Saturday, December 16, 2006

My comment in the blog "Pain"

Your November 30th 2006 post has an hyperlink to DeWall’s Research Statement. Reading DeWall, I think that suffering from rejection, like any suffering, has the potential to deturn one’s attention from other suffering and one’s willingness to exert self-control. Also, I like the idea that “as evolution prepared animals for increasing social interaction, instead of creating entirely new systems to react to social events such as being rejected or excluded, it piggy-backed these responses onto the existing systems that were hard-wired for responding to physical pain.” It is a pet theory of mines that physical pain is hard-wired to the system of ’suffering’, and that sometimes, like in cingulotomy, this hard-wiring is severed…

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Progress in Wikipedia Article on Suffering

Articles in Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, are often among the very first results coming up when a search is made on the internet. Thus it is with the word suffering or the word pain. So, people who want to contribute to human knowledge about suffering, and particularly to the circulation of that knowledge, should probably pay attention to this paramount point of collective focus that represents the Wikipedia article on suffering.

I have now begun to edit that article, with the goal of bringing it to the highest standards, first as a ‘Good Article’, and ultimately as a ‘Featured Article’. For now, there is a new introduction, and a new table of contents. The old and somewhat primitive contents have been revised.

Your own special concern with the subject of suffering could help in developing one section or the other within the new 'comprehensive' structure of the article. Please have a look there.