Comment on Pain

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:07:37 GMT

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.

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