Psychological suffering is a mathematical glitch where long term goals refuse to let the body's stress relief systems do their job.
Human suffering arises from a specific computational conflict between two different timing systems in the brain. The body uses one system called allostasis to resolve immediate physiological stress and return to a neutral state. A second system called egostasis tries to maintain a consistent identity and long-term goal-seeking behavior regardless of the cost. Chronic distress occurs when egostasis forces the brain to ignore the signal to relax, trapping the individual in a self-perpetuating loop of high tension. This model redefines mental pain as a systemic error where persistence becomes a biological bug rather than a virtue. Understanding this loop could lead to treatments that physically target the temporal scales of neural processing to break the cycle of despair.
Egostasis: A First-Principles Account of the Neurocomputational Basis of Suffering
PsyArXiv · 2cr9y_v1
This paper introduces the concept of egostasis (self-based goal-directed persistence behaviour) and proposes a novel neurophenomenological theory of the experience of suffering, grounded in the framework of active inference. We argue that psychological suffering is a transmodal, aversive state arising from prediction errors being attributed to a self-model. Chronic suffering is proposed to arise from temporally and counterfactually deep action policies that prevent the resolution of interoceptiv