Hacker News Reader

Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

> If you are feeling pain, for example, this gives you very actionable knowledge about what you should do next in order to survive.

This seems exactly backwards to me. The visceral sensation of pain exists precisely in order to bypass your conscious decision-making. When you're hurting, your body doesn't want you to start weighing the pros and cons of various courses of action, it wants you to deal with the injury right now. That is the reason that pain feels very different -- much more urgent and harder to ignore -- than (say) getting a text message informing you that you have been hurt.

View on HN

I've read some things suggesting that nonphysical pain can be registered in the brain similar to physical pain. A text message can certainly impact you in a similar way.

Just as an example... Imagine somebody with PTSD. Let's say they get a text message that suggests to them, even indirectly, that their trauma is about to repeat. They may feel pretty intense physical danger and an urgency to intervene that makes no logical sense.

Certain kinds of pain stimulus causes you automatically to move away from it, such as when you put your hand on a stove.

But parts of your body might be sending pain signals into the brain for which there are no automatic actions for, e.g. you are in a sauna and it's too much.

The state of the simulation that you are in is updated with this pain signal. So, now, you might experience discomfort in the sauna and it is repellent so you might want to construct an action plan to move away from the source that is causing the pain (the fact you're in a sauna). But you might want to resist that for a moment and ignore the pain, maybe you have another conflicting goal which is to try to stay longer in the sauna than you're used to. Eventually the discomfort and pain might become overwhelming so you move out of the sauna.

I agree with you. But it seems that pain probably existed before higher reasoning (since it's a associated with the older parts of the brain), so it's a bit of a puzzle. Maybe early on the pain mechanisms existed without the associated qualia, or maybe pain also forces other control systems to be bypassed.

An imperfect but generally good model of the brain is the basic/reptilian portion still in control by default, but with the higher reasoning able to act as an override.

This is why it takes effort to do something like ignore pain, say no to candy bars, etc.

> This seems exactly backwards to me. The visceral sensation of pain exists precisely in order to bypass your conscious decision-making.

That quote is not about conscious decision making, it's about how the experience of pain motivates action that is adaptive to survival. If pain didn't feel like anything, but was instead just some light bulb that went off in your head, your ancestors could easily ignore it to their evolutionary detriment.

Therefore it makes sense that pain feels like something you want to avoid so it's not something you can just ignore without considerable effort.

>When you're hurting, your body doesn't want you to start weighing the pros and cons of various courses of action, it wants you to deal with the injury right now.

This is called instinct. It is evolutionary mechanism so you don't have to think what to do when you are getting hurt and your life is in danger. You react instantaneously.

Edit: Better phrase would be: It is evolutionary mechanism so you don't have to think what to do every time* when you are getting hurt and your life is in danger.

Sounds like you're in agreement then? I don't see how it's backwards. The quoted text says nothing about decision-making or weighing pros and cons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com