Hmm hmm.

I've had bad pain. I've had non-bad pain (the feeling of wiggling a tooth as a child). I've had bad non-pain (the feeling of bumping the nerve in your elbow). I think I can pick pain apart.

• It's hurty. This is the least important part. Just a sensation, not even unpleasant on its own.

• It's loud. Even small amounts shout over everything else.

• It's intrusive. You can't will it away. About the most you can do is match its intensity and drown it out.

• And finally it makes you want to pull away. It's a flinch, abstracted. I suspect this is the "primitive op". All animal life flinches, even stuff too simple to have a brain. Since this is an abstract demand, you can't satisfy it.

So, you are being overwhelmed by an insistent demand to pull away from the pain, and it's not letting you pull away, all overlaid with a loud sensation that won't reduce - this is why pain causes something of a cognitive crash. Also explains my other experiences above. Non-bad pain doesn't demand a flinch, so as with the tooth it tempts you to increase it. Bad non-pain is loud and demands a flinch, it's just not hurty.

Given all that, what's bad about pain? I'd say the insistence and the inability to satisfy the flinch.

What we should do once we have supertech: first, make it not insistent at all, because as humans we're capable of thinking of strategies and sometimes "jerk my hand out of the box and ignore the Gom Jabbar" is a bad strategy. Second, make it satisfiable. "I bashed my thumb, but the hammer isn't coming back, so hush".