it’s unclear why the brain would develop the capacity to process pain drastically more intense than this
The brain doesn’t have the capacity to correctly process extreme pain. That’s why it becomes unresponsive or acts counterproductively.
The brain has the capacity to perceive extreme pain. This might be because:
The brain has many interacting subsystems; the one(s) that react to pain stop working before the ones that perceive it
The range of perceivable pain (that is, the range in which we can distinguish stronger from weaker pain) is determined by implementation details of the neural system. If there was an evolutionary benefit to increasing the range, we would expect that to happen. But if the range is greater than necessary, that doesn’t mean there’s an evolutionary benefit to decreasing it; the simplest/most stable solution stays in place.
The brain doesn’t have the capacity to correctly process extreme pain. That’s why it becomes unresponsive or acts counterproductively.
The brain has the capacity to perceive extreme pain. This might be because:
The brain has many interacting subsystems; the one(s) that react to pain stop working before the ones that perceive it
The range of perceivable pain (that is, the range in which we can distinguish stronger from weaker pain) is determined by implementation details of the neural system. If there was an evolutionary benefit to increasing the range, we would expect that to happen. But if the range is greater than necessary, that doesn’t mean there’s an evolutionary benefit to decreasing it; the simplest/most stable solution stays in place.