[Serious] The Purpose of Pain

[Fake Messiah]

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.

Sure, if you stand on hot sand pain comes in handy for you to know not to fry your feet, but there is a lot of unnecessary pain that seems to exist just to torture people.

And pain is also a reminder of many truly complicated diseases.
Like this scene from the movie"Lorenzo's Oil", where the boy is going through excruciating pain for which you may argue that is useful so that people know which organs and body parts are under attack by the disease, but then you have to ask "Why does such brutal disease exist that is so complicated to cure that people still can not cure it?"




Or Julia Sweeney describing her brother's pain:

My brother Mike, who had cancer, suffered unspeakably for a very long time. Eye lids freezing open and his eyes drying up, canker sores all over his throat and he couldn't swallow, weeks and weeks and then months of gut wrenching vomiting and nausea, before he then died.

Not exactly helpful.

[Rahn127]

Without pain, would doctors exist ?

Imagine people dropping dead for seemingly no reason all the time. How often would you eat or drink ? How long would you spend laying in the sun or in a house fire.

People with disease wouldn't get any help at all. Viruses would wipe out populations.

Without pain, we probably wouldn't exist very long.

[The Grand Nudger]

Yes, and doctors treat a great many things that cause no pain already.

That is exactly how alot of us go out. We drop dead for no reason that we are aware of..or, realistically, could be aware of - because we're dead.

OFC they would, and people get help for diseases before they cause pain, as well as diseases that do not really cause pain.

We must have existed for a very long time without it, and much of life still does, so far as we can tell. Human pain is another one of those ghost in the machine level conundrums we have to resolve.

[Ranjr]

I don't claim pain never serves a purpose.  In fact, I pointed out earlier that pain can make pleasure feel better.  Such as when recovering from an illness:  85% can feel like %100.

Pain is a bad design because it continues after it has notified the mind of damage.  It's like a pulsed input that continues to throw an interrupt when there is no change of state.  What kind of idiot would design and build that?  Not this one.

[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.

[zwanzig]

This certainly went somewhere. Ah, well. Serves me right for making such a simplistic thread title.

[arewethereyet]

This certainly went somewhere. Ah, well. Serves me right for making such a simplistic thread title.

It actually opened up an interesting discussion though it may have veered off the path you were expecting or hoping for.

Some of the best conversations go that way.

[possibletarian]

Why promise a pain and trouble free afterlife if pain is so important ?

[The Grand Nudger]

To exploit pain avoidance as a recruiting and conformity tool. We don't just avoid real or actual pain. We avoid imagined and expected pain. Imagining and expecting pain, in fact, causes actual pain, lol.

I think that we have to remember that the people who put this stuff together into a cohesive religion weren't just making a church, they were attempting to form a civil government, and had, as a consequence of their birth as a part of a state, already pulled in some quirks of state.

If you wanted a more procedural answer, it's because the augistinian faction of the catholic church beat the living shit out of the arminian and universalist sets. Heaven sits opposite hell as a necessity of their theological view on the limits of gods love, the irreconcilability of some people with god, and the retributive model of justice. The sorting hat has to have places to send the two types of people. Those god loves, and those he does not and never will.

It creates issues for it's own position, ofc. It's unclear how an eternal life without some parts of human experience could be fulfilling or as-fulfilling-as a normal human life. Once we exhaust all of the non-pain possibilities, we still have eternity to go, and that remaining pain content is locked outside of permissible content in gods kingdom. Hence the syncretic reincarnation and pain tourism beliefs that some christians hold today. Outside of that, it seems as though it would take a sustaining act of gods power to maintain the premise and promise of a blissful afterlife. When we reach that point, if we reach that point, however long it takes - we're either lobotomized by god, in his wisdom, or we fall to earth...in our desire....or heaven becomes intolerable hell.

[Rahn127]

Why promise a pain and trouble free afterlife if pain is so important ?

Pain is important for biological life in this real world when it comes to survival.

After you are dead, survival isn't an issue.