How Old Is Suffering?

If we agree that our primate relatives don't have the same sort of self or the same level of suffering, then something must have changed. This is not an ability to experience direct pain, but a kind of second-order narrative that comes alongside pain. Even things that we think are very basic, things like language, may use parts of the brain that are partially co-evolved for that purpose. But this cannot be the telos of evolution, because, as I've been kind of suggesting throughout, evolution does not have any telos.