this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
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There were a lot of experiences that were experienced, but never recorded. If a tree falls in the woods, and 100 people witness it and die without speaking a word of it, does it make a sound? Yes!
Yeah, actually. Take the person who lived the most suffering. Let’s call them person X (pX).
It’s actually not fair to say nobody interpreted pX’s suffering, because pX did. However, I also notice that this isn’t solely dependent upon what the person “goes-through,” in a physical, social, or other external sense. This is true because we all suffer in different ways with varying degrees of tolerance or perception of the things which might cause us to suffer. For example, how would you compare the worst physical versus mental ways to suffer, loss of limb or loss of loved? It’s tough.
So, what I imagine you have to end up with is, what matters is how events are internalized. That’s where you gauge suffering. Yet also true then, what you’re left with here is the subjective interpretation of events by pX. It’s just their interpretation.
Yes! I want to know how bad the worst life was. Taking into account pain tolerance, perception of time, everything.
Doing a little bit of thinking here…
Do you think it’s possible to suffer while believing that you’re not suffering? Perhaps, to be in agony while wholly believing that you’re in euphoria?
No, it’s subjective. It would have to be dysphoric to be suffering.
Would you think it’s possible that someone could exist in permanent dysphoric state, born and until death with truly having experienced no state beyond that? Or would you perhaps think there must be contrast with nondysphoric states for the effect to truly be meaningful?
Those 100 people did interpret the tree falling, though.
Better might be: if a tree falls in the forest and only a protein was present (yes, a protein), did it make a sound? No — because sound doesn’t exist. Air ripples propagate and are interpreted as sound by ears, and there were no ears present to do the interpretation.
Similar if there was a human present. Did the tree make a sound? No — because the didn’t do anything different based on whether the human was present or not. The tree didn’t all of a sudden make anything. New information was interpreted, dare I say even curated, by the interpretation itself.