[Serious] The Purpose of Pain

[John 6IX Breezy]

"There are many other ways that living creatures appear to leverage a body control model without any evidence that they feel pain [emphasis added]." 

You don't have access to the conscious experience of other animals to make such a claim (cite your reference).

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

"There are many other ways that living creatures appear to leverage a body control model without any evidence that they feel pain [emphasis added]." 

You don't have access to the conscious experience of other animals to make such a claim (cite your reference).

It isn’t necessary to have such access to make that claim. Nudger isn’t claiming that some other living organisms don’t feel pain, just that we don’t have evidence that they do (with respect to body control).

Boru

[HappySkeptic]

The body control model of pain does not require and is not premised on the experience of pain.  There are many other ways that living creatures appear to leverage a body control model without any evidence that they feel pain (and, fwiw, good reason to believe that ours is more like theirs than we'd care to consider).  Pain isn't a blessing, pain isn't a curse.  It's a function, there are many like it, but this one is ours.  There's no particular reason that we couldn't leverage those other models (and no clear evidence that we don't), aside from the accidents of heredity.

In a conscious creature, I believe the pain is a requirement.  They are part of the oldest part of our brain, indicating that they are fundamental to survival.  It can be built into reflexes, but our mind can counteract reflex, so it requires a conscious qualia.  Conscious bad experience teaches us what not to do, and plan ways to avoid pain in the future.

[Angrboda]

I spend the vast majority of my time not having negative emotions.  Aside from those who our hypothetical god has graced with clinical depression or terminal clumsiness, suffering is an alarming and temporary difference in our everyday lives.  Most of the negative emotions I do have, are things like being pissed that my tea is too hot or cold or sweet...or not sweet enough.

We already learn and adapt and grow outside of pain, and spend a considerable amount of time ensuring that our children -can- learn without that barrier in place.

I believe it was Sam Harris who pointed out that consciousness is always in the process of trying to change what it's feeling and experiencing. If we're sad, we want to be happy, if we're anxious, we take steps to become calm, if we're bored we seek excitement. Something is driving that, whether there's an all-encompassing name that describes all instances of it or not. The Buddhists refer to Dukkha, or disquiet and disturbance of the mind, which may be similar. And Sartre's conception of consciousness posited that what we are, the in-itself, is constantly seeking to negate what is for what can be. Sartre may be a bit literal in his conception, but there is a definite sense in which we are driven by the things we are not. So "suffering" may be the wrong word, but the human mind has, and likely needs, something to goad it out of whatever complacency it has when things aren't ideal or optimum. Failure is a necessity in a universe with entropy. So the mind has to have signals to itself to facilitate fighting back against the inevitable failings. If there isn't some sense in which what we imagine we could be is better than what we currently are, then why would we make any effort to change?

[The Grand Nudger]

I don't see any shortage of things that goad human beings out of complacency - and I'll note that the most complacent people are often those in the most pain.

I don't personally think that we would be improved by the absence of pain, but, likewise, I doubt the value of pain for improvement. That's not what pain does. I don't personally think that the existence of pain demonstrates that the creator of this world (whether we're talking fairy tales or something more serious) is evil, either, since it's pretty clear that pain is an accident of biology in the grandest sense of the word. No one to blame or be thankful to, nothing to be happy or upset over. I don't think that it's a poor design relative to the natural constraints of it's production, either.

We got it from our parents, who had no choice in the matter themselves, and who spent their lives trying to minimize it as most of us will do for our own. Pain has no specific or necessary or reliable outcome with respect to learning, it barely manages that with respect to it's own biological function. Indelible stamp and all that.

With respect to what might drive our urge for change in state. Maybe we've got that backward. There's just no stop button. No brakes on this train, or, none that we know how to operate. What we conceptualize as an urge may more accurately be our inability to remain in any particular state indefinitely. That said, I've never found myself sitting around happy thinking - "man, I would just love to go find me some misery right about now". Anecdotal, I know.

[Fake Messiah]

one could objectively argue that this life would be misery without pain. Pain allows us to avoid harm, it engages important withdrawal reflexes, and it motivates us to rest and protect an injured limb to allow healing (Connors, 2016). There's a reason why being diagnosed with diabetes places you at risk of limb amputations: because nerve sensitive wears out, and risk of injury increases. In conclusion, I disagree with the argument you hate on various fronts as well. But it is clear that in our current state pain exists for our benefit: living without pain is not a blessing.

Not chronic pain which can last for decades. It is estimated that over 40% of Americans suffer from chronic pain and one fifth of them will suffer it for more than 20 years. Chronic pain affects more people than cancer, heart disease, and diabetes combined. It can be hugely debilitating.

[John 6IX Breezy]

Pain has no specific or necessary or reliable outcome with respect to learning, it barely manages that with respect to it's own biological function. Indelible stamp and all that.

The scientific study of learning and memory has used pain more than any other stimulus, perhaps with the exception of fear itself, to advance our understanding of learning. From John Watson inducing fear in Baby Albert, to Eric Kandel using noxious stimulus in sea slugs to win the Nobel Prize in memory. Avoiding future pain and injury is perhaps one of the primary purposes of learning and memory from an evolutionary perspective.

[The Grand Nudger]

My pet theory is that people who hold to some implicit idea of a body forge with respect to the natural world will find themselves more capable of empathizing and agreeing with the themes of a soul forge - yet another instance of how our sense of the numinous in the natural world misinforms our superstitions. Same way that ideas about the natural world had us claiming that people ived "above" and "under" our rock as an item of genuine religious belief and import.

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Pain has no specific or necessary or reliable outcome with respect to learning, it barely manages that with respect to it's own biological function.  Indelible stamp and all that.

The scientific study of learning and memory has used pain more than any other stimulus, perhaps with the exception of fear itself, to advance our understanding of learning. From John Watson inducing fear in Baby Albert, to Eric Kendell using noxious stimulus in sea slugs to win the Nobel Prize in memory. Learning and avoiding future pain and injury is perhaps one of the primary purposes of memory from an evolutionary perspective.

Pain as we experience it is not the memorization of data points which we could return to in order to avoid future harm.

A very simple machine can do that.  Or, hey, maybe that -is- what we are doing, in which case, soul forge is out once again. The funny thing about a soul forge (natural or supernatural), is that it proposes the only kind of universe in which rational and moral objections to the soul forge can be levied.

[John 6IX Breezy]

Chronic pain affects more people than cancer, heart disease, and diabetes combined. It can be hugely debilitating.

I agree; much like losing the sensation of pain, increasing or prolonging it is equally problematic. Hyperalgesia can be as detrimental as analgesia.

[The Grand Nudger]

I'll share another anecdote about my relationship to pain. Some of you guys know that I got fucked up pretty bad just about two decades ago.

For months afterward, I couldn't sleep for more than ten or twenty minutes at a time because it felt like my legs were collapsing under their own weight...which they were. This didn't make me a better father or husband, and my pain spread pain to others that I loved. Adding more pain, and pain of different types.

What was it that being a functional insomniac and self medicating addict, for years, whose inability to adequately provide for his family or in fact maintain his family is supposed to have taught me? The value of a good nights rest? I learned absolutely nothing from that terrifying experience, because that's not what pain is for, and that's not what pain does. Pan actively made the situation worse, for everyone, from everyone. The only points of data I was collecting were that I very much wanted to chop off my legs. I couldn't avoid them, otherwise - and wouldn't you know it..I did obsess about that for a time, I did sometimes daydream about some freak accident that would take care of my pain problem.

Tons of pt and therapy later, plenty of medications, and it would be hard to make the case that anything about me had improved, or, insomuch as anything had, that it improved because of any of that. It was as random and pointless a situation at the begging as it was at the end. That's pain for you, accidental itself, and more often than not, caused by accident. I suspect that anything we think we might have learned from the experience of pain is just as accidental as the rest of it.