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WrongBot comments on Rationality Quotes: July 2010 - Less Wrong
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Sure. The analogy to computers is not a perfect one, because brains don't function like modern computer operating systems. My objection to pain is not that it is uninformative, it's that it's overwhelmingly unpleasant even when we do not wish it to be.
Yes, it can inflict more harm by forcing you into suboptimal decisions. Shame can be alike too. So, I vote for insect-like shame and pain processing, I've mentioned in grandparent.
There are cases of people with no sense of pain. Here's an article about it:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_25_170/ai_n26713199/
...and a link to the primary it references, if you have a subscription to Nature:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7121/full/nature05413.html
A relevant quote from the review:
"The team's first research subject, a 10-year-old boy, was well known in his community for street performances in which he placed knives through his arms and walked on hot coals. Despite tissue damage, he apparently felt no discomfort."
Other mutants for the same gene were similar -- they generally enjoyed showing off their lack of pain by deliberately injuring themselves. One killed himself by jumping off a roof, I believe just after the above article was published (sorry, I'm not really sure where I read that). Living without pain is generally an unhealthy idea. Without visceral negative feedback, humans don't place value on bodily integrity and tend to self-terminate, which is probably why those mutants are incredibly rare.
Perhaps once aversion reactions have been formed, knocking out pain receptors would be a good thing. I'd certainly be curious to see if people still avoid injuring themselves if they lose the ability to feel pain AFTER they've experienced it all their lives.
They don't. People who develop pain asymbolia from various insults to the brain are not strongly motivated to avoid pain. (And these are people who have functioning nociception, unlike the family described in the article you link.)
Yeah, knocking out pain receptors in children seems like a very bad idea. Pain is unnecessarily harsh if you already have a strong interest in preserving your body; then all you really need is to know that you're doing something bad to yourself, and that's more than enough reason to stop. But for those who are not yet sufficiently rational, like (most) children, it's probably not something to be messed with without serious consideration.
It sounds like that kid has some of the worst parents in human history. How do you let your kid get a reputation for self-mutilation and not, y'know, stop him?
Stop your child from getting status for himself and your family? Inconceivable!
Knocking out nociceptors? It's not what I thought about. Knocking them out reduce available infomation to make decisions. I meant deliberate suppression of goal-shifting and brain resource allocation effects of nociceptors activity (in a sense proposed by Marvin Minsky). It is hard to evaluate effects of this change on child's pain aversion behavior, but I can hypothesize that this kind of pain control could be ineffective until "central executive" is sufficiently developed.
Edit: In the case of mild pain this way of dealing with it can be exercised on our current brainware.