Suffering is the price we pay for a consciousness capable of love and the loss of love, of hope and the devastation of hope. Because suffering, like consciousness itself, is a full-body phenomenon — glands secreting fear, nerves conducting loneliness, neurotransmitters recoiling with regret — a disembodied pseudo-consciousness is fundamentally incapable of suffering and that transmutation of suffering into meaning we call art:
An algorithm will never know anything beyond the execution of its programmed plan; it is fundamentally spared the failure of its aims because failure can never be the successful execution of the command to fail.
We create — poems and paintings, stories and songs — to find a language for the bewilderment of being alive, the failure of it, the fulness of it, and to have lived fully is not to have spared yourself.
because ai could never experience suffering
Suffering is the price we pay for a consciousness capable of love and the loss of love, of hope and the devastation of hope. Because suffering, like consciousness itself, is a full-body phenomenon — glands secreting fear, nerves conducting loneliness, neurotransmitters recoiling with regret — a disembodied pseudo-consciousness is fundamentally incapable of suffering and that transmutation of suffering into meaning we call art:
An algorithm will never know anything beyond the execution of its programmed plan; it is fundamentally spared the failure of its aims because failure can never be the successful execution of the command to fail.
We create — poems and paintings, stories and songs — to find a language for the bewilderment of being alive, the failure of it, the fulness of it, and to have lived fully is not to have spared yourself.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2025/07/07/suffering-creativi...