I'm interested in thinking about what systems are capable of suffering if panpsychism is true. That is, is suffering a very basic property of having an experience, or is it a higher-level property. My guess is that suffering comes along with having a goal of, say, homeostasis where trajectories away from fixed points cause suffering. The reason I'm interested in suffering is due to its impact on ethics. If many more systems beyond animals are capable of suffering, then most of the suffering in the universe is invisible and that is a big blind spot. As per Chris Fields: >This is an interesting question that I think depends on how stress, pain, and suffering relate.  It’s safe I think to say that all organisms can experience stress.  Pain in a sense we might recognize may be experienced by many invertebrates and maybe by plants, though there is lively debate about this.  What more or else is required to experience suffering?  Does it require knowing that one’s goals can’t be achieved or that one’s expectations have been violated?  How cognitive is suffering?  How much of an experienced sense of identity and individual history does it require? ### Open questions - How do we make sense of fruiting plants whose positive states include getting a part of them (the fruit) eaten? - Is it analogous to us humans doing sex? Because very similarly, male wants his sperm to get ejected into a woman and that's pleasurable. In similar sense, are flowering / fruiting plants somehow capable of feeling pleasure whenever fruiting or pollination happens? #inbox