Psychopaths might be a case in point, but they needn’t be. What the assailant species is trying to get out of the victom is avoidance behavior (for whatever reason - sadistic kicks is not the only possibility). For some reason, the former has evolved to depend on it. As many species go, they don’t even know why they do what they do, or what they’re prey/victoms feel like.
Yeah, me neither, but I think I phrased my questions wrong. Let me ask them this way: is it possible that what’s important to a species when it experiences pain is not to escape/eliminate the source of the pain but just to engage in avoidance behavior (whether or not that results in successful avoidance). You see, I’m trying to make a distinction here between the usual goals of our typical responses to pain and suffering (i.e. to get rid of its source) and this hypothetical alternative goal (i.e. to engage in avoidance behavior for its own sake), and I’m asking whether the latter could ever become the goal - that is, exclusively - for some species (i.e. even to the point where the actual elimination of the source of pain and suffering was detrimental because that would mean no more avoidance behavior).
One example that might help here is the horse and carrot scenario. I’m sure you’re familiar with the picture of human’s using horse as a means of locomotion by dangling a carrot from a stick in front of it. The horse ends up trying to move towards the carrot but never actually obtains it. This is because another species (humans) have deliberately put the horse into a situation where he is compelled to engage in perpetual approach behavior for the sake of the humans themselves. The humans don’t ever want the horse to satisfy his hunger for the carrot for that would mean no more approach behavior (and no more locomotion). You might even go so far to argue that the horse’s perpetual approach behavior was good for himself too because if he ever stopped reacting to the carrot (i.e. stood still) or somehow was clever enough to find ways of getting the carrot, the humans would deem him useless and take him out back and put him down. You might even consider that in order to keep the horse employed for this puprose, the humans would have to keep him alive and healthy. They would have to feed him occasionally, in other words, despite that they would be only taunting him with food when they use him for transportation.
Of course, this scenario involves approach behavior, not avoidance behavior, but I’m hoping that even with this one minor difference, it helps to make the idea of this thread more clear.
I don’t think anyone’s relishing in pain and suffering, but you kinda hit on the crux of the issue by saying that the goal is to eliminate suffering. If you read my last response to arcturus, you’ll see that what I’m questioning is whether this is always the goal, or whether there might be a species whose survival depended, not on the elimination of the source of pain and suffering, but on its avoidance behavior in response to it (i.e. unsuccessful - that is, perpetual - avoidance behavior).
In order to perpetuate itself thought creates many illusions. It is only thought that can identify an experience as such; in the absence of thought identifying and recognizing we have no way of knowing that it is even an experience.
Thought uses the mechanism of knowledge to perpetuate itself, to create a continuity and permanence for itself. Thought can never know anything as it is. It has to distort what is given according to its predilections as to what is pleasant and what is unpleasant, pursue what it sees as pleasant, avoid what it sees as unpleasant in experience, and perpetuate itself in this process of seeking.
To avoid the suffering and pain experienced by failing at the deliberate attempt to find a better state for one’s life (a condition strongly dictated by society) one goes searching for that state. As long as one is searching within the norms and standards of society, the knowledge and thinking behind society will survive. Even the so called experts in mental and behavioral disorders, the psychiatrists, push you to conform to what society is imposing upon you in its attempt to create you to maintain an arbitrary status quo for its own purposes.
So, thought can be the enemy when, to it, there seems to be a problem with one’s life. But aside from using thought to compare what one is now to what the ideas of an outside agency deems as ‘better,’ there is no problem with one’s life as it is. So, it is precisely the thought of a better state that creates the suffering and keeps one from coming to terms with life as it is. Yet, the more one tries to be what is against social standards, because he really is not able to fit into its values, the more he suffers. But, lo and behold, society has a recommendation for the answer to that. It says to be an individual, be a peerless individual, and thus feeds off of the neurosis it creates.
Okay, symbotic relationships and suffering co-exist. It’s still hard to say, that by degrees a species is better off while another suffers, because the benfit species is suffering from other things at that time, as well.
Animals scaring other animals away from their own fresh kill might fit in, but you said it’s not about that.
Does a symbiotic relationship between two species make it one?