RE: The Purpose of Pain
January 27, 2021 at 2:41 pm
(This post was last modified: January 27, 2021 at 2:44 pm by 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.
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.
(January 27, 2021 at 2:39 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:(January 27, 2021 at 2:02 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: 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.
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