The Evolution of Pleasure and Pain | Hacker News Reader

The Evolution of Pleasure and Pain

nautil.us

105 pointsdnetesn35 comments

Pain and pleasure may not be as distinct as common sense assumes. The purpose of both seems to be to draw one's attention.

A simple example would be eating chilli which is painful the first time. After one has learnt to enjoy it then the experience becomes pleasurable.

More controversially perhaps is when I stub my toe these days. Instead of yelling and hopping around the room I try to transfer as much of my attention to the affected toe as I possibly can. I won't say it feels exactly nice now but it's a heck of a lot better than when I was a kid trying to distract myself from the pain.

It seems plausible that if one could get very proficient at paying attention then the experience might be comparable to a highly intense pleasure (a pleasure too intense to be comfortable, at least to begin with).

The french call orgasm "la petite mort", or "the little death."

Indeed - extreme pleasure and pain approach each other in many ways.

"Passion" comes from the word for suffering - so also is an emotion that has strong elements of pain.

A good thing to remember when you are hurting.

> chili

More precisely, peppers get their flavor from stimulating the pain receptors on the tongue. Somehow, this morphs into pleasure.

Probably has something to do with endogenous morphine.

>How does consciousness emerge out of nerve cells? Well, it doesn’t. You’re not dealing with the brain alone.

I'm not sure that this gives any real insight. Perhaps some other types of cells in the body are also involved in creating consciousness, but then the question is "How does consciousness emerge out of cells?".

Saying the brain is "just a computer" understates the complexity of computers with arbitrary software. Just because the brain (and any other cells involved) isn't implemented as a simple Turing machine, it doesn't follow that it does anything that couldn't be alternatively implemented using a simple Turing machine.

I dislike the title here: Pain isn't necessary. The path evolution took - why pain exists makes sense - but the author's statement in the title is absurd.

I can easily imagine a future where we have obsoleted pain as a communication channel. Pain is a neurological version of a healthcheck system and not even a particularly good one; it's slow, has no off or way to silence false reports, and lacks context. Pain doesn't tell you what the problem is; only that there is a problem. Any engineer who had to deal with such a low-bandwidth protocol would be complaining about it loudly.

Pain is not necessary. And I hope it is replaced soon.

More importantly pain in chronic cases may be only a sign of neurological deficiencies rather than an indicator of anything in particular.

I'd argue having an easy way to snooze the alarm would lead to more health damage than dealing with acute pain promptly (i.e. burst appendix is something you really need to take care of now, not when it's most convenient).

However, I agree on having an off switch for chronic pain would probably be better than what we have now.

As someone who has dealt with chronic nerve disorders for the better part of a decade, I can tell you that numbness is preferable to raw chronic neuropathic pain.

I'm not gonna say you're wrong, especially since of the two numbness does seem somewhat preferable, I wonder how much agreement you'd find from someone with leprosy.

Counter point from my perspective as someone with a sports related spinal injury is that pain is an essential proprioceptive device allowing me to keep active within the boundaries of my injury.

Once we have reached a point where we can diagnose all conditions that may cause pain, this may work. But we are far, far away from that.

Pain is incredibly necessary, and I only hope the future brings more of it, not less. There are way too many conditions that people die from today that go undetected until right before death. If there were only some way to have some natural and instant mechanism for the body to signal something is wrong for these conditions people could get treatment sooner and survive longer. In fact, if evolution is correct it is inevitable that the longer a species survives the more receptive to pain it should be, since feeling a greater sense of pain means more motivation to seek treatment earlier or avoid dangerous activity, and thus survive.

I'd argue it is, though, especially as people aren't born with the inherent ability to solve problems that cause pain, it acts as a good rudimentary indication that damage is being done. And even grown people, intelligent people in fact, might be more prone to doing things they know are bad for them if they aren't given pain feedback.

It might not be a perfect system, but the existence of unpleasant feedback is necessary when there isn't inherent knowledge of the inner workings of the body. And in regards to low-information, that doesn't make it unnecessary, just inefficient, but it's still allowed humans to diagnose problems for ages. It tells you where the problem is, and what intensity it is.

Saying that pain can be improved upon doesn't make it unnecessary.

Yes. Our minds should exist in a continual state of explosive orgasm. Anything less is a grossly inefficient oppression of nature. /s

OK, we'll go with the HTML doc title instead.

I would throw in, that you can also learn how to deal with pain - work with it, rather than supress it.

In my family we have migraine. I also had sometimes my share of it, the type of where no amount of aspirin and only the strongest painkillers help. One day(night), while beeing in the wilderness, with no medication around, there was suddenly a strong wave. It was a very harsh night and I used all breathing/meditation technices I learned so far (or just heard of). Eventually I was able to resolve the pain. And I never had migraine again.

Now I am not saying at all, that this applies to all the types of pain which exists, but it certainly helped me with all my problems/injury's so far. And I believe it got me further than just swallowing a aspirin every time I feel discomfort.

For anybody's interested, the most effective technic I found, is from a russian martial arts called systema, "Breath through the pain".

What's the alternative, a designed and engineered feedback system to replace pain? Who should design this and what would an ethical proposal look like? Sounds like a nightmare

A learning system needs some kind of feedback which it can use as a loss function to measure its performance. If that feedback is strongly negative, then it will be functionally identical to pain. If you want to go down the qualia/p-zombie rabbithole and claim that this "isn't really pain" then go right ahead, but I don't see how you can rationally claim a difference.

And pain does tell you, quite precisely, which part of you is being damaged, along with diagnostic info(sharp pain? pressure? hot/cold? intermittent and correlated with something?). It's a thousand times better than any diagnostic system in use on industrial machinery today.

Pain can also make mess out of our ability to think clearly. Do we really need industrial robots running around and flailing manipulators randomly?

Then if robot doesn't run around randomly, but quickly and precisely removes the source of damage or stops operations if it cannot find the source of damage, signals damage condition, and proceeds to retrain the part of itself which led to the damage, we can ask "Does it feel the same overwhelming and impossible to ignore feeling, we call pain?"

Your comment reminds me of the futurist philosopher David Pearce’s work, specifically his Abolitionist Project (https://abolitionist.com) and Hedonistic Imperative (https://hedweb.com).

There are people who are born without the ability to feel pain. They are otherwise completely normal.

They tend to not live long.

I see pain and suffering as the necessary tools for carving out meaning in our own lives.

I prefer curiosity and generosity, Viktor Frankl be damned.

Curiosity has led me to a better understanding of how large-scale systems work, which removes many of the negative emotions that people tend to have about them, which is important when you're living inside one. :-)

Generosity provides an emotionally powerful "desired state" to work toward. I think most people enjoy the idea of a harmonious, prosperous, generous world, and that's a fun challenge to work on.

I would agree, but I carve a giant exception for chronic, relentless pain. After developing a condition with chronic pain, it's a constant struggle deciding whether to continue to exist or not. Any benefit of meaning is lost, and there is only misery and darkness from which you cannot escape. Modern medication can provide relief, but these days it's a battle to even get that because we have decided that the risk that somebody might "get high" is worth allowing people to suffer.

In related comment, the trend of medical professionals (let's be honest, it's politicians and lawmakers primarily driving it) to ignore and turn their backs on chronic pain patients is comparable in my opinion to allowing torture to continue. Internal wounds are just as real as external wounds, but humans typically only acknowledge in others what is visible. We pity the man with no legs, but we disregard the man with paralyzing and crippling pain.

I agree with you. In my opinion, people turn their back on chronic pain because, just like with depression (or other mental health conditions), it's something they can't see or measure. They have no idea what it's like to be in your shoes. Most people have never experienced it, so they don't really have any kind of reference.

I would argue that chronic pain is an evolutionary "bug", similarly to eczema, psoriasis, peanut allergies, and chronic depression. Most people can probably understand the notion that there are plenty of minor genetic issues that we all are affected with. I have a friend who has a sensitive stomach, she routinely feels sick and vomits. People understand that we all have unique genetics, but they somehow have a hard time understanding that we all have unique brains and nervous systems. I think the current political climate might be partially to blame: it's almost taboo to suggest that our brains are, in fact, unique, that we don't all experience the world the same way, in large part because of our genetics.

Biology is quite fragile. Humans have about 20,000 genes. Each one of these genes exists in multiple variants in the human population. You are a random combination of subsets of your parent's genes. We've evolved in such a way that most combinations of genes work reasonably well together. However, it shouldn't be so surprising that some random combinations of genes do not, in fact, work well together, and give rise to "genetic bugs". It shouldn't be so hard to conceive that it's possible that some people are made in such a way that they are more sensitive to pain than others. Maybe the regions of their brains that handle pain are hyperactive, maybe it's something in their nerves, maybe it's their pain sensors that fire too much. We don't have the medical technology to really assess these things, but that doesn't mean they can't exist.

> it's almost taboo to suggest that our brains are, in fact, unique, that we don't all experience the world the same way

We can only hope (and work towards) that will change. Of all the things I've read in the last year, Andy Clark's "Surfing Uncertainty" [0] has most changed my view on the experience of being.

You can read a synopsis at the link, but my quick take is that its core premise is that based on the totality of our life experience, our brain creates models of the world and our interactions with it. Our everyday experience of the world is then the interaction between what our brain predicts will happen from the model, error corrected via our sensory input.

So yes, everyone is unique and experiences the world differently. Where this is relevant to pain is realising how much of pain is in our head (so to speak). I started thinking about this originally when I was trying to work out why I would voluntarily put myself through the "pain" of long-distance running...

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25823558-surfing-uncerta...

My girlfriend has chronic neuropathic pain. Like everything else in life, moderation is key. Some pain is useful but too much of it is not a good thing.

However that does sound like a tautology. Too much pain is too much and not enough pain is not enough.

That's correct but a lot of people don't understand it. Same with germs. A lot of people think that having no germs is best which isn't correct.

I lived for some years with incredible chronic back pain. It really is a kind of nightmare. If you're lucky, your doctor will give you something addictive and dangerous for a bit of temporary relief. But more probably, it's just a burden you're expected to shoulder and get on with your life.

As someone in a similar situation, how were you able to get rid of it?

The spinal shots have done wonders for me. I have a herniated disc which caused pain in my leg so bad I couldn't walk. I can normally deal with pain, but this was something so bad I really understood how people want to take pain killers constantly.

I found a conservative, non-surgical MD who ordered an MRI and gave me the shot. He said I may need more shots in the future, but as long as I'm not in pain I'm good. Along with that, I have changed my workouts to include a lot more stretching and core strengthening. I'll probably never deadlift 500lbs+ [1] again, but that's a young persons game anyway :)

[1] I didn't hurt myself lifting, but playing basketball.

For me it was muscular and joint issues. Initially, it was a combination of steroid injections and kratom for the pain (a TENS unit also helped). I had a very good friend of mine die of opiate overdose and get really skittish at the thought of an opiate prescription for pain management. Also, opiate painkillers make me very lazy and totally kills my ability to focus -- a death knell for a programmer -- while the kratom keeps my head clear and my motivation up.

Those things combined allowed me to start working out every day, both cardio and weightlifting. I also began seeing a physical therapist at the VA regularly. Finally, I also worked at a company that generously bought standing desks for those that wanted them. That allowed me to strength train my way out of the muscular issues. I still do deal with joint pain, but I found it much easier to deal with by itself. On bad days I take kratom to help with the pain, but those are far and few between nowadays.

I think the key is correlation with some controllable action. Pain is useful when it tells us something useful. Chronic neuropathic pain is useless because it doesn't guide your actions away from causing yourself damage.

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