The evolution of pain.

[Aoi Magi]

Pain as a warning system is good and makes sense.
Excruciating/paralysing pain however is a hindrance, and I fail to see the evolutionary benefit of it.

[emjay]

Pain as a warning system is good and makes sense.
Excruciating/paralysing pain however is a hindrance, and I fail to see the evolutionary benefit of it.

Perhaps that's the actual point though... that the more unpleasant it is the more it interferes with other actions you could take... like you can't concentrate on anything else. Because if it was say like a Terminator readout instead... just a neutral damage report... then maybe it wouldn't be treated with the same priority as with pain?

[Aoi Magi]

Pain as a warning system is good and makes sense.
Excruciating/paralysing pain however is a hindrance, and I fail to see the evolutionary benefit of it.

Perhaps that's the actual point though... that the more unpleasant it is the more it interferes with other actions you could take... like you can't concentrate on anything else. Because if it was say like a Terminator readout instead... just a neutral damage report... then maybe it wouldn't be treated with the same priority as with pain?

But in case of paralyzing pain it actually hinders our ability to get away from the source of the stimuli or find some other means of easing it. What's the point of a warning if all escape routes are already blocked?

[emjay]

Perhaps that's the actual point though... that the more unpleasant it is the more it interferes with other actions you could take... like you can't concentrate on anything else. Because if it was say like a Terminator readout instead... just a neutral damage report... then maybe it wouldn't be treated with the same priority as with pain?

But in case of paralyzing pain it actually hinders our ability to get away from the source of the stimuli or find some other means of easing it. What's the point of a warning if all escape routes are already blocked?

Maybe it's more to do with the healing than as a warning system per se... fear warns of danger but pain signals something else? So maybe extreme pain is just effectively saying 'you cannot afford to do anything else other than wait for this to heal/subside'... saying essentially that movement itself could be causing more damage.

[Aoi Magi]

But in case of paralyzing pain it actually hinders our ability to get away from the source of the stimuli or find some other means of easing it. What's the point of a warning if all escape routes are already blocked?

Maybe it's more to do with the healing than as a warning system per se... fear warns of danger but pain signals something else? So maybe extreme pain is just effectively saying 'you cannot afford to do anything else other than wait for this to heal/subside'... saying essentially that movement itself could be causing more damage.

Evolution is stupid

[Gemini]

Maybe it's more to do with the healing than as a warning system per se... fear warns of danger but pain signals something else? So maybe extreme pain is just effectively saying 'you cannot afford to do anything else other than wait for this to heal/subside'... saying essentially that movement itself could be causing more damage.

Evolution is stupid  

Pretty much. Data pertaining to organisms that don't leave progeny is lost. So when all escape routes are blocked, whether extreme pain contributes to the organism's chances of survival doesn't matter. It experiences the pain as a byproduct of the usefulness of pain for organisms that replicate.

[emjay]

Maybe it's more to do with the healing than as a warning system per se... fear warns of danger but pain signals something else? So maybe extreme pain is just effectively saying 'you cannot afford to do anything else other than wait for this to heal/subside'... saying essentially that movement itself could be causing more damage.

Evolution is stupid

I'm still hung up on why there is experience in the first place... as a hard determinist AFAIK it's superfluous and we may as well be philosophical zombies so the question for me is why are we not? I don't think we'd do anything whatsoever differently without phenomenal consciousness... civilization would still progress as it is now and people would still use Facebook etc but there would be no conscious recognition of any of it, just neural networks processing data.

[Gemini]

I'm still hung up on why there is experience in the first place... as a hard determinist AFAIK it's superfluous and we may as well be philosophical zombies so the question for me is why are we not? I don't think we'd do anything whatsoever differently without phenomenal consciousness... civilization would still progress as it is now and people would still use Facebook etc but there would be no conscious recognition of any of it, just neural networks processing data.

That's a good question. It would seem the answer is the evolutionary pathway to a computational architecture that functioned in terms of experiences with pleasurable and unpleasurable values was simpler than a purely formal computational architecture.

Why this should be the case is probably one of the most important questions in neuroscience. I haven't a clue, to be honest.

[emjay]

I'm still hung up on why there is experience in the first place... as a hard determinist AFAIK it's superfluous and we may as well be philosophical zombies so the question for me is why are we not? I don't think we'd do anything whatsoever differently without phenomenal consciousness... civilization would still progress as it is now and people would still use Facebook etc but there would be no conscious recognition of any of it, just neural networks processing data.

That's a good question. It would seem the answer is the evolutionary pathway to a computational architecture that functioned in terms of experiences with pleasurable and unpleasurable values was simpler than a purely formal computational architecture.

Why this should be the case is probably one of the most important questions in neuroscience. I haven't a clue, to be honest.

I can (roughly) understand that from a neural network perspective but it still doesn't say anything about why or how there is phenomenal experience. If you're interested, me, Bennyboy, Rhythm, and ChadWooters discussed this at length in the thread Philosophy>Seeing Red. That thread was a lot of fun and yielded a lot of insight (I thought) and we've all got theories but in the end they're just theories 

[robvalue]

What "experience" even means is pretty hard to meaningfully define I think. I agree, you can roll out the science, but it doesn't quite get to the bottom of it.

Words just seem to fail.