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TimFreeman comments on Suffering as attention-allocational conflict - Less Wrong
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What's the problem we're thinking evolution might be trying to fix here?
The problem isn't that suffering feels bad. Evolution isn't trying to make us happy. If the hypothesis in the OP is true and suffering is the instinct that leads us to move away from situations that place conflicting demands on how we allocate attention, and people don't do well in those situations, then suffering might easily be a solution rather than a problem.
No, I didn't mean that the badness was bad and hence evolution would want it to go away. Acute suffering should be enough to make us focus on conflicts between our mental subsystems. It's as with pain, acute pain leads you to flinch you away from danger, but chronic pain is quite useless and possibly maladaptive since it leads to needless brooding and wailing and distraction which does not at all address the underlying unsolveable problem and might well exacerbate it.
I get your point, and I agree. At the moment I believe suffering fails to focus our attention in the right place because evolution hasn't had either the time or the capacity to give us the exact correct instincts.
I vaguely recall an experiment where someone (I don't recall who) made a horse suffer in the sense we're describing here. They trained it to do X when it was shown an ellipse with the vertical direction longer, and do Y when it was shown an ellipse with the horizontal direction longer, and gradually showed it ellipses that were more and more circular, so it had no way to decide which one to do. It did the "brooding and wailing and distraction" you're talking about.