Humans may have evolved to experience far greater pain, malaise and suffering than the rest of the animal kingdom, due to their intense sociality giving them a reasonable chance of receiving help.
From the paper:
Several years ago, we proposed the idea that pain, and sickness behaviour had become systematically increased in humans compared with our primate relatives, because human intense sociality allowed that we could ask for help and have a reasonable chance of receiving it. We called this hypothesis ‘the pain of altruism’ [68]. This idea derives from, but is a substantive extension of Wall’s account of the placebo response [43]. Starting from human childbirth as an example (but applying the idea to all kinds of trauma and illness), we hypothesized that labour pains are more painful in humans so that we might get help, an ‘obligatory midwifery’ which most other primates avoid and which improves survival in human childbirth substantially ([67]; see also [69]). Additionally, labour pains do not arise from tissue damage, but rather predict possible tissue damage and a considerable chance of death. Pain and the duration of recovery after trauma are extended, because humans may expect to be provisioned and protected during such periods. The vigour and duration of immune responses after infection, with attendant malaise, are also increased. Noisy expression of pain and malaise, coupled with an unusual responsivity to such requests, was thought to be an adaptation.
We noted that similar effects might have been established in domesticated animals and pets, and addressed issues of ‘honest signalling’ that this kind of petition for help raised. No implication that no other primate ever supplied or asked for help from any other was intended, nor any claim that animals do not feel pain. Rather, animals would experience pain to the degree it was functional, to escape trauma and minimize movement after trauma, insofar as possible.
If the evolutionary logic here is right, I’d naively also expect non-human animals to suffer more to the extent they’re (a) more social, and (b) better at communicating specific, achievable needs and desires.
There are reasons the logic might not generalize, though. Humans have fine-grained language that lets us express very complicated propositions about our internal states. That puts a lot of pressure on individual humans to have a totally ironclad, consistent “story” they can express to others. I’d expect there to be a lot more evolutionary pressure to actually experience suffering, since a human will be better at spotting holes in the narratives of a human who fakes it (compared to, e.g., a bonobo trying to detect whether another bonobo is really in that much pain).
It seems like there should be an arms race across many social species to give increasingly costly signals of distress, up until the costs outweigh the amount of help they can hope to get. But if you don’t have the language to actually express concrete propositions like “Bob took care of me the last time I got sick, six months ago, and he can attest that I had a hard time walking that time too”, then those costly signals might be mostly or entirely things like “shriek louder in response to percept X”, rather than things like “internally represent a hard-to-endure pain-state so I can more convincingly stick to a verbal narrative going forward about how hard-to-endure this was”.
[Epistemic status: Piecemeal wild speculation; not the kind of reasoning you should gamble the future on.]
Some things that make me think suffering (or ‘pain-style suffering’ specifically) might be surprisingly neurologically conditional and/or complex, and therefore more likely to be rare in non-human animals (and in subsystems of human brains, in AGI subsystems that aren’t highly optimized to function as high-fidelity models of humans, etc.):
1. Degen and Finlay’s social account of suffering above.
Pain management is one of the main things hypnosis appears to be useful for. Ability to cognitively regulate suffering is also one of the main claims of meditators, and seems related to existential psychotherapy’s claim that narratives are more important for well-being than material circumstances.
Even if suffering isn’t highly social (pace Degen and Finlay), its dependence on higher cognition suggests that it is much more complex and conditional than it might appear on initial introspection, which on its own reduces the probability of its showing up elsewhere: complex things are relatively unlikely a priori, are especially hard to evolve, and demand especially strong selection pressure if they’re to evolve and if they’re to be maintained.
(Note that suffering introspectively feels relatively basic, simple, and out of our control, even though it’s not. Note also that what things introspectively feel like is itself under selection pressure. If suffering felt complicated, derived, and dependent on our choices, then the whole suite of social thoughts and emotions related to deception and manipulation would be much more salient, both to sufferers and to people trying to evaluate others’ displays of suffering. This would muddle and complicate attempts by sufferers to consistently socially signal that their distress is important and real.)
3. When humans experience large sudden neurological changes and are able to remember and report on them, their later reports generally suggest positive states more often than negative ones. This seems true of near-death experiences and drug states, though the case of drugs is obviously filtered: the more pleasant and/or reinforcing drugs will generally be the ones that get used more.
Sometimes people report remembering that a state change was scary or disorienting. But they rarely report feeling agonizing pain, and they often either endorse having had the experience (with the benefit of hindsight), or report having enjoyed it at the time, or both.
This suggests that humans’ capacity for suffering (especially more ‘pain-like’ suffering, as opposed to fear or anxiety) may be fragile and complex. Many different ways of disrupting brain function seem to prevent suffering, suggesting suffering is the more difficult and conjunctive state for a brain to get itself into; you need more of the brain’s machinery to be in working order in order to pull it off.
4. Similarly, I frequently hear about dreams that are scary or disorienting, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone recalling having experienced severe pain from a dream, even when they remember dreaming that they were being physically damaged.
This may be for reasons of selection: if dreams were more unpleasant, people would be less inclined to go to sleep and their health would suffer. But it’s interesting that scary dreams are nonetheless common. This again seems to point toward ‘states that are further from the typical human state are much more likely to be capable of things like fear or distress, than to be capable of suffering-laden physical agony.’
Rolf Degen, summarizing part of Barbara Finlay’s “The neuroscience of vision and pain”:
From the paper:
Finlay’s original article on the topic: “The pain of altruism”.
[Epistemic status: Thinking out loud]
If the evolutionary logic here is right, I’d naively also expect non-human animals to suffer more to the extent they’re (a) more social, and (b) better at communicating specific, achievable needs and desires.
There are reasons the logic might not generalize, though. Humans have fine-grained language that lets us express very complicated propositions about our internal states. That puts a lot of pressure on individual humans to have a totally ironclad, consistent “story” they can express to others. I’d expect there to be a lot more evolutionary pressure to actually experience suffering, since a human will be better at spotting holes in the narratives of a human who fakes it (compared to, e.g., a bonobo trying to detect whether another bonobo is really in that much pain).
It seems like there should be an arms race across many social species to give increasingly costly signals of distress, up until the costs outweigh the amount of help they can hope to get. But if you don’t have the language to actually express concrete propositions like “Bob took care of me the last time I got sick, six months ago, and he can attest that I had a hard time walking that time too”, then those costly signals might be mostly or entirely things like “shriek louder in response to percept X”, rather than things like “internally represent a hard-to-endure pain-state so I can more convincingly stick to a verbal narrative going forward about how hard-to-endure this was”.
[Epistemic status: Piecemeal wild speculation; not the kind of reasoning you should gamble the future on.]
Some things that make me think suffering (or ‘pain-style suffering’ specifically) might be surprisingly neurologically conditional and/or complex, and therefore more likely to be rare in non-human animals (and in subsystems of human brains, in AGI subsystems that aren’t highly optimized to function as high-fidelity models of humans, etc.):
1. Degen and Finlay’s social account of suffering above.
2. Which things we suffer from seems to depend heavily on mental narratives and mindset. See, e.g., Julia Galef’s Reflections on Pain, from the Burn Unit.
Pain management is one of the main things hypnosis appears to be useful for. Ability to cognitively regulate suffering is also one of the main claims of meditators, and seems related to existential psychotherapy’s claim that narratives are more important for well-being than material circumstances.
Even if suffering isn’t highly social (pace Degen and Finlay), its dependence on higher cognition suggests that it is much more complex and conditional than it might appear on initial introspection, which on its own reduces the probability of its showing up elsewhere: complex things are relatively unlikely a priori, are especially hard to evolve, and demand especially strong selection pressure if they’re to evolve and if they’re to be maintained.
(Note that suffering introspectively feels relatively basic, simple, and out of our control, even though it’s not. Note also that what things introspectively feel like is itself under selection pressure. If suffering felt complicated, derived, and dependent on our choices, then the whole suite of social thoughts and emotions related to deception and manipulation would be much more salient, both to sufferers and to people trying to evaluate others’ displays of suffering. This would muddle and complicate attempts by sufferers to consistently socially signal that their distress is important and real.)
3. When humans experience large sudden neurological changes and are able to remember and report on them, their later reports generally suggest positive states more often than negative ones. This seems true of near-death experiences and drug states, though the case of drugs is obviously filtered: the more pleasant and/or reinforcing drugs will generally be the ones that get used more.
Sometimes people report remembering that a state change was scary or disorienting. But they rarely report feeling agonizing pain, and they often either endorse having had the experience (with the benefit of hindsight), or report having enjoyed it at the time, or both.
This suggests that humans’ capacity for suffering (especially more ‘pain-like’ suffering, as opposed to fear or anxiety) may be fragile and complex. Many different ways of disrupting brain function seem to prevent suffering, suggesting suffering is the more difficult and conjunctive state for a brain to get itself into; you need more of the brain’s machinery to be in working order in order to pull it off.
4. Similarly, I frequently hear about dreams that are scary or disorienting, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone recalling having experienced severe pain from a dream, even when they remember dreaming that they were being physically damaged.
This may be for reasons of selection: if dreams were more unpleasant, people would be less inclined to go to sleep and their health would suffer. But it’s interesting that scary dreams are nonetheless common. This again seems to point toward ‘states that are further from the typical human state are much more likely to be capable of things like fear or distress, than to be capable of suffering-laden physical agony.’
Devoodooifying Psychology says “the best studies now suggest that the placebo effect is probably very weak and limited to controlling pain”.
How is the signal being kept “costly/honest” though? Is the pain itself the cost? That seems somewhat weird …