21–30 of 60 posts
In particular, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/a-world-withou... - this is a fantastic article. I really want to know my own levels of anandamide now, I wonder how possible it would be to test that as a layman.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
I understand that's common nomenclature, but to me "selected" always feel like it implies intelligence in some manner. I've always preferred saying "the environmental factor caused evolution" in some manner or something similar. For example, if feels more natural to me to say "an obstacle in my path may cause me to go around it", compared to "an obstacle in my path selected for me to go around it". I think of evoluti…
When you say "an object in my path caused me to go around it", you're switching the cause and effect.
A more accurate way to say it would be "an obstacle on the path meant that only a handful of the population can go around it".
The change that allows you to go around the obstacle was not caused by the obstacle, it would have happened regardless. However, the change is only important if the obstacle is there - that's what drives evolution (selection).
[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 (t…
"Nociception" is one of those words which assumes its conclusion, and is a kind of dormitive fallacy. "What is pain?" "Well, it is a behavioral response to a nociceptive stimuli..." Talking about nociception may be useful once you have already gone through all of the anomalies about pain and made a good case for distinguishing between the different parts and have an implicit taxonomy. But it's not useful for my essay…
Rather I see it as splitting along an intuitive boundary - namely a whole host of low level biological responses (seriously there's a lot) versus higher level psychological (ie perceptive, conscious, whatever) phenomena. This seems particularly meaningful to me in part because most low level multicellular organisms that otherwise lack anything resembling emotion or psychology of any sort still possess (often highly conserved) analogous pathways.
My understanding is of nociception being a biological phenomenon that can be measured by proxy via behavior. It's important to note that the behavior itself isn't the nociception but rather a downstream response to it. That might sound like nitpicking but it's important because nociceptive responses can and do occur (and are of clinical significance) in patients who have lost consciousness. (At absolute minimum it seems weird to me to talk about an unconscious patient experiencing pain. Surely we benefit from being able to draw a distinction here?)
So (for example) the mouse tail flick test is a means of quantifying the nociceptive response which presumably also causes the rodents some mild pain. In fact it's (presumably) pain that actually results in the behavior that's measured but we can't quantify it on account of (at minimum) being unable to meaningfully communicate with them. Compare this to a physician collecting periodic "pain level" survey responses from a postoperative patient.
Semi-related thought: The term nociception allows avoiding confusing turns of phrase such as "painful pain" and "nonpainful pain". Surely the apparently contradictory term "nonpainful pain" should alone be sufficient evidence that there are important distinctions to be made here (and hence justify the additional terminology)?
Another semi-related thought: I find things much easier to reason about once they're "stacked" like this. Otherwise, trying to make sense of nonpainful pain, or the C. elegans thermal response, or the physiological responses of unconscious patients is downright confusing to me. Modeling it as "damage -> nociception (ie sensing) -> pain (ie psychology) -> response (ie behavior)" is much more intuitive to me. Importantly, it provides a framework for differentiating between cases that have more or less of a psychological response involved in mediating any behavioral ones, as well as allowing for cases that exhibit only physiological responses (ie nothing psychological or behavioral). (Or perhaps it just helps scientists sleep at night after they throw a few hundred plates with thousands of C. elegans each into the autoclave?)
(even knowing this, I am usually a fool. Also, could someone please tl;dr "inner vs outer losses" for me? advthanksance)
Edit: am I properly interpreting "pain as grounding" to be somewhat parallel to the I term of a PID controller?
This reminds me a lot of pain related to finance and gambling losses, underwent by someone being much riskier than they should have been. You can tell someone about the risks of gambling or very-high risk investing, but in my experience the best teacher by far is for them to experience pain from something gone wrong themselves, which is generally them losing a lot of their hard-earned money, and feeling somewhere bet…
My understanding of his answer is if this were the case, we wouldn't always avoid lesser pleasant sensations and may even seek them out to enjoy the rebound to greater pleasure. If burning your skin knocks you from baseline (1 instead of 0 for this example) to 0 (instead of -1), and the relief of stopping the burn kicked you up to 2 as a reward for escaping it, you'll just repeatedly burn your arm. Only negative values ensure you'll never seek them out for the purpose of rebounding to higher values.
That would fall in the "useful painful pain" category, I guess.
Few of the comments here seem to discuss his point. He asks if pleasure to pain is a continuum, why have pain at all? Instead of -1 to 1, with negative representing unpleasantness, human experience can instead span 0 to 2 and have the same reinforcement value with no sensation of displeasure. My understanding of his answer is if this were the case, we wouldn't always avoid lesser pleasant sensations and may even seek…
A quotation from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-harm below:
“Those who engage in self-harm face the contradictory reality of harming themselves while at the same time obtaining relief from this act.
It may even be hard for some to actually initiate cutting, but they often do because they know the relief that will follow. For some self-harmers this relief is primarily psychological while for others this feeling of relief comes from the beta endorphins released in the brain. Endorphins are endogenous opioids that are released in response to physical injury, acting as natural painkillers and inducing pleasant feelings, and in response to self-harm would act to reduce tension and emotional distress. Many self-harmers report feeling very little to no pain while self-harming and, for some, deliberate self-harm may become a means of seeking pleasure.”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn’t lose a lot but enough to feel it! Trading options can teach you a lot, it is one of the few areas where you need to form an opinion, reinforce it and then have it either affirmed or torn down (at great cost). Sometimes I wish political, social and economic opinions had to withstand such an immediate and potentially costly test, would certain teach some people some things.
It definitely took me quite a few lessons to have a good idea what I was doing there myself. Skin in the game is definitely important, and has become increasingly less common in society, to the detriment of many systems.