Thread: How to control what you see, stop feeling pain... How to learn doing things that are not natural

I know it's not core to the thread's purpose, but I really have to argue against your ideas about pain. Maybe there is potential for a better system to exist, but I think that giving us a sense that something is "wrong" but it isn't as intrusive or can simply be ignored is a very poor model to run off of for survival. Pain is not merely a hindrance. Your ideas about it seem to rely heavily on the assumption that we will always be civilized and that society doesn't have a chance of failing, and in a way it also assumes that children can and do have the perspective of adults when it comes to pain.

Let's start with my point about children. If pain were merely a signal that alerts us to something, but it isn't intrusive, bad, or downright what we experience as painful, how would children effectively learn to be safe? They would depend on role models and mentors entirely when it comes to learning safe practices, which assumes there will always be a role model or mentor. Teenagers, for instance, even with pain being as powerful of a deterrent as it is, still engage in very risky behavior. Employ your suggested system of pain and imagine the results. Children only know not to touch the stove again after doing the it the first time and experiencing pain and a lasting burn. They don't need to be told over and over not to touch it if they actually wind up touching one. Your system allows curiosity and desire to trump doing something that can destroy your body and even kill you. People also like to do things they are told not to, the whole forbidden fruit thing. The only reason people don't wind up doing things that are guaranteed or have a very high risk of causing them pain when told not to (as they get older) is because they already know how much they dislike pain and how awful it is. Ignoring all this, if you start with a clean slate and have to learn everything about getting hurt yourself, the danger everything poses cannot possibly be understood without a previous understanding of what dangerous actions can result. You are set up, in that case, to fail. The only thing that we know of that can bridge the gap of that lack of understanding is the discomfort pain causes.

The bit about society possibly failing is also tied into the concept about children. We could regress so far that we wind up having to learn to do things by ourselves again by simple experience, and without anyone to teach us anything. Not only that, but we wouldn't have the medical prowess, nor the technology to correct whatever issues come up as a result of this essentially impact-less system of pain you propose. Humans are honestly barely out of the jungle, and society is incredibly fragile. It's a big mistake to assume things will always be good enough that we can afford to make pain essentially painless, and simply have it as a somewhat annoying pop up that we can simply dismiss. A better system is actually one we already use--drugs. We can interrupt pain signals (opioids), interfere with the ability to sense pain at all (dissociative anesthetics), and even simply induce an unconscious state to get through the pain (anesthetics, etc.). Better yet, we can't simply abuse this system and use it whenever we want--withdrawal effects or other complications (cognitive deficits that take possibly weeks to go away, as with dissociatives) prevent us from being able to engage in every risky behavior we simply feel like because we can simply make the pain go away. And that there is the biggest issue with doing away with pain as we know it: as with just about everything humans do, we will take things too far. It would be far too easy to engage in risky behavior, simply because the only downside is possibly losing your limbs, being maimed, or death. That, and the prolonged inability to function properly as a result of the number of broken bones and everything that will go up as a result of this reduced punishment for being risky. Making it easy to forgo safety is just a bad idea.

Originally Posted by snoop

I know it's not core to the thread's purpose, but I really have to argue against your ideas about pain...

You are of course right and I agree with the absolutely largest part. I've phrased my opinion much too simple and focused to stand up against this form of criticism. Most importantly I forgot to mention that one of the primary premises for a pain system as I have described it is a mental state similar to mine in certain regards. I personally have no need whatsoever to have any pain system tell me I maybe should consider not breaking my arm, because I'm fully aware of just how much I need my arm, and my body in general to function. For me an error message would do everything that pain does, and even more beyond that. "Deep cut. Minor blood loss. Infection danger." would be all I need to hear to immediately take care of the wound. But yeah, this isn't gonna just work for everyone if you'd suddenly invoke it in every human right now, obviously.

People that do stupid stuff for stupid reasons weren't really accounted for in my original equation. Though to be honest... maybe it would be good to have them be able to freely be idiotic without pain in their ways as a way of natural selection, because humans have completely taken out nature's way of selecting individuals and progressing evolution. Quite frankly though in terms of reproduction and perpetuation of traits I have to say that both nature and humans handle it in atrociously inefficient ways right now. Harsh natural selection is good at mustering out any overly bad short term mutation, as such are an instant death spell in nature. Neither hunter nor pray animals will be able to survive without properly working legs for example, or some crippling genetic disease. The immediate dispatching of such individuals prevents those bad traits from propagating.
But this system is inherently cruel, of course humans would strive to get away from it. And it does nothing to fix smaller long term bugs in design either. Take the muscle that controls your vocal folds for example, I'm sure it was the recurrent laryngeal nerve. It travels down to your heart before going upwards to your vocal folds. That's stupid design, and nature's natural selection isn't ever going to be fixing.

Humans don't do it better either. We've taken out the whole cruel survival of the fittest problem, instead we've added the issue of no selection at all. Humans just breed where they want, how they want and with whom they want. And if babies are born they will be kept alive at any cost and the resulting humans can reproduce in any way they want again. Genetic diseases and countless smaller and larger issues are almost completely free to propagate through the human species, which isn't good. It's not good at all. I understand that people have a desire to reproduce with loved ones, as sex and reproduction are just deeply linked. I understand the desire to not ever have anything die. Still I really think mankind should start paying organized attention to how we reproduce. I think having to live today with many families that have children that aren't 100% related by blood to their parents and are results of planned reproduction is a very little price to pay for having much more healthy and as such also happy future generations. It doesn't seem like humans are anywhere near being ready for this though.
I'm going off on tangents again.

And obviously children wouldn't work without pain. We are born outstandingly stupid and we only get a slight chance to get intelligent as we grow up, a chance few people seem to make use of. The absence of pain would be... exactly as you said, problematic. In order to get rid of physical pain completely from the start we'd have to change so substantially we'd hardly be human anymore. Not that that'd be a bad thing but it's nothing any of us has to worry about today either way.

Which brings me back to the topic, as of today you can only learn to subvert pain permanently and without repercussions through painstaking mental self-exploration and exercise. Which probably is a good thing, because completely safe pain killers would be problematic I guess.