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Comment by Afforess | Hacker News Reader

I dislike the title here: Pain isn't necessary. The path evolution took - why pain exists makes sense - but the author's statement in the title is absurd.

I can easily imagine a future where we have obsoleted pain as a communication channel. Pain is a neurological version of a healthcheck system and not even a particularly good one; it's slow, has no off or way to silence false reports, and lacks context. Pain doesn't tell you what the problem is; only that there is a problem. Any engineer who had to deal with such a low-bandwidth protocol would be complaining about it loudly.

Pain is not necessary. And I hope it is replaced soon.

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OK, we'll go with the HTML doc title instead.

I'd argue it is, though, especially as people aren't born with the inherent ability to solve problems that cause pain, it acts as a good rudimentary indication that damage is being done. And even grown people, intelligent people in fact, might be more prone to doing things they know are bad for them if they aren't given pain feedback.

It might not be a perfect system, but the existence of unpleasant feedback is necessary when there isn't inherent knowledge of the inner workings of the body. And in regards to low-information, that doesn't make it unnecessary, just inefficient, but it's still allowed humans to diagnose problems for ages. It tells you where the problem is, and what intensity it is.

Saying that pain can be improved upon doesn't make it unnecessary.

I'd argue having an easy way to snooze the alarm would lead to more health damage than dealing with acute pain promptly (i.e. burst appendix is something you really need to take care of now, not when it's most convenient).

However, I agree on having an off switch for chronic pain would probably be better than what we have now.

As someone who has dealt with chronic nerve disorders for the better part of a decade, I can tell you that numbness is preferable to raw chronic neuropathic pain.

Counter point from my perspective as someone with a sports related spinal injury is that pain is an essential proprioceptive device allowing me to keep active within the boundaries of my injury.

I'm not gonna say you're wrong, especially since of the two numbness does seem somewhat preferable, I wonder how much agreement you'd find from someone with leprosy.

There are people who are born without the ability to feel pain. They are otherwise completely normal.

They tend to not live long.

More importantly pain in chronic cases may be only a sign of neurological deficiencies rather than an indicator of anything in particular.

I would throw in, that you can also learn how to deal with pain - work with it, rather than supress it.

In my family we have migraine. I also had sometimes my share of it, the type of where no amount of aspirin and only the strongest painkillers help. One day(night), while beeing in the wilderness, with no medication around, there was suddenly a strong wave. It was a very harsh night and I used all breathing/meditation technices I learned so far (or just heard of). Eventually I was able to resolve the pain. And I never had migraine again.

Now I am not saying at all, that this applies to all the types of pain which exists, but it certainly helped me with all my problems/injury's so far. And I believe it got me further than just swallowing a aspirin every time I feel discomfort.

For anybody's interested, the most effective technic I found, is from a russian martial arts called systema, "Breath through the pain".

Your comment reminds me of the futurist philosopher David Pearce’s work, specifically his Abolitionist Project (https://abolitionist.com) and Hedonistic Imperative (https://hedweb.com).

A learning system needs some kind of feedback which it can use as a loss function to measure its performance. If that feedback is strongly negative, then it will be functionally identical to pain. If you want to go down the qualia/p-zombie rabbithole and claim that this "isn't really pain" then go right ahead, but I don't see how you can rationally claim a difference.

And pain does tell you, quite precisely, which part of you is being damaged, along with diagnostic info(sharp pain? pressure? hot/cold? intermittent and correlated with something?). It's a thousand times better than any diagnostic system in use on industrial machinery today.

Pain can also make mess out of our ability to think clearly. Do we really need industrial robots running around and flailing manipulators randomly?

Then if robot doesn't run around randomly, but quickly and precisely removes the source of damage or stops operations if it cannot find the source of damage, signals damage condition, and proceeds to retrain the part of itself which led to the damage, we can ask "Does it feel the same overwhelming and impossible to ignore feeling, we call pain?"

What's the alternative, a designed and engineered feedback system to replace pain? Who should design this and what would an ethical proposal look like? Sounds like a nightmare

Once we have reached a point where we can diagnose all conditions that may cause pain, this may work. But we are far, far away from that.

Pain is incredibly necessary, and I only hope the future brings more of it, not less. There are way too many conditions that people die from today that go undetected until right before death. If there were only some way to have some natural and instant mechanism for the body to signal something is wrong for these conditions people could get treatment sooner and survive longer. In fact, if evolution is correct it is inevitable that the longer a species survives the more receptive to pain it should be, since feeling a greater sense of pain means more motivation to seek treatment earlier or avoid dangerous activity, and thus survive.

Yes. Our minds should exist in a continual state of explosive orgasm. Anything less is a grossly inefficient oppression of nature. /s

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