“Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”
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“Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”
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Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”
#2i think one evolutionary purpose of chronic pain is to remind about the event which caused it.
for example, every time it rains i'm reminded of all the events which caused fractures. hopefully that helps with not repeating them.
Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”
#3> Lobotomized subjects similarly report feeling intense pain but not minding it
I'd sign up for that, actually.
Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”
#4i think one evolutionary purpose of chronic pain is to remind about the event which caused it. for example, every time it rains i'm reminded of all the events which caused fractures. hopefully that helps with not repeating them.
Its intellectually hazardous to anthropomorphize chaos, like ascribing a purpose to evolution.
Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”
#5i think one evolutionary purpose of chronic pain is to remind about the event which caused it. for example, every time it rains i'm reminded of all the events which caused fractures. hopefully that helps with not repeating them.
Its intellectually hazardous to anthropomorphize chaos, like ascribing a purpose to evolution.
I thimk GP meant that pain concurrent with some experience makes the experience more memorable (ie, the brain helps you avoid future experiences by making previous experiences more readily memorable).
Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”
#6i think one evolutionary purpose of chronic pain is to remind about the event which caused it. for example, every time it rains i'm reminded of all the events which caused fractures. hopefully that helps with not repeating them.
Its intellectually hazardous to anthropomorphize chaos, like ascribing a purpose to evolution.
Thinking in terms of purpose helps understanding. Just gotta keep in mind that some things don't really have a purpose. They may have arisen randomly, be vestigial or be a side effect of something beneficial.
Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”
#7i think one evolutionary purpose of chronic pain is to remind about the event which caused it. for example, every time it rains i'm reminded of all the events which caused fractures. hopefully that helps with not repeating them.
Sorry for the offtopicness, but could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”
#8> and in other ways the manifestations of lobotomy and morphine are similar enough to lead some researchers to describe the action of morphine (and some barbiturates) as ‘reversible pharmacological leucotomy [lobotomy]’.
Interesting. Wonder if they did brain scans on people taking morphine to see if the same areas were affected. If so, couldn't we narrow "mindfulness of pain" to that section of the brain?
Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”
#9[c-f] nociception -> zero hits
This surprised me. Nociception is the term you will find in the biological literature because we can't quantify how (for example) a mouse "feels" when it's tail is dipped in hot water but we can quantify the behavioral response and use it as a proxy for the underlying biological mechanism.
Once you separate the biological and psychological responses in this manner the reasoning seems (to me) to become much cleaner.
Without higher level reasoning, nociception just needs to trigger any learning response in order to achieve survival. That's an incredibly open ended requirement.
In the presence of higher level reasoning then, pain could be viewed as a secondary effect that in turn triggers some learning response. So if you have higher level reasoning you don't necessarily need pain, but you probably do need nociception plus some other robust downstream response for a reliable organism. (This seems to mostly match up with the observations about useful nonpainful pain in the article.)
Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”
#10i think one evolutionary purpose of chronic pain is to remind about the event which caused it. for example, every time it rains i'm reminded of all the events which caused fractures. hopefully that helps with not repeating them.
Its intellectually hazardous to anthropomorphize chaos, like ascribing a purpose to evolution.
Yup. It always rubs me wrong when some says "Oh, the organism evolved to overcome that environmental factor".
It's more accurate to say "The environmental factor selected for a genetic variation that improved fitness."