I didn’t think this would be objective enough for GQ so I decided to post it here.
Unless you have a syndrome which prevents pain from being transmitted to the brain, or damaged nerve endings, you can feel pain. And for 99% of people it doesn’t feel good. You’ve probably never carried a hot bowl and said to yourself “I’ll just walk for 10 more seconds, put it on the table and then deal with the pain” Once the pain becomes unbearable you’ll let go instantly.
Evolutionary science says that pain is to help us prevent injury to ourselves. This is done when nerves pick up a strong stimulus , send it to the brain and the brain interprets this as pain.
But my question is why is this so uncomfortable? Why is it that no matter what age, gender, race, life circumstance, pain overrides the brains willpower? Could one train themselves to ignore pain?
Of course you can choose to ignore pain; otherwise there would be nobody with a tattoo.
But it’s difficult, and the greater the pain the more the difficulty. But this is a feature, not a bug. In general, to be evolutionarily successful it helps if you don’t ignore pain. And therefore evolution selects those who’s experience of pain is difficult to ignore.
And if the purpose of pain is to tell us something is wrong, then why must it persist after we’ve gotten the message? Why do we need a constant reminder? Why must a toothache continue after we’ve made the dental appointment?
A related question is the intersection of pain and pleasure: people who eat extremely spicy foods, or people who stab or cut themselves or pick their scabs. And actual masochists, though masochism is much more nuanced than simply confusing pain and pleasure; to a masochist pain is contextual, involving intent.
Dental appointment making hasn’t been part of evolutionary pressure for long enough, and there may be no path of evolution from our current system to one where toothache’s vanish once you’ve made the appointment and only returns if you miss it.
One of the first things an athletic person has to do is learn the difference between pain that’s telling you that you’re damaging yourself and should stop, and pain that you work through because it’s just there. You can ignore both, though, to your detriment - but maybe the team’s gain!
The ever popular “Are you hurt or are you INJURED?”
I get migraines, sometimes badly enough that I start vomiting and wish for death. I can’t sleep or eat or do much of anything, so I lay and zone out for a while. I am not asleep, time is passing and I am hyper aware of the pain, but I sort of exist within it. Hard to explain and it’s less about ignoring the pain, more about yielding to it.
I get migraine pain also and I do the same thing, a zen-like compartmentalizing of the pain.
If we didn’t have pain no one would try to avoid dangerous things. Everyone would be intentionally or unintentionally destroying their numb little meat bags. Just putting your hand on a hot burner could get you killed if you didn’t realize you were doing it until you had burned your hand off. Which could then lead to a painless infection that got into your blood.
Emotional pain is similar. We’re designed to protect our kids lest me feel the pain of losing them. The same goes for family and community.
Pleasure is a reward system. Probably because without it we wouldn’t ever have kids that we’ll spend the rest of our lives worrying about. Lol Pleasure and pain go together as you can’t have one without the other. If your trying to survive the wilderness and your hunger causes you no pain and the fish you ate gives you no reward, what is left?
Although you are technically correct, in ordinary language it’s okay to use language like “purpose” and even “design” regarding evolutionary features. Stephen Jay Gould defended this, so long as it’s non-academic and non-technical discussion.
Eyes are “made to see.” Pain is “designed” to prevent us from doing various things.
So long as nobody takes this to actual “intelligent design,” then meh. This isn’t a university symposium.
Because you didn’t listen to what the pain was telling you and probably damaged part of the body that the pain was trying to warn you not to damage. Nature doesn’t know that in the long run, the dental work is preventing more damage to your teeth and face.
Evolution doesn’t mean creating perfect machines. There is evolutionary advantage to having pain warn you about impending damage. Not so much with having the pain stop.
For the first question, the pain persists because making an appointment with the dentist doesn’t count as actually doing something about it. Getting the dental work done does count.
For the second question, the brain can be tricked into feeling one type of pain and lessening the other because it can’t focus on both pains at the same time.
I don’t think Nava’s claim is technically correct, I think it’s wrong.
There’s a confusion here between two distinct meanings of purpose.
(1) The reason something exists;
(2) An intention or objective, entailing thought, desire and the power to act.
I don’t think anyone would claim that there’s anything wrong with saying The purpose of the heart is to pump blood
That’s sense (1). It doesn’t require a discussion of whether the heart came about through conscious design or otherwise to justify it.
Trinpopus’ point about the anthropomorphization of evolution (more specifically natural selection) and the pitfalls therein only concerns sense (2), thus:
Natural selection designed an incredibly efficient heart
That’s seems like a valid anthropomorphization.
The purpose of natural selection is to design progressively more efficient hearts with each generation
That’s sense (2) of “purpose”, and obviously this is mistaken, taking the anthropomorphization too far - natural section does not have intention or foresight.
Why is there a requirement for an unpleasant conscious subjective experience? Why not just hook up a direct link from the nerve endings that sense the potential damage to the motor functions that move us out of danger, without requiring a subjective unpleasant sensation? After all, simpler creatures without complex brains do work this way.
I think the answer is that it’s better for our survival to have our sophisticated problem-solving brain sit in the middle, between sensation and motor action. The nervous system sends our brain a very strong signal that it needs to make a decision urgently, and to weight things heavily in favor of the “obvious” rectifying reaction - this weighting is achieved by the subjective “pain” experience - but to allow our brains to override the “obvious” rectifying action under complex extenuating circumstances. If you get a serious cut on your foot - strong signal to stop and rest, let it heal; but if a predator is nearby, override the pain, just run.
As for why pain lingers, that’s more tricky. Perhaps again it’s a question of weighting the brain’s decision making correctly - perhaps we make better decisions when the persistent nagging pain “warns” the brain of the potential damage if the brain does decide to ignore the pain signal. But then perhaps it’s just an unfortunate side effect of how the whole thing is wired up. Not everything is an adaptation.
Yielding to it and accepting it, or ignoring it? My own “trick” is to go to bed, cover my eyes, and not move. But your triage nurse “Are you hurt or are you INJURED?” question is correct, as I’m never more than a few hours of shuteye away from health.
I’ve found that, at my job, doing a lousy job is less painful than lying at home, asleep. A crappy job with 0 expectations pays better.
Yes, but for pain to stop because you’ve already taken measures would require pain to be conscious that you’ve taken measures. Very often the problem with imprecise language is that even if we intellectually understand the precise meaning, the assumptions trip us, or that multiple meanings get mixed.
Agreed…and agreed. Evolution isn’t intelligent, and never came up with an “off switch” for pain, even though it would be in our best interests if there were one.
(Well, sorta. Nature arranged for us to pass out – sometimes – from really severe pain. Kind of an off switch. Doesn’t always work…)
