Evolution can’t dictate what’s harmful and what’s not; bigger peacock tails can be sexually selected for until it is too costly for survival, and an equilibrium sets in. In our scenario, since pain-inducing stimuli are generally bad for survival, there is no selection pressure to increase the pain threshold for electrical shocks after a certain equilibrium point. Because we start out with a nervous system that associates electrical shocks with pain, this pain becomes a pessimistic error after the equilibrium point and never gets fixed, i.e. humans still suffer under electrical shocks, just not so bad they’d rather kill themselves.
Suffering is not rare in nature because actually harmful things are common and suffering is an adequate response to them.
Why then is it possible to suffer pain worse than death? Why do people and animals suffer just as intensely beyond their reproductive age?
suffering after reproductive age is easy to answer—after reproductive age you are almost out of the reach of natural selection, especially e.g. some male wasps who keep living for a while after all the females have already mated and retreated into their nests. The males are now useless, nothing they do will change their reproductive success any more. So whatever happens to them doesn’t count—whether it’s a lot of suffering or the end of all suffering and infinite bliss. Unfortunately there’s no natural selection that would end their suffering after mating chances are depleted. Probably they’ll just keep having the same pain reactions to the same stimuli that they had before and during the mating season (because these already exist, not because they are necessary for anything). Probably they’ll have some additional old age problems accumulating just like old humans, because natural selection is not weeding these out.
Evolution can’t dictate what’s harmful and what’s not; bigger peacock tails can be sexually selected for until it is too costly for survival, and an equilibrium sets in. In our scenario, since pain-inducing stimuli are generally bad for survival, there is no selection pressure to increase the pain threshold for electrical shocks after a certain equilibrium point. Because we start out with a nervous system that associates electrical shocks with pain, this pain becomes a pessimistic error after the equilibrium point and never gets fixed, i.e. humans still suffer under electrical shocks, just not so bad they’d rather kill themselves.
Why then is it possible to suffer pain worse than death? Why do people and animals suffer just as intensely beyond their reproductive age?
suffering after reproductive age is easy to answer—after reproductive age you are almost out of the reach of natural selection, especially e.g. some male wasps who keep living for a while after all the females have already mated and retreated into their nests. The males are now useless, nothing they do will change their reproductive success any more. So whatever happens to them doesn’t count—whether it’s a lot of suffering or the end of all suffering and infinite bliss. Unfortunately there’s no natural selection that would end their suffering after mating chances are depleted. Probably they’ll just keep having the same pain reactions to the same stimuli that they had before and during the mating season (because these already exist, not because they are necessary for anything). Probably they’ll have some additional old age problems accumulating just like old humans, because natural selection is not weeding these out.