Quote Originally Posted by snoop View Post
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.