RE: The Purpose of Pain
January 28, 2021 at 11:36 am
(This post was last modified: January 28, 2021 at 11:46 am by The Grand Nudger.)
That is, in effect, the difference between the assumptions of the body model, and human pain. The body model is just that. An event is recorded as having had occurred, and this information is utilized for control.
It may actually be useful to have a recurring notification, a task list of items that return in our apprehension until they've been resolved or attended to, to the specifications of the system or function or architecture.
That, still, is not human pain, or, at least, it's not human pain as we take to describing it's fundamental nature. We don't apprehend a flashing light, we don't apprehend a priority tray of abstracted variables being manipulated by algorithms. We feel searing, terrifying, motivating, conditioning, and confusing, and instructive...pain (and, hey, for the freaks, sometimes soothing). It's noise in the body model, data beyond it's perishability of items not necessarily useful to body control....still taking up space...still consuming resources...still driving outcomes.
The conservative interpretation of this is that pain as we experience it is probably derived from and originally served the purpose of the body control model - but that we've found another, more novel, use for it. If we can cogently assess pain and human pain by metrics like these, I think that we can make an equivalent objection to the notion that pain, physical or psychological, either ever was intended (by biological reality -or- supernatural decree) to be a learning tool...and, additionally, if it was (again, god or nature) it's relative efficacy.
It's not about whether pain serves any purpose, but whether it serves some particular purpose. Presumably, things that don't serve one purpose can serve, or have once served, another. I don't think that pain serves the particular purpose required for forge ideology. I don't think that, assuming we can make novel use and try...which I think we do, that we should put -too- much stock in the specific value outcome of that press-ganged function. It's a hammer looking at nails and we have a question about screws. And, again, I'm skeptical that the value outcome itself is anything other than a pain avoidance feature very much a product of and a problem caused by that novel use.
It may actually be useful to have a recurring notification, a task list of items that return in our apprehension until they've been resolved or attended to, to the specifications of the system or function or architecture.
That, still, is not human pain, or, at least, it's not human pain as we take to describing it's fundamental nature. We don't apprehend a flashing light, we don't apprehend a priority tray of abstracted variables being manipulated by algorithms. We feel searing, terrifying, motivating, conditioning, and confusing, and instructive...pain (and, hey, for the freaks, sometimes soothing). It's noise in the body model, data beyond it's perishability of items not necessarily useful to body control....still taking up space...still consuming resources...still driving outcomes.
The conservative interpretation of this is that pain as we experience it is probably derived from and originally served the purpose of the body control model - but that we've found another, more novel, use for it. If we can cogently assess pain and human pain by metrics like these, I think that we can make an equivalent objection to the notion that pain, physical or psychological, either ever was intended (by biological reality -or- supernatural decree) to be a learning tool...and, additionally, if it was (again, god or nature) it's relative efficacy.
It's not about whether pain serves any purpose, but whether it serves some particular purpose. Presumably, things that don't serve one purpose can serve, or have once served, another. I don't think that pain serves the particular purpose required for forge ideology. I don't think that, assuming we can make novel use and try...which I think we do, that we should put -too- much stock in the specific value outcome of that press-ganged function. It's a hammer looking at nails and we have a question about screws. And, again, I'm skeptical that the value outcome itself is anything other than a pain avoidance feature very much a product of and a problem caused by that novel use.
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