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kpreid comments on Pain - Less Wrong
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Please don't take me as having thought this through thoroughly...
I did not intend for that description to be considered outside the person. All of what you're describing are plans the person or animal themselves would disagree with (if they could), yes?
Here's a different statement of roughly the same idea: "My excess pain is bad because it interferes with what I want to do, without benefiting anyone else."
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're doing. Your criteria seems to set a standard for determining which pain is bad, and that criteria I would agree with. The pain that's bad is the pain beyond that necessary to send a useful signal.
What I interpreted Alicorn as asking was why pain is bad in the first place. A lot of things can be useless, for example a tune that keeps playing in your head, but useless pain seems to be worse than useless anything else because of something especially bad about pain. Even from an intrapersonal perspective, I can't agree that pain is all about goals. Consider the following thought experiment:
I offer you two choices for tomorrow. Option one: I will torture you for six hours, using a method that is very painful but will leave no lasting scars or aftereffects, and you can spend the rest of the day doing whatever you want. Option two: I will give you a sedative that causes you to sleep through all of tomorrow: you will wake up the day after tomorrow.
If the only problem with pain was that it interferes with things people want to do, then everyone should take Option 1 without a second thought: the pain interferes with what they want to do for six hours, and then they can spend the rest of the day free. But I would take Option 2 (would you?) suggesting that there is more to the negative value of pain than simple inability to do things while you're experiencing it.
I have no particular well-structured reply to this. Miscellaneous thoughts.
Indeed. Pain causes operant conditioning; removing the operant conditioning makes the pain be something very unlike pain. In fact, according to a theory I vaguely remember, the idea of pain is, to a great extent, a rationalization of aversion: "I don't want to do X. I guess I don't want to do it because it will cause me pain." If this vague rememberance were completely true, it wouldn't be pain at all. But this vague rememberance ignores the fact that we know whether we're in pain or not at the time we are or not in pain.