Does pain exist?

Re: Pain
Pain exists in multiple varieties. For the sake of discussion I will break it into three fundamental types. Physical pain, emotional pain and deprivation pain.

Physical pain occurs when nerves within our body register damage getting past our skin (effectively "pain nerves" are like those that grant our sense of touch but by lacking a sensitive tip they can only register very forceful impact or cutting that damages the nerve).

This triggers sensation within the brain in various locations, firstly on an instinctual level it triggers automatic reactions in the brainstem (jerking your hand away from a flame, etc), secondly it in the lymbic system to generate the emotional experiences of pain and lastly it teaches us to avoid the situation in which it occured.

Emotional pain occurs when sorrow or rejection (and other such "negative" emotions) reaches a painful point. The emotional regions trigger the pain areas of the brain as an instinct to discourage the behaviour that caused the experience. This appears to be mostly tied into our social instincts that cause humans to assosciate in groups.

Finally deprivation pain occurs when the body notifies the brain that it is lacking in substance X. The brain notes what is lacking (food, warmth, addictive substances) and triggers pain as motivation for providing the substance.

This system is the basis of much of the human ability to learn and act. It has been evolving in bits and pieces for much of the last billion years or so.

Hello again, guidedog/Marquis.

I think either you are missing the point of my question, or else my question is missing a point...

I am in these vague terms aware of the processes that occur in the body and brain. In the context of my rambling thought-processes, all your three varieties are just stimuli of pain, and are not the issue.

You say 'trigger the pain areas of the brain' - this brings us closer to what I am pondering. How do these pain areas work? How do they differ from pleasure areas? How would I go about creating such a pain area for my pet robot?

You talk about pain being used as a motivation to alter behaviour, but how does this work? To simplify, say I wire up a computer in such a way that there is an area X and an area Y. Certain external stimuli send signals to area X and others to area Y. In evolving my clever little computer, I write into area X "on receiving stimulus, remember recent behavior and avoid repeating it, also into area Y I write "on receiving stimulus, remember recent behavior and try to repeat it". Does my computer feel pain when area X is stimulated, and pleasure when Y is stimulated? If yes, why does it feel anything? If not, why does it seem to me that I experience pain? Am I mistaken? Do I not really experience anything at all?

Do I conclude from the lack of response that: (a) no-one else is interested in this?, or (b) the question is meaningless and/or already answered?

Or perhaps I should rename the topic: "God created pain so he had a way to punish gays and evolutionists"...

Hi
I too have been struggling with this problem and agree with you that most people miss the point. We all know what pain feels like and don't need explanations at the physiological level. The problem is conceptual. There is an attempt here which may be on the right lines:

http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~croft/archives/academic/pain.html

He states " Pain is a continuously and purposely optimizing input to a feedback system"

From a computing point of view ( and that is the source of my interest ) you can set up your program to optimise what ever it is that you are trying to achieve and that is probably about it! For instance, if you have written a program to evolve solutions ( as in genetic programming ) it can hold onto good solutions and discard bad ones. Clearly it will have no feelings but feelings are probably meaningless from a computational view - rather like consciousness .... ( not a problem in my opinion - it is just an emergent phenomenon in the same way that a group of people become a crowd and a group think emerges - or fails to emerge, more likely )

Thanks for this, and welcome!

My knowledge of computing is minimal, so I may take a while to read around the article so I have a fighting chance of following it, but I will get back to you as soon as I have something worthwhile to contribute.

Since tyour article seems to fit a dualist position, is this useful? New dualism: Quantum physics in neuroscience and psychology

On a much less scientific level, my mother was firmly convinced that things only hurt as much as you think they do. So whenever one of her kids had an accident, whatever she really thought of the damage she would cry bracingly "It's only a broken leg! Whoever heard of making a fuss about a silly old broken leg! Think how jealous all your classmates will be when you come back to school with a plaster cast! Aren't you lucky!" And I'm certain (though naturally I have no way to prove it) that we suffered a lot less than if she had wrung her hands and sympathised.

djbt,

It appears you are asking "Does Pain Exist?"

Or if I've got the question wrong, if you try to summarize your question in 2 or 3 sentences at some point, that would be great.

MarquisDC's answer is closest to how I feel, for the most part on it.

I think pain "exists" as much as anything else "exists." I tend toward the existential, and I can easily argue everything exists, and nothing exists, including pain.

But I feel a bit like you are approaching pain almost 3rd hand. I mean, have you ever experienced excruciating pain from a surgery, serious injury, pinched nerve, etc? If you have experienced this pain (I have recently), I think you would most likely agree you can't make this pain go away "by thinking about it correctly" any more than you can make a hammer disappear. Thats how real it is.

Hell, when you are in certain kinds of pain, it seems like that is all there is. The pain is more real than your car, your family!, everything. You experience pain like that and it opens your eyes to the world of pain. Its got to be in a major nerve thats got a straight shot to your brain. (I had a severe pinched nerve in my neck a few months back--the pain was indescribable. Hellish. I mean I've broken several bones and that pain was nothing comared to that damn pinched nerve.

That pain is actually electricity in nerves.

That is damn real.

Well, as real as anything. Is electricity real? Are nerves connected to your brain real?

But as for emotional pain, and the other types, it gets more fuzzy. I've been in great emotional pain at times to where I couldn't sleep for like a week straight, and it was actually painful. Pain in the body & brain. But somehow it didn't seem quite as "real" to me personally. I mean it was there, but it seemed like if I tried really hard, I could almost keep myself ultra-occupied or working constantly, or whatever, and it would go away a bit--so it was a bit psychological and it seemed a little less solidly real. With the pinched nerve, there is no way I could make that pain go away by thinking correctly or something.

I don't necessarily think pain has to predate the brain. Not clear why you say that?

I look at pain as a protection device that helps us survive...

Can you tell us your pain question again in like 2 or 3 sentences?
thanks

How Does Pain Work?

We wish to avoid things that cause us pain. The capacity to feel pain probably evolved because having an incentive to avoid certain things makes us more likely to survive. For instance, broken bones heal better if you don't walk on them, sticking your hand in the fire will burn it, people with nerve damage from leprosy or diabetes may be unaware of injuries and be maimed from not treating them.

The ability to feel pain pre-exists in the brain, but pain must be experienced to learn from it. The experience of pain comes when sensory information activates certain areas of the brain, which produces a body image and beliefs about body states. "Phantoms in the Brain" considers the problem of pain felt by amputees in their missing limbs.

Robots and machines cannot feel pain. You can program them to respond as if they did, but they will never have the subjective experience.

Nice Terry. Does pain exist?

I mean thats the question in the title, but then it goes into something different...

I took it as: Does pain exist? (From the header...)...Do you think pain is "real?"

Take an example: When one is at the dentist getting a tooth drilled with zero drugs or medicine, its seems that the intense pain they will feel is as real as anything in their universe. In the universe that they are experiencing, or in, as it were.

Be careful EM.

You are in danger of stimulating some threaders beyond their capacity to control themselves and before you know it lurid descriptions will be appearing on the forum possibly crowding out more mature and considered ideas.

EM - a confession.

This thread was originally called just 'Pain', I cynically and somewhat misleadingly renamed it 'Does Pain Exist?' in a (cheap, but successful) attempt to get a response. Sorry about the confusion.

My question is still vague and unclear in my mind, sorry. I certainly doubt it will meet spendius' criteria of maturity and considered-ness...

Three approaches that may help illustrate what I'm trying to get at:

(1) When pain evolved, was subjective experience there from the beginning? If wavering's article is correct, and pain is a 'continuously and purposely optimizing input to a feedback system', did the subjective experience exist as soon as the system did? If so, why? Why is the subjective experience necessary? The system would, it seems, work without it. Do certain systems lead of necessity to subjective experience? How simple can a system be and yet still do this?
Or did the subjective experience of pain emerge later? With 'consciousness'? If so, why?
Alternatively, did the subjective experience of pain pre-exist the evolution of brains which made use of it? A kind of universal negative experience which brains tapped into to manipulate the behaviour of the organism?

(2) Terry says that: 'Robots and machines cannot feel pain. You can program them to respond as if they did, but they will never have the subjective experience'. Why not? Are our brains not complex computers? Are we not (organic) machines?

(3) In wavering's article pain is explain as 'a continuously and purposely optimizing input to a feedback system'. Presumably pleasure could be similarly described. Why do they feel different?