Given that nerve impulses are almost digital and that dust specks probably only activate the touch sense while paper cuts directly activate the pain sense, I’d say that practically humans do divide dust specks into a fundamentally different category than paper cuts. No matter how often I occasionally got a dust speck in my eye it would never feel as painful as a paper cut. On reflection, I might realize that I had spent a lot more time being annoyed by dust specks than paper cuts and make some sort of utilitarian deal regarding wasted time, but there is still some threshold at which the annoyance of a dust speck simply never registers in my brain the same way that a paper cut does. It physically can’t register the same way.
My brain basically makes this distinction for me automatically; I wear clothes, and that should register like a whole lot of dust-speck-equivalents touching my skin all the time and I should prefer some lottery where I win papercuts instead of feeling my clothes on my skin. Instead, my brain completely filters out the minor discomfort of wearing clothes. I can’t filter out paper cuts, broken arms, or torture.
I understand that “dust specks” is really meant as a stand-in for “the least amount of dis-utility that you can detect and care about”, so it may just be that “dust specks” was slightly too small an amount of dis-utility for a lot of people and it created the counter-intuitive feelings. I would never subject one person to a speck of dust if by doing so I could save 3^^^3 people from being hit twice as hard by a stray air molecule, for instance. I don’t know how I feel about saving 3^^^3 people from papercuts by torturing someone. It still feels intuitively wrong.
Given that nerve impulses are almost digital and that dust specks probably only activate the touch sense while paper cuts directly activate the pain sense, I’d say that practically humans do divide dust specks into a fundamentally different category than paper cuts. No matter how often I occasionally got a dust speck in my eye it would never feel as painful as a paper cut. On reflection, I might realize that I had spent a lot more time being annoyed by dust specks than paper cuts and make some sort of utilitarian deal regarding wasted time, but there is still some threshold at which the annoyance of a dust speck simply never registers in my brain the same way that a paper cut does. It physically can’t register the same way.
My brain basically makes this distinction for me automatically; I wear clothes, and that should register like a whole lot of dust-speck-equivalents touching my skin all the time and I should prefer some lottery where I win papercuts instead of feeling my clothes on my skin. Instead, my brain completely filters out the minor discomfort of wearing clothes. I can’t filter out paper cuts, broken arms, or torture.
I understand that “dust specks” is really meant as a stand-in for “the least amount of dis-utility that you can detect and care about”, so it may just be that “dust specks” was slightly too small an amount of dis-utility for a lot of people and it created the counter-intuitive feelings. I would never subject one person to a speck of dust if by doing so I could save 3^^^3 people from being hit twice as hard by a stray air molecule, for instance. I don’t know how I feel about saving 3^^^3 people from papercuts by torturing someone. It still feels intuitively wrong.