Consciousness

[The Grand Nudger]

Pain intensity can be explained by the various widths and speeds of different transmitting fibers, as well as the activation of more nociceptors - relatively speaking, and before modulation. It is real. It exists. It is material. Made up of mechanical and electrochemical objects with mappable relationships to each other and across our species. That you're/we're not consciously aware of that, and instead believe it/us to be some other thing is what illusionism is (in general) talking about. That we're not what we think we are does not mean that we do not exist. That it doesn't work how it seems doesn't mean nothing is happening. Even phantom pain has an apparent and material cause - and that's as close to "not real" as you're going to get in this sense.

Obviously correct me if I'm wrong, but when we say "just" processing we don't necessarily mean that the experience of pain is other-than or achieved by other means. We think of the experience as an additional step to the counting of signals. Maybe it would be in an intentionally designed machine system. We are no such thing. Perhaps that subjective experience is our counting of signals. It certainly maps to it. Interrupt the processor interrupt (or entirely remove) the experience. Then again, perhaps it is additional, and yet still "just processing". Either way (and even if it is additional and not just processing), from an evolutionary standpoint, take away the subjective experience of pain and we get worse at survival, not better. Drug addicts and the impaired provide a fantastic demonstration of this. This is where it fits into model control theories.