Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re doing. Your criteria seems to set a standard for determining which pain is bad, and that criteria I would agree with. The pain that’s bad is the pain beyond that necessary to send a useful signal.
What I interpreted Alicorn as asking was why pain is bad in the first place. A lot of things can be useless, for example a tune that keeps playing in your head, but useless pain seems to be worse than useless anything else because of something especially bad about pain. Even from an intrapersonal perspective, I can’t agree that pain is all about goals. Consider the following thought experiment:
I offer you two choices for tomorrow. Option one: I will torture you for six hours, using a method that is very painful but will leave no lasting scars or aftereffects, and you can spend the rest of the day doing whatever you want. Option two: I will give you a sedative that causes you to sleep through all of tomorrow: you will wake up the day after tomorrow.
If the only problem with pain was that it interferes with things people want to do, then everyone should take Option 1 without a second thought: the pain interferes with what they want to do for six hours, and then they can spend the rest of the day free. But I would take Option 2 (would you?) suggesting that there is more to the negative value of pain than simple inability to do things while you’re experiencing it.
I have no particular well-structured reply to this. Miscellaneous thoughts.
Let’s just attribute that preference to bias and move on :) (That is: This is an extremely “unnatural” scenario involving rather primitive brain hardware.)
No lasting aftereffects? I think you’d have to turn this into an “and you don’t remember afterward” scenario.
No lasting aftereffects? I think you’d have to turn this into an “and you don’t remember afterward” scenario.
Indeed. Pain causes operant conditioning; removing the operant conditioning makes the pain be something very unlike pain. In fact, according to a theory I vaguely remember, the idea of pain is, to a great extent, a rationalization of aversion: “I don’t want to do X. I guess I don’t want to do it because it will cause me pain.” If this vague rememberance were completely true, it wouldn’t be pain at all. But this vague rememberance ignores the fact that we know whether we’re in pain or not at the time we are or not in pain.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re doing. Your criteria seems to set a standard for determining which pain is bad, and that criteria I would agree with. The pain that’s bad is the pain beyond that necessary to send a useful signal.
What I interpreted Alicorn as asking was why pain is bad in the first place. A lot of things can be useless, for example a tune that keeps playing in your head, but useless pain seems to be worse than useless anything else because of something especially bad about pain. Even from an intrapersonal perspective, I can’t agree that pain is all about goals. Consider the following thought experiment:
I offer you two choices for tomorrow. Option one: I will torture you for six hours, using a method that is very painful but will leave no lasting scars or aftereffects, and you can spend the rest of the day doing whatever you want. Option two: I will give you a sedative that causes you to sleep through all of tomorrow: you will wake up the day after tomorrow.
If the only problem with pain was that it interferes with things people want to do, then everyone should take Option 1 without a second thought: the pain interferes with what they want to do for six hours, and then they can spend the rest of the day free. But I would take Option 2 (would you?) suggesting that there is more to the negative value of pain than simple inability to do things while you’re experiencing it.
I have no particular well-structured reply to this. Miscellaneous thoughts.
Let’s just attribute that preference to bias and move on :) (That is: This is an extremely “unnatural” scenario involving rather primitive brain hardware.)
No lasting aftereffects? I think you’d have to turn this into an “and you don’t remember afterward” scenario.
Indeed. Pain causes operant conditioning; removing the operant conditioning makes the pain be something very unlike pain. In fact, according to a theory I vaguely remember, the idea of pain is, to a great extent, a rationalization of aversion: “I don’t want to do X. I guess I don’t want to do it because it will cause me pain.” If this vague rememberance were completely true, it wouldn’t be pain at all. But this vague rememberance ignores the fact that we know whether we’re in pain or not at the time we are or not in pain.