What, exactly, is pleasure and pain?

Great Debates
1

This is somewhat of a continuation of the thread I created in 2009 (what does a sperm feel? - Great Debates - Straight Dope Message Board). Sorry for the late response. I did spend some more time thinking about this all, though.

Think about you and consider the following. This is something that nobody has figured out or truly understands, but we can consider what makes the most sense. This universe has the capacity to create everything that makes up “you”: your hands, your eyes, your memories, your thoughts, your dreams, your fears, your desires, etc. Anything you experience is ultimately based in reality (i.e., the laws of nature). If you fall asleep and have a dream about having sex and it feels good, billions of years of evolution brought the pieces of reality together in a way to create that experience. The big question is: what are the pieces that the universe used to make that experience (or any experience), or to make you? What is the recipe for you, what are the ingredients?

Is one ingredient a hand? To create you, someone would need a hand, right? That’s like saying, to make a pb&j sandwich, you need jelly. If you look at the jelly jar, you see it has ingredients: strawberries, sugar, etc. If you break “you” down into your simplest parts, what do you get? You could break your hand down into different elements of matter, with some sort of energy or electricity running through it.

Let’s consider your experience of touching something really hot. Your nerves react to the heat by sending certain signals to your brain. If these signals don’t reach the brain (perhaps you have a severed spinal cord), you don’t feel the heat and you don’t react to it. If the signals reach the brain, a feeling/experience of pain occurs. The brain is wired to store the experience as a memory, and the brain is also wired to have the ability to access that stored memory, re-experience (in a way) the pain, and use that information to move away from hot objects.

The main part I want to focus on is the subjective experience of pain. What exactly IS pain? Did evolution piece together this thing called pain, somewhere along the way? Or is pain something more common in the universe, that evolution built upon, by storing images of fire along with some sort of key you use to access pain?

It seems plausible to me that pain and pleasure commonly occur throughout the universe. Perhaps there is an experience of pleasure when a roach follows a sweet scent. It might be a basic unit of pleasure much less powerful than what evolution built a human to experience. Perhaps there is an experience of pleasure when a sperm follows the scent of an egg. At what level does the most basic experience of pleasure or pain exist? Does it exist at the complex organ level of the brain, or does it exist at a less complex electrical/chemical reaction level, that the brain was built upon?

It makes sense to me that pain and pleasure are intrinsic qualities at the atomic level. What’s the alternative? That somehow (magically) the brain is wired in a way so that certain things are mixed together in a way that somehow (magically) causes pain or pleasure? I don’t believe in magic, I prefer things that make sense. Just because the brain is too complicated for you to understand doesn’t mean you should pretend it has magical abilities to create pain or pleasure out of thin air. Until you can explain to me exactly how the brain does this pain/pleasure magic trick, I will think of you as a blind faith follower of some sort of brain cult.

From where in the chemical/electrical reaction does the pleasure or pain arise? Does a positive charge feel pleasurable and a negative charge feel painful (or vice versa)? Or, does no charge feel pleasurable, and positive or negative charges feel painful? Perhaps through evolution, the brain evolved to be able to contain charges in a central processing unit, where things that maintain survival are stored and linked with a neutral charge and things that don’t maintain survival are stored and linked with a negative charge.

Do you really believe everything in the brain is a product of evolution? The brain has water in it, and water existed before evolution. The brain was built with water; the brain did not create water. Was the brain built with pain/pleasure also?

It is easy to believe that water existed before evolution because we see water all the time outside of evolved life. We are also able to see chemical/electrical reactions outside of evolved life. But pain and pleasure can only be subjectively experienced and can never be objectively detected. There is no way to prove that anyone other than yourself experiences pain or pleasure. You only make assumptions that just because someone else smiles or frowns in the same way that you do, that they also experience pain or pleasure similarly. For something to experience pain or pleasure, does it have to look similar to you or somehow communicate to you that it is experiencing pain or pleasure?

Do you tend to believe such things because your brain has been wired through evolution to focus so much on what you are able to sense and relate to, that you naturally don’t consider what you can’t sense or what you don’t relate to? Your brain naturally tends to understand things superficially, but its perception of the universe does not match the actual universe, which is hidden deeper than any brain will ever understand.

You can make more sense of this universe by focusing less on what you think you know, and focusing more on the possibilities enclosed within all you don’t know.

2

There are a great many varieties of mental experience beyond pleasure and pain. For example, right now I just imagined a purple firetruck with baby legs instead of wheels. It’s walking around and waving its ladder. Hello, purple firetruck!

Does this mean that baby-legged purple firetrucks must have some existence apart from a pattern of neurons firing in my brain? After all, how could my brain just create the experience of seeing a baby-legged purple firetruck out of thin air?

But this line of reasoning leads to the troubling conclusion that the universe must consist of a mammoth number of Platonic forms. Everything that is possibly conceivable must already exist as some sort of universal principle, otherwise we would be unable to conceive it.

A simpler explanation is that the brain is capable of producing the experience of a baby-legged purple firetruck without baby-legged purple firetrucks already existing as a universal principle. And if this is so, then the brain is also capable of producing the experience of pleasure or pain all by itself as well.

3

If you break up the idea of baby-legged purple firetrucks walking around, you will find a bunch of known concepts:

The legs of a baby
The color purple
Firetrucks
Walking

The brain did not create any of the above. You have sensed each of these things and stored them in the brain. The brain, which is wired to perform many logical tasks (like a computer), has the ability to combine anything it has stored. What things does it combine to form pain or pleasure?

I’m not saying it’s impossible that the brain can somehow create pain or pleasure. I’m just saying it doesn’t make as much sense as pain/pleasure being easily accessible before evolution and evolution building upon that to create the brain.

Show me the logic. How does the brain create pain or pleasure? What’s the formula for that? Or is that magical ability of the brain just something you blindly believe in?

4

In order to construct an example that I could communicate to you, I obviously had to pick something that could be described with words that you and I both share. However I can also imagine things for which there are no existing words.

The brain is wired in a way that is almost entirely different from a computer and humans are notoriously bad at performing logic.

Nothing, because that’s not how the brain works.

Occam’s razor. We know that the physical brain is involved in the production of the sensation of pleasure or pain. You’re proposing a sort of Platonism where pleasure and pain are not produced by the brain in isolation, but rather in conjunction with the influence of an external entity. However, since we don’t understand all the mechanics of how the brain goes about producing the experience of pleasure and pain, we’re better off starting from the premise that it does so in isolation and then only postulating additional entities when we hit a brick wall.

You say that pleasure and pain exist independently of their embodiment within physical brains. Okay, where’s the evidence for this claim?

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I don’t have evidence. I don’t think there’s evidence either way. But if I can get a better understanding of both sides, then I might be able to convince people that what I’m considering makes more sense.

The way I see it, is that everything a person imagines comes from:

  1. what is sensed and stored in the brain, or

  2. it is built upon the actual brain itself. The brain didn’t invent it; everything in the brain is rooted in the laws of nature, and the pre-evolved brain built upon something in the laws of nature. I’m saying that the pre-evolved brain didn’t start with nothing (it at least had some elements and some sunlight), it had a few head starts, and then evolved from there to hear better, see better, feel more, think more, run faster, etc.

An example of the 2nd part would be the feeling of existence: “I am.” I believe I feel “I am” because that which makes up my consciousness (matter/energy in the brain) exists, and the brain evolved in a way so that it is able to think about that existence. Without the structure of the brain around that matter/energy, I believe that matter/energy (like all matter/energy) would of course still exist, and would feel “I am”, but would not be able to think about that existence. Of course, no memories would be stored that I could access to understand the existence or form an identity. The only evidence I have of this is my own feeling of “I am”. If you feel “I am” also, you could try to follow my line of reasoning and let me know if the logic doesn’t add up (I’ve heard humans aren’t very good at logic…). Why would the brain completely INVENT the idea of existence, when it has proof of existence intrinsically rooted into its very being?

It makes sense to me to apply the same reasoning to the experiences of pain and pleasure. It’s a bit more questionable because it’s not as obvious to me that pain and pleasure is rooted in my very existence, as it is obvious to me that I do exist. But if the pre-evolved brain was able to tap into its own existence to build upon it to form an identity and memories, I wonder, what other intrinsic qualities of the matter/energy that composes “me” was the pre-evolved brain able to build upon? Perhaps the experiences of pain and pleasure.

Certain things we experience probably say more about matter and energy than they do about evolution. You can’t completely disregard the materials that started it all, that were around years before evolution started. Did “I am” completely form in a brain, or did it have some help from the fact that matter and light exist (and have existed long before evolution)?

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Why only pleasure and pain? Do you think those are the base yin and yang of all human feeling? Like maybe carbon is clingy and insecure, which is why it so readily forms compounds.

7

Interesting question…but why do certain people like to experience pain while having sex? Certain people seem to have some kind of “inversion”-they derive pleasure from pain, in sexual situations-what is the cause of this?

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Physical pain is the most basic form of pain, and the one that has existed longest in our evolutionary history. I assume social pain came next, then interpersonal, then psychic (the ability to reflect on pain in the past and potential pain the future). Obviously I’m making all these terms up but hear me out.

Life has existed for 3.8 billion years, bacteria have no feelings whatsoever they are just collections of molecules and metabolic processes (emotions come from the brain, mostly the mammalian brain). Of those years, multi-cellular life has only existed for 600 million. The first vertebrates came about around 500 million years ago. My understanding, and it could’ve changed based on new research, is that only vertebrates can feel physical pain in a way we would consider it pain.

That isn’t to say pain came into existence 500 million years ago, it could’ve been 300 or 200 or 400. Who knows for sure (I’m sure some neuroscientists know, but I don’t). But either way, in the 3.8 billion year history of life on earth, at minimum 90% of it was spent where life was incapable of any kind of pain. Life had impulses to engage in behavior that was pro-survival, but it wasn’t pain. I don’t know when pleasure evolved.

Social animals like mammals have more advanced emotions, the first mammals came about around 200 million years ago. Granted, the first more complex emotions they felt may not have occurred until 100 million years ago, again I don’t know. But assume if it was, that means that 97% of the history of life on earth occurred where life did not suffer from psychic or emotional pain.

In chemistry there is the fact that atoms and molecules want to get into a lower energy state. Organic life involves taking low energy molecules and building them into complex higher energy molecules, which we can do because we have the sun dumping endless trillions of kilojoules of energy on this planet which we use to engage in anabolic reactions and create molecules in a higher energy state than what is found in nature. Hence the fact that dead organic matter can be used as fuel in exothermic reactions (fossil fuels, or set fire to a dead animal). Pain is (by and large) a warning that you are engaging in behavior detrimental to your survival, which means the attempt to overcome the 2nd law of thermodynamics and create order out of disorder are failing. Granted we humans have tons of order above and beyond our biological order (our interpersonal, intrapersonal, social, etc forms of order, all of which can be torn apart very easily causing an existential crisis). So in that regards, there may be some kind of universal push and pull in the universe. Atoms want to enter a lower energy, more homogenous state; organic life wants to maintain a higher energy, more complex/organized state. The 2nd law of thermodynamics exists, but organic creatures use the energy of the sun to temporarily overcome it. In the long run chemistry wins though, buddha was right.

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Pain is a subjective experience and can’t be measured or observed objectively. Your belief that pain came into existence about 500 million years ago is based only on faith. Just because someone hooks a person/rat/whatever up to some machine and analyzes which parts of the brain react when the person/rat is hurt, doesn’t mean that that part of the brain is necessary for something to feel pain. The pain is just one part that can be associated with whatever part of the brain is lighting up on the machine’s monitor. Believing that the brain causes pain is like putting a gear into a clock to make it work, and then saying that apparently you need a clock in order to have a gear. The matter and energy that makes up that part of the brain is fairly similar to other matter and energy; there’s no reason other matter and energy wouldn’t experience pain or pleasure also. Humans are wired with a superficial biasness to only be able to emphasize with other things that look like them. You should put your biasness aside when investigating these things.

I don’t think organic life wants to maintain a more complex state. I think that out of all the variation of organic life, the organic life that happens to maintain a more complex state outlasts the organic life that doesn’t happen to maintain a more complex state. Throughout evolution, the different variations of matter may have been built atop the core energy that experiences pain and pleasure, or is able to move away pain and towards pleasure. That core energy exists in the organic life (me, you, etc.) that happened to be best at maintaining a complex state, but it has also existed in all variations that did not happen to be as good at maintaining a complex state, including the variations at the very beginning of evolution.

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It isn’t based on faith to say pain came into existence sometime around 300-500 million years ago. Physical pain requires a relatively complex central nervous system and nociceptors. Organic life didn’t have those things for the vast majority of its history, and even today the vast vast vast majority of life and biomass do not have these things and does not feel any kind of pain.

Emotional pain mostly comes from the limbic system of the mammalian brain (but has roles in other parts of the brain too). It isn’t somewhere in the ether. Organisms that do not have mammalian brains with limbic systems do not feel complex emotional pain.

There are health disorders that make you immune to pain. People with congenital analgesia do not feel physical pain. Sociopaths generally do not feel emotional pain (depression, remorse, shame, fear, guilt, anxiety, loneliness, etc). A sociopath with congenital analgesia will feel little to no pain their entire life.

And to claim pain can’t be measured isn’t true. You can do brain scans of people in pain and determine what areas are activated. You can use analgesics to alleviate emotional and physical pain. Since physical pain evolved first and emotional pain came second, there is overlap in the brain about how these forms of pain are processed. That is why a lot of recreational drugs were originally designed and used as anesthetics (alcohol, cocaine, ether, heroin, dissocatives, nitrous oxide, tranquilizers, etc). They kill physical and emotional pain. If you are in physical and emotional pain, then take a bunch of opioids, your physical and emotional pain will lessen if not totally go away. There are even studies showing taking OTC NSAIDS for physical pain like tylenol will lessen emotional pain for the same reason, the brain areas overlap.

This isn’t faith, this is neuroscience. I don’t see why you are writing what I said off as faith. And you have far more bias than anyone here. You started with the concept that emotions come from the ether, have nothing to back it up, don’t explain why ‘emotions’ exist in the ether, don’t explain how our brain can process them out of the ether, and write off anything that disagrees with it.

Do you have any evidence that our emotions exist in the ether, and our brains just let us experience them?

Pain is unpleasant. It is meant to be, it means we will do almost anything to avoid it. It isn’t fair or humane, but the universe is amoral.

Organic life is a complex state. That is why carcasses and organic matter can be used as a source of energy. Coal, natural gas, oil, wood, animal dung, etc. You are taking factors from the environment (sunlight, atmospheric gases, water, nutrients) and turning them into higher energy molecules. That is life.

Pain is mostly a sign we are doing things that are detrimental to our survival in one way or another. Granted that is a simplistic explanation.

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I don’t think that positing that pain and pleasure are intrinsic properties at the atomic level answers anything. What explanatory power does the hypothesis that pain/pleasure is an intrinsic property have? OTOH it certainly creates lots of questions; how that property is tapped into by the brain and how/why evolution ever appropriated it, and how that property is stored and relayed implies additional physics that at this time we have no evidence for at all.

The much simpler explanation right now is that brains “make” pain and pleasure (and all other subjective experience). But it’s true we have no idea how this is possible right now.

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If a large majority of people believed that pain came from the ether, then I would be arguing that the brain creates pain. I don’t know either and I have no evidence for either. But I have no reason to believe one over the other. I think, of course, the brain plays a huge part of what we experience, but I also think there’s a chance that some parts of our experiences are intrinsically engrained in what you are calling the ether. All existence must be rooted in the ether, and it’s a question of structured form vs. parts: if you break me up into my smallest parts, do each of the parts still exist, do they still experience gravity… any question can be applied to this, to see what was formed through evolution and what evolution built upon. Evolution is very complex, so if there are qualities of the ether that evolution built on, it would be very difficult for us to see or detect those parts, because those parts are much smaller than the product of evolution, which is more complex and easier for a complex, evolved body to detect.

I’m really just arguing against people jumping to conclusions about subjective phenomenon. Maybe people want to understand so badly what’s happening, that they can’t help but jump to a conclusion when there’s evidence that only proves some association.

I have no problem saying that I have no evidence and don’t know that pain came from the ether. But I still have no reason to believe it was completely created by the brain. The two are just as likely to me. For the arguments you mention about the studies done on the brain, you can just refer back to what I said about the gear and the clock.

13

The technical term for what you’re calling “pleasure and pain” and a whole host of other things (such as “redness”) is “qualia”. It’s a really slippery concept, and a lot of fascinating philosophical discussions surround it. I suggest you google it and read a few classic thought experiments like the zombie argument and the knowledge argument, and come back and discuss them. The wikipedia articles look pretty good to me.

I’m fascinated by the difference between mind and brain, which is what I think you’re touching on here. The staunch materialist says there’s no distinction. The dualist says they’re entirely different. IMHO the truth is that they’re both missing something: that the mind is an emergent phenomenon created by the brain (google “emergentist” … I’m not sure I agree with all of what wikipedia says about that, but it’s pretty close.)

The bottom line is that it’s very difficult to do objective studies about qualia, since qualia exist only as subjective phenomena. Of course, we can correlate qualia to brain states using things like funcitonal MRI, but that doesn’t mean that the qualia “are” the brain states (as the philsophical arguments I mentioned above try to illuminate).

Your attribution of qualia to intrinsic properties of the universe (i.e., “ether” as Wesley Clark so nicely puts it) is one resolution to the “homunculus” infinite regression problem. (Again, google that. To put it briefly, a homunculus is some observer in the brain to give rise to the self’s sense of observations. But when we try to look into the homunculus, we find we need to invent another homunculus to explain the subjective experience. And as the saying goes, “it’s turtles all the way down!”) One classic solution to this is to embue the universe with some fundamental that is the direct cause of qualia. (No doubt there’s a term for this but it eludes me.)

I seriously doubt that solution. I’m much more comfortable using a tool that applies at so many levels of physical reality: emergence. Subatomic phenomena give rise to atomic phenonmena which give rise to chemical phenomena which can give rise to biological phenomena. Each higher level utterly depends on and is created by the lower level, but gives rise to phenomena that aren’t terribly meaningful to talk about while restricting oneself to the lower level. It will never make sense to discuss psychology in terms of quantum dynamics, even though psychology is utterly dependent on and created by them.

14

One reason I reject intrinsic qualia is that there is no limit to the number of possible qualia. So, if there is an intrinsic, it has to be a “subjectivity” intrinsic that’s extendable to cover an arbitrarily large number of different, discrete, atomic qualia.

For example, we have qualia for colors. There seems to be a fixed set of primary qualia, many of which can be mixed in our brains to provide smooth gradients (but some of which cannot be mixed to provide gradients: you cannot have yellowish blue without going through green). So far, no problem with having a fixed set of inherent “qualions”.

But consider the pigeon. Ignoring rods, we have 3 color receptors, wired together in a way that produces the kinds of sensations we have (and could be wired differently to produce rather different sensations, but that’s beside the point). Some pigeons have 5.

Compared to pigeons, we’re color-blind. They can see more primary colors and distinguish vastly more different shades than we can. There are a number of different polychromatic colors that look the same to us, that the pigeon sees quite differently. There is every reason to suspect that the pigeon is not limited to the human’s relative paucity of qualia for color. I suspect it’s even mathematically possible to show that they must have more qualia than we have in order to make these distinctions (if we grant them qualia at all).

So, either there are no intrinsics, or else the intrinsics are arbitrarily expandable, or else pigeons don’t have qualia (and it would be impossible for humans to evolve into beings with more sophisticated color preception).

If the intrinsics are arbitrarily expandable, then what does that make them? There clearly isn’t a particle for pain and a particle for pleasure. So what is this particle? a particle for observation/experience?

I don’t think a reasonable explanation of the universe demands such a particle, so I don’t tend to posit it.

15

My problem with that is that subjective consciousness is a tiny, tiny, microscopic aspect of the universe. The vast majority of the universe contains no biology, and even of the biology that does exist (that we know of) the vast majority does not have subjective consciousness capable of experiencing pain or pleasure.

So to claim there is something in the ether that was sitting, waiting for our brains to evolve to the point where it can tap into it doesn’t make sense to me. That is like a single grain of sand on a single planet in a single solar system thinking the entire solar system has something devoted solely to it. Why would the universe have emotions like pain or pleasure? The universe is 99.999999999999999999999999999% free of biology capable of subjective emotions.

Again, the only thing I can think of that would be comparable in chemistry and physics is low energy states in chemistry (although there could be other things, I don’t know a lot about physics and the 4 forces). Atoms and molecules are attracted to low energy states and repulsed by high energy states. If two hydrogen atoms meet, they bond and form H2 because that is a lower energy state. If two helium atoms meet they don’t bond because it isn’t a lower energy state for them to do so.

So in that regard, attraction and repulsion exists in chemistry. And attraction and repulsion exists in biology as pain and pleasure. We are attracted (by and large, our brains are fairly advanced and can create various contradictory philosophies where one impulse goes against another. Dying for your country as an example, or sadomasochistic sex) to what helps us survive and repulsed by what doesn’t. But I don’t think that is the same thing.

Point is, you could be right. Subjective experience could somehow exist in the universe, and our brains just tap into it. But in that case there are likely an infinite number of subjective experiences, and our brains just tap into a tiny slice of it. But evenso, a reason I reject that is just because the vast majority of the universe is just chemistry and physics and devoid of biology (as far as we know, SETI hasn’t gotten and responses to its calls and I don’t think any signs of microbe life has been found). Subjective experience is a very rare part of the universe, I’d assume less than trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of all the mass in the universe is capable of subjective experience.

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Learjeff:

I’m glad people have considered these sorts of things. Maybe I’ll look into reading what others have considered when I have time.

I can’t make sense of pain or pleasure at a low or high level, so I’m not able to use emergence. I don’t see any direct relation between any biological phenomena and pain (or pleasure). The evaluations made in a brain, that end up letting one impulse take control over another, should be able to occur without pain or pleasure, and are therefore possible to have no relation to pain or pleasure.

Wesley:

I agree that, as far as we can tell, the universe probably contains very little biology. But I don’t think you need biology for pain or pleasure. You might need something like biology to “think” about your existence, but you certainly don’t need it to exist or whatever subjective experiences might come with that existence.

What I’ve been thinking about doesn’t have anything to do with something in the ether sitting, waiting for a brain to evolve to the point where it can tap into it. I’m thinking that the phenomenon of pain and pleasure might be something that’s fairly common throughout the universe, like a positive charge being pleasure and a negative charge being pain.

“Why would the universe have emotions like pain or pleasure?”

I’m not aware of any reason for the universe or for just certain creatures of the Earth to have pain or pleasure. Incoming data from several sensory devices can be stored and compared to cause movement without an experience of pain or pleasure. For example, people have argued that roaches don’t experience pain or pleasure. What can a human do that a roach can’t? Both of them eat, drink, breed, and run away from harm. A human can make decisions; if you believe a roach can’t, then how could a roach be modified to be able to make a decision? I don’t think it’s that difficult. You just store some pictures somewhere in the roach, and instead of just looking outward for food, program the roach to also look at those stored pictures. Show the roach a skittle and then hide the sight/smell of the skittle from the roach and place another skittle twice as far away, but within the roach’s sight/smell. The roach will look around and see/smell the skittle in front of it, and will also look at the stored pictures of the skittle. It will do some calculations to determine that the skittle in the stored pictures is closer, so it will choose to go to that skittle.

All evolution needs to do to create this evolved species of roach, is for roaches that are able to maintain light better, to outlast roaches that aren’t as good at maintaining light–over time, the ability of memory will form. Then the two signals (there’s food in front of me vs. there’s food hidden behind something behind me) will clash. Numerous roaches will react to these clashing signals in a variety of ways, but those who stay in place to allow the signals to dance for a while, where the “there’s food hidden behind something behind me” signal ends up winning out and causing the response of turning around to get to that food–those roaches will outlast the others, because that food is closer.

There’s probably good reasons that roaches did not evolve to “think” that much about things, while rats did. Just because a rat or human thinks, does that mean that the human feels pain and the roach does not? Or does it just mean that the human is able to remember pain while the roach is not able to remember the pain it experiences?

Is pain caused by one impulse going against another? Or is it possible for a single impulse to cause pain? And, even if pain is caused by one impulse going against another, isn’t it common in the universe for energy to clash into other energy? Is that a painful experience? If not, what exactly is the difference between that experience and the experience of the clashing impulses in the brain?

From my roach example above:

Say, a roach does not experience pain or pleasure.

The main difference between a roach and a human is that a human can store what is sensed and access it later so that it clashes with what is currently sensed or with other stored images. (This is what we call “thinking”.)

It is easy to explain (by only mentioning impulses, responses, stored images, etc., without mentioning pain or pleasure) the evolutionary process that transforms a roach into something that can store what is sensed and access it later so that it clashes with what is currently sensed or with other stored images.

From this, we see that:

It is not necessary to introduce an experience of pain to get from a roach to a “thinking” roach.

Therefore:

It makes sense that pain was not created during the evolution of the brain. Instead, pain existed before the evolution of the brain. Roaches (and perhaps things less complex than roaches) feel pain.

17

Qualia are what a self-aware program feels like from the inside.

18

Evidently I didn’t do a very good job of explaining.

First, about emergence, though that’s a bit of a side track here. The emergent phenomena are based entirely on phenomena that exist at a “lower level”, but which seem to be completely new and unrelated stuff. You don’t get chemistry from “lower chemistry”, but from atomic physics, and you don’t get atomic physics from “lower atomic physics”, but from quantum mechanics. At each level, the phenomena look very different from the underlying cause.

More to the point. The evaluations in the brain that cause behavior do occur without pain or pleasure when looked at from outside the brain. They don’t cause pleasure or pain no matter how far you zoom in, either.

But, to the consciousness that is created by the brain, pleasure and pain occur, just as do blue and green and hot and cold and any other kind of sensory experience.

To the objective observer, the subjective experience is entirely unnecessary, up to a point (which I’ll get to below). I’ve often wondered: if it’s possible to have an understanding intelligence without any subjective experience, and if that intelligence studied intelligence, would it ever discover the existence of the subjective experience? I confess I have no answer to that. From an objective viewpoint, there may not need to be any such thing, and we only know it exists because we experience it ourselves! (It could go the other way too … interesting in either case, IMHO.)

My point is that there are two entirely different points of view when observing brain states. One is the objective point of view. There is no sensation, just signals that help direct behavior. Pain has a purpose but not a feeling.

The other is the subjective point of view: what it’s like to BE the brain (or more aptly, the consciousness created by the brain). In this case, we have pain. Do we need pain? Probably not: what we need is anything that strongly motivates us to avoid the pain, even despite strong contradictory objectives. Well, the subjective experience of pain meets that criteria, but IMHO doesn’t seem a-priori necessary. Nonetheless, it’s what we feel, and it does the job.

Back to “up to a point” mentioned above. Once we start writing poetry and talking about qualia, that intelligence without subjective experience might get a clue that there’s something to study. However, it might just conclude, “Yeah, they do talk that way. They’re just rationalizing their behavior.”

My suspicion is that it’s not possible to have an understanding intelligence devoid of any subjective experience. Wild guess on my part, quite possibly wrong.

Bingo! :slight_smile:

19

The OP is concerned with pain and pleasure. The thinking comes close to self-discovery. These concepts are not the same in all people because people are unique. What may to pleasurable to a teenager like loud music is only pain to me.

Not much talk about consciousness or the “mind” whatever that is to different people. The brain is just to small to carry all the concepts in the world. Man is much greater than the simple brain. Pain and pleasure happen in the mind or consciousness which is separate from the brain.

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Except we can remove the feelings of pleasure/pain by removing/damaging parts of the brain. Remove or suppress the specific cells needed to process pain inputs, and viola, no pain. It’s like having a powered toy, and you ask the question ‘Where does the power come from?’ Well, when you remove the batteries the toy now lacks power. Given this is seems fairly obvious that the power came from the batteries.

I don’t see how you can separate the mind from the brain, when without the brain, there is no evidence of existence of the mind.