhist philosophy proposes that there is no need to be frustrated about any long-term lack of reward, nor is there any need to make any negative self-evaluation; not getting much reward and not reaching one’s goals is natural and unavoidable.38
Another objection that could be raised against the philosophy presented here is that it may not be useful to reduce frustration since the frustration signal is useful for learning. Human beings seem to be trapped in a situation where they need frustration to learn, while they suffer from it. That may sound like a dilemma with no satisfactory solution. However, I’m not sure there is any real dilemma here. One reason is that, as discussed in Chapter 5, many of the rewards we are programmed to receive are actually rather useless “evolutionary obsessions”; frustrating them may not teach us anything useful, if it is not the very futility of those rewards. The same is true from the viewpoint of insatiability: why should one try to learn how to better satisfy desires which cannot be satiated anyway?
Furthermore, Chapter 12 proposed that a large part of the problem is actually how frustration is made conscious even it didn’t need to be; learning from frustration could, in principle, happen on an unconscious level. It may seem that not much can be done about this, but in fact, an intervention is possible, as will be seen when we talk about meta-awareness in Chapter 15.
Another point is that while understanding the uncertainty of all perceptions reduces frustration, it may actually improve learning and make us more “intelligent”. Uncertainty and uncontrollability are real properties of the world, but we may have been grossly underestimating them because our basic cognitive apparatus is not good at handling them. Thus, learning to better appreciate the uncertainty and the uncontrollability is a useful learning process even from the viewpoint of trying to optimize rewards in the world. Based on these arguments, I think that while it may be meaningful to claim that not all frustration should be removed, most of it can still be removed without making learning any worse.39
To conclude this chapter, let us look at the absence of desires from more positive viewpoints. First, the absence of desires can be expressed as contentment, in the literal meaning of being content with what one has and not wanting more. Insatiability of the desires, in particular, implies that the agent cannot be content: it always has to search for more rewards. That leads to endless frustration, which is why reducing desires is essential. In a stronger form, contentment may further turn into a feeling of gratitude.40
Another well-known positive interpretation of having no desires is freedom. The condition of a human being has been described as being a “puppet of the gods” by Plato,41 meaning that “affections in us are like cords and strings, which pull us different and opposite ways”. We have to remove those cords and strings if we want to be free, instead of being enslaved by the interrupts and unconscious action tendencies. Epictetus summarizes the idea in a way that is, yet again, in complete harmony with the Buddha’s philosophy:42
Freedom is acquired not by the full possession of the things which are desired, but by removing the desire.