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Comment by monarchwadia | Hacker News Reader

I suppose one could argue that both are equally real.

I remember one time at summer camp in the teen dorm I claimed that pain was an illusion, because it was subjective. A girl named Lisa picked up a wooden block and threw it at me. It hit my lip, which started bleeding, and she was immediately horrified at what she had done; but I had to acknowledge that subjective "reality" has an importance to me that objective reality does not.

Interestingly I had just re-watched the House episode with the CIPA patient in S3, and it touched on this if you squint. The girl, having CIPA, effectively can’t feel pain. She can’t even feel getting 2nd degree burns and it’s questionable if she even felt them poking around in her head or if she used that to escape (and fall down a 2nd story balcony). The only time she felt actual pain was seeing her mother relapse and be wheeled off for more surgery.

She cannot feel what should objectively cause her pain, but because pain is a subjective experience she can’t. However, truly subjective pain, that is pain derived from emotional connection, is literally the worst pain she can feel.

This is a very deep story. Thank you.

I think you will like this Capgras Syndrome story.

https://youtu.be/dqBGzkz1oDU

The guy couldn't emotionally recognise his mother after seeing her and started calling her imposter. But when he heard her voice over telephone, he felt emotional connection and said the person on other end was indeed his mother. Emotional pathways provide salience information in conjunction with sensory pathways. Any disruption to emotional pathways can override even correct sensory data.

She objectively caused you to transition to an objective state which you both experienced subjectively!

Pain actually has a lot of objective parts to it. There are real chemical and mechanical processes involved. You could even argue the subjective part might be smaller than people think. Mindset can change the experience, but different people might just have different "pain functions" to begin with.

Same idea with hunger and weight gain or loss. Hunger is a biological process. You can push through it, but people also experience it differently because their actual hunger mechanisms differ, not just because they "interpret" it differently.

I don't care about the objective parts; the chemical and mechanical processes would have been exactly the same if it had been Lisa's lip that was bruised and bleeding instead of my own, or the lip of another boy halfway around the world, but it wouldn't have mattered to me in the same way.

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