[Serious] The Purpose of Pain

[arewethereyet]

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.

I sympathize and empathize.  I spent years in pain after my mastectomies and reconstruction.  Nerve damage and other issues that were barely controlled with medication.  I slept for years sitting up in a recliner.  A dozen years later and I still have days that simply suck and there's not a damn thing I can do about it.

If I was supposed to learn something, I missed the lesson.  Now I just deal with pain instead of seeking medical help until it's simply not something I can do any more.  That's why I waited so long to have broken ribs checked out a little over a year ago and I am still paying for that.  Pain just became my normal.  Rub some dirt on it and walk it off.  

Luckily I was going through the mastectomy crap back when doctors would actually give you effective pain medications.  If I had to go through it now I am pretty sure I would be looking for a permanent way out.

[The Grand Nudger]

Another problem with pain as a learning tool. The greater the severity or duration, the less likely we are to even register it's existence. We go into shock or we get used to it, and the more we get used to pain the less effective pain is at body control, let alone learning. The idea of a person in shock having learned something or being improved..I would hope, doesn't even have to be addressed.

Thankfully, my pain was something that rubbing dirt on it and walking could help - that's pretty much the only thing - it just took forever. I had my geriatric routine down by my mid twenties. Bench and rail shower, all the furniture against the walls. No hard edges, single level only. ABSOLUTELY NO GLASS...which sucked, cuz I love glass. Sports cars and motorcycles are out of the question - so I'll have to find something else to lose my mind over at midlife. I;m already working on a good gig there, something to perpetrate on my better half.

Leads me into the next thing. In the same way we create distance from pain to promote learning in children, the distance we have as observers to others pain, something that we're in the dark on in important ways - might account for why we think pain is a learning or improvement tool in the first place. It may be more accurate to state that the pain of others helps us to learn - as it provides us a third person view without all of the biological complications that pain in the first person presents. I can't think of anything I learned, but I know two women who learned a hell of alot about me...alot of it, I suspect, they wish they never had, or could forget.

In that sense, the point of the forge is to torture some other guy on our behalf, to kill some other persons kid instead of ours so that we might learn, and this is getting more and more familiar by the second. Sickeningly and disturbingly familiar, when we strip the cultural window dressing. Maybe all the pain that I was feeling and projecting was forging them, because they were somehow dificient before I got around to personally applying my own brand of cruelty. Hell, let's dial it even further back. I was forging the souls of randos in whogivesafuck by shooting their kids down like animals. I bet they're all very much improved for it today. The kids too, presumably. No one could argue with the improvements made and lessons learned by the application of this tool in just my life alone!

[John 6IX Breezy]

I sympathize and empathize. 

Both of these terms, in this context, rest on the utility of pain. Pain here added social value; it motivated others to reach out even if just to tell a relatable story. Thus, pain is not only informative, it is communicable. It allows others to know help is needed, and it creates secondhand avoidance of a potentially injury-inducing behavior. That being said, I do think it's important not to confuse the existence of pain with issues of proper functioning (anything that can go wrong, will go wrong).

[Sal]

If pain is a teacher, it certainly sucks at its job.

It's an evolutionary adaptation at best, all religious beliefs probably already know how to section off the afterlife part as a driver - as a sorry ass excuse for creating a flawed existence - in this life. I'd rather have a painful reminder that I'm mortal, than worship a sky daddy that promises a painfree existence in the hereafter. Fuck faith.

[The Grand Nudger]

If we wanted to get super meta, I think that our tendency to overestimate the value and efficacy of pain as a learning tool while simultaneously underreporting or not genuinely considering it's adverse effects towards the same is, itself, a way to minimize and avoid pain. It is more bearable, we imagine, if it has value.

Maybe so, but what value? We don't all respond to pain the same way, so maybe some of us do learn from pain or we do sometimes learn from some pain..but what? Are we learning the right lessons and is pain a particularly good setting to figure those out in? It's hard to see it as reliable in any of those contexts - and here again I'd compare it to our explicitly pain avoiding setups for kids. They do show a reliable effect and benefit. We have the the advantage of a thinking and plotting and planning and comparing brain, though, to help us instantiate these sorts of situations in reality. I'd tend to agree with Sal, that if pain is a teacher it's not a very good one. Fine, for the product of unplanned monkey sex back in the day.

I'd push back on it being an excuse for creating a sorry ass existence though. They think the meatgrinder is the best god could or would do, and it's good for us. In reality, they're not using it to assert a god or a sorry existence, it's been used to excuse and enforce the sorry state of our peers - but never ourselves, mostly enforced by ourselves, for all of human existence. So much so that a pessimistic view of life that is thoroughly amenable to the idea of the soul forge as a natural or supernatural thing operating in reality has become pretty common.

We suffer, and we want it to mean something.
We see suffering, and we want it to mean something.
We cause suffering, and we want it to mean something.
We suffer and see suffering and cause suffering, because we want suffering to mean something.

I'd refer to The Prophet, Luda, as to all that pain has ever meant. Move, get out the way.

*and speaking of a painless existence - especially in response to earlier comments about pains necessity and utility (and other interesting things we do), people who live in a painless existence now often volunteer to do things that they know will cause them pain. No lofty goal required. It just might be fun. If there were no pain in our "normal existence" - there would still be people who signed up for some. If there were a trigger, people would turn it on and off. Even more so if it were the only way to learn in heaven...which I hope isn't the case - and doesn't exactly leave us thinking that soul forge ideology makes any sense from any angle. This is the meat of a loopy belief that some soul forgers actually do hold. That what excuses a creator for his role in this, whatever that is, is that we have made some agreement that we no longer remember.

Which is just, chefs kiss...... cuz now we're amnesiacs, too....and it seems like we may have lost knowledge as a consequence of pain, rather than gained whatever unreliable amount we might expect to acquire, out of something that may be nothing more than a little vr skin party.

[Angrboda]

The exception proves the rule.

[Belacqua]

But it seems to me that negative emotions are unavoidable, given what it is to be a human being.

Bolding is mine.

How do you know this? [...]

I explained my reasoning for this.

[Rahn127]

Pain is an awareness of bodily damage.

Creatures with an awareness that their body has been damaged or an awareness that their body could be damaged by remembering past events have the capacity to live longer and live to an age where they can reproduce.

Pain helps keep us alive

One can also ask "What are the purpose of eyes or ears or any of our sensory organs that make us aware of our environment ?"

Pain let's us know that some kind of damage has taken place.

[The Grand Nudger]

-or at least reports that is has or will.

That's the thing that really is an issue for our understanding - and pretty much all of it is an open question. Even though pain in the body model is relatively straightforward, the human instantiation of pain seems to be elaborate, deeply flawed, and we're not sure what it adds or is supposed to add to something we might call the base body model - where a machine or organism is aware of it's surroundings and aware of damage and aware of danger but doesn't feel pain. This is the norm for most of life, so far as we can tell (and we spend a considerable amount of time in that space ourselves) - so even if we're allowing that our own model works, the other model(s?) is much better represented right on the face of things.

We don't even have a particularly impressive body model (again, if that's what we're doing - open question) - that's why we're clumsy, too. It's the kind of solution to a problem that you might expect a committee of absent members to arrive at in isolation from each others contributions, solely limited to items they already had laying around their respective houses.

My hair is wet, quick, go get the toaster! I want to put a sticker on my face, someone grab a hammer! I'm drowning, let go of my arm and dig a ditch to let this water out!

[Ranjr]

God is either drunk at work or just hateful to make a sensor that continues to alarm the mind of damage the mind has noted and acknowledged.