[balamatom]

"I could use more meaning in my life."

Telling. (Me, I could definitely use even less.)

I think GP has a point, but it kinda works the other way around. (Which is common among unexamined intuitions.)

Basically, you can't represent any data with just ones, or just zeros. And the most basic unit of meaningful sensory data is "suffering/not suffering".

As long as there's any difference between "more preferable" and "less preferable" states of being (and not a uniform homogeneous universe, or alternatively a universe free from subjects able to prefer -- neither of which would not be much of a universe anyway), there will exist suffering caused by being in the less preferable state; and, conversely, the striving towards the more preferable one will be experienced as meaningful.

(And once you're in the most preferable state available to you, "meaning" becomes somehow unimportant. It's why they say "struggle builds character" -- "character" is one name for the ability to discern personally relevant meaning. It's also why it's easy for "personal fulfillment" to make a person kinda dumb -- unless they keep challenging themselves in actually meaningful ways.)

The evident paradox of "why would God not prevent suffering" is therefore a bit nonsensical, like most Christian doctrine (if you look at the history of Christianity past the point of being made state religion of the very empire that persecuted it -- no mean feat! -- you can see how it's pretty much designed by committee). Among extant religions, Buddhism seems to have the most no-nonsense treatment of the question.

On a practical scale one can see something similar in the concept of the "first world problem". Someone cooked your food wrong? There are people starving somewhere, you are in a vastly more preferable position to those -- but the knowledge that someone else is suffering from starvation does not in any way diminish your experience of (admittedly tiny) suffering caused by the unpleasant food. (That one takes a basic degree of self-control -- the "character" again.)

(Someone's taking away some privilege of yours in order to ensure more equitable conditions for others who never had that privilege? Well, pretty much the same thing. Which is why you see people hanging on to ill-gotten gains for dear life...)

So, that's why suffering and meaning are so often juxtaposed. What do we say to people throwing a tantrum over a minor inconvenience? We tell them to "grow up", i.e. that their suffering is not meaningful to us, and they should learn to extinguish that suffering in themselves.

Is it just to tell someone who is experiencing any suffering at all (even that of the minor inconvenience) to just, like, not suffer? That question also has no practical bearing. Ending suffering in oneself is the only end to suffering there can ever be. (Other than death, I guess. In death one is free from all suffering, striving, and meaning. I've heard that the ancient Thracians used to celebrate passings and mourn births, which I find much more logical than the ritually prescribed emotions of our culture. On the other hand, maybe that's why they're gone now :D)

Doesn't mean we shouldn't improve the world and end poverty, injustice, disease, stupidity, and other pretty obviously fixable forms of suffering. We just deserve a more meaningful teleology for that than just "ending suffering". Because I don't think "ending suffering" is a thing that can ever be done in light of the above. Even by an omnipotent being, since "potent" assumes power to change stuff, and "change" assumes the existence of "more preferable" and "less preferable" states. Might as well ask why there's something instead of nothing...

[card_zero]

No, you're wrong. It took a while to parse all that. But suffering involves being upset. We routinely have preferences while accepting that they're out of reach, and feeling happy despite this. The equivalence you draw between "less preferable states" and suffering is incorrect.

Suffering has to involve being coerced (even if merely by physics). Something has to upset you, knock you off balance. If you're prepared for it, if it isn't an intrusion, it isn't suffering. We are always in a less than ideal state, but not always suffering - unless you want to make the term meaningless by stretching it.

But problems, which may be welcome and enjoyable, are endless. And it's true that suffering is relative, and people who seem to be having a tantrum are most likely suffering for real.

[mrob]

You're not working with just suffering and non-suffering, you also have death. The existence of death makes the concept of an absolute threshold of suffering meaningful. If, assuming an experience lasts an entire lifetime, you would rationally prefer to be dead, that experience is below the absolute threshold of suffering. In practice most experiences do not last entire lifetimes, but this isn't relevant to the definition. Something can still be below the absolute threshold of suffering even if you willingly and rationally endure it because you know it's temporary.

You could encode the same meaning using only experiences above the absolute threshold of suffering, i.e. as 1 and 2 instead of 0 and 1. I believe a world with no experiences below the threshold of absolute suffering would be strictly superior to our world. Relative suffering is sufficient for meaning.

[card_zero]

Huh, that's a good idea, to create a benchmark to rescue the concept of suffering from relativism. But it won't work for me. I'm very anti-death, I don't see death as an escape, or as an action at all: I'm here to live, however unpleasant it gets. Death would be no more pleasant, because being dead is not an experience. It can't logically be an improvement.

[mrob]

It logically can be an improvement if experiences can have negative value. I think most people would prefer non-existence to endless torture with no hope of escape.

[card_zero]

No, it's not a zero-value experience: it's no experience. Ugh, how do I express this ... in preferences, an experience of some kind is the goal, or at least, my goal. That means death isn't among the options: putting it in there is a category error.

[mrob]

That sounds more like your personal absolute threshold of suffering is unusually low, not a category error.

[card_zero]

No, it just makes no conceptual sense to me to "prefer non-existence". It's a contradiction. The concepts of preference and not existing can't go together.

I guess I'll allow that death is the ultimate undesirable thing, disrupting all intentions, negating all possibilities.

I can see how this could be interpreted as unusually high tolerance for suffering, by any normal, latently suicidal person. But from my point of view you're just all getting it wrong. I've never heard anybody else express this position, though, so perhaps I'm an irrelevance.

Late edit: there's more to preferences than mere experiences, mind you. So "I prefer that I not exist" makes logical sense, but not by the reason "because my experiences are so horrible": perhaps some philosophical notion could be the reason for it, though I can't imagine one. Oh, self-sacrifice to save others, for instance, or for knowledge in the abstract, that kind of thing.