Ask HN: Is there a bug in the universe which allows pain and suffering?

It is not a bug, it is a feature. Pain and suffering are a feedback mechanism that give the animals a chance to improve the situation.

By design or not: Pain is a useful input.

There are medical conditions that inhibit pain perception. People suffering from such conditions have to be especially careful because their bodies won’t tell them when there’s something amiss (like a hand resting comfortably on a hot plate).

The literal pain as others have mentioned is a biological feedback loop and feature of the human brain and evolution. When a baby is born, the baby needs to eat or it will feel pain. When you touch fire, you feel pain, so you avoid fire. When you eat, you receive positive feedback, so it encourages you to eat rather than starve.

Back in the hunter-gatherer days, life was hard so people needed to stay in tight-knit groups or communities. Being kicked out of the group meant death- that is why so many people have issues today with social media. Social media can connect but it can also isolate, and that isolation can create a psychological pain. So all those likes, upvotes, and positive feedback give tiny dopamine hits and feel nice, but when you don't receive them, you start craving them, and you can feel isolated. Also social media is probably not a substitute for good human interaction.

Philosophically, if you decide to find some meaning in life, suffering can be considered a gift.

I luckily don't have any literal chronic pain but I've been blessed to experience a lot of pain in my life. It has helped me be thankful for what I do have and I think it has helped me empathize with people who have faced similar trials. It also gave me a mission and a desire to prevent or help others from going through what I did. Of course, this could also be some psychological feature that I'm not aware of, like the need to tell a story to make my suffering feel meaningful.

But to support my point, one example could be this great blog post I read today on why you need hardship for passion. https://brookeallen.com/2015/01/27/passion-requires-that-you...

One of my favorite theories, Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Integration, suggests that pain is necessary to reach higher self-awareness. For example, you realize one morning that the world is pretty messed up and that's a pretty painful reality, so what do you do? It makes me feel better because it suggests my mental health issues could be more societal than personal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_disintegration

From a Christian perspective: Yes. The original design was not pain and suffering. Unfortunately, we are not living in the original design.

It isn't a bug. It's an unavoidable consequence of two facts:

1. There is variation in pleasurability of stimuli.

2. Experience of pleasurability is relative, rather than absolute.

So if your baseline for some sensation is 10 units on an absolute scale, experiencing 10 units of that sensation feels normal, and 5 units is probably uncomfortable. However, if your baseline was 5 units, it would feel completely normal and 10 might be uncomfortable.

You can see this in action with the hedonic treadmill. New pleasurable stimuli initially make you happy, but after a while you adapt, and to get a thrill you need to push the envelope farther. Additionally, once you're adapted, losing that pleasurable stimuli is actually painful, even though you were just fine before without it.

Whether it is a "bug" or not, people do experience it, and there is probably nothing we can do to change the way things are.

However, accepting that it is a possible and common experience we can have it is more fruitful to examine if suffering and pain have a cause, if they have an end and if there are methods to overcome them.

In other words, are pain and suffering hackable? And how?

In order for it to be a bug, wouldn't the universe have to be designed? I'd say pain and suffering are an emergent property of a complex / chaotic system. They're neither a feature nor a bug - they just are.

Think of universe as a reinforcement learning system. A system where its creatures are subject to a cost-function, the output of which is pain and suffering. You'll see how important it is for this world to evolve.

If you really want to go down a long tunnel with this question, read Schopenhauer. He's so uncompromising about it that it's surprising he occupies even the grudging place in the Western canon he does have.