Pain:a natural warning, but is it necessary?

What is pain?

Pain is a signal that evolution has used to warn us about damages that occur to our physical and possibly mental form.

Without this warning, survival is close to impossible, as no damaged is registered by the body and a wound will eventually lead to death if deep enough.

But, why is pain so...painful? Why has the body develloped this means to warn us, and not another?

Please share your insight on the question, as well as suggest any alternatives that you think could have evolved into becoming our failsafe system.

Thank you for your time and contribution.

You pretty much answered your own question.

However, if there was no pain, everyone would die by a stupid reason. No one would go to the doctor and only those who are aware of their pain would probably be alive. Keep in mind that it is because we feel pain, so if we can't feel pain then it might be possible that we don't feel anything else. Life would be much different overall also.

It is bad enough we can't feel physical pain, but taking out mental pain is taking out some humanity. However, it might help out with some relationship problems, such as abuse, but at the same time, there might be even more problems such as people staying with the same person, even if they aren't a good match.

What if we like pain? :3

Pain is good!

In addition to this you also learn to not repeat them same thing again. Very beneficial for long-lived organisms.

This. I mean, it might be nice to be able to control it, but for most of us without it we would end up accidentally killing ourselves or majorly damaging our bodies

ROFL. Pain is your body's last way to physically force you to get out of danger.

Seriously, it just makes damn sense. Self-preservation is a basic human drive, without which we probably would not have thrived for all the millenia we have so far.

Pain is a human categorization of something natural. If the body used a different method of informing us of being hurt, THAT feeling would be in turn what we now call pain.

But the question remains:
why is it in this form. Why is pain, an electrical signal transmitted by our nervous system, the choice that was made by our body during its evolution.

Why don't we see a red veil, for example, when we are hurt, or a veil of any color that is, red being once again a human categorization of "hurt".

Could one think up a way to replace this system with another?

My question is, could there have been another way of warning us of the damages we experience.

And as for psychological pain, what of it?
How can it be that the system for damage control on a physical level be so similar to the one on a mental level?

We feel a squeezing in our chests, a throbbing in our veins.
Why did the brain choose to manifest emotional pain with the same means as a physical one?

I know these are a lot of questions, and maybe you'll think I'm just bumping, but I really would love to hear opinions on this. To reflect with others builds a better understanding, at least I think so.

The reason we don't like pain, is so we stop doing what we are doing. The body does that so you will stop because you want to, not just because you need to.

Pain is a sensation and without a sensation, we wouldn't have pleasure either. Life just wouldn't be worth living without sensations. I can't imagine a more efficient way to let the body know you're in danger other than the feeling of pain.

I'd halfly agree with this, Most pain (other than serious organ destroying injuries) is completely good for someone.. Pain is a better teacher than anything else.

Nothing could do a better job of showing us what is dangerous, what is harmful, what is wrong, or what is just stupid. You can call it something else, but nothing could replace it.


As for phycological pain, thats more of a ethics question, but even than, it isn't much different. You could of been an gave person_1 something of value, only to never get it back, with pain, you now know that was a stupid thing to do.

I'm gonna get some sleep after this so I'm not looking anything up before writing, apologies for minor errors.

As explained by earlier posts pain is good, pain works excellent for quick reactions and leaves a good reminder not to do it again. Seeing a specific colour or similar would not have as strong effect. This is why pain is good.

Technically. Unless you want a really long offtopic discussion of why/how/how it evolved/etc touching and feeling started, we'll just accept a few things. In the skin there are various receptors, one for heat, one for cold one for light pressure and one for heavy pressure, and maybe a few more I don't remember. These are fairly advanced. The pain receptors on the other hand are basically just loose nerve endings that responds to cell damage. Very simple (heat/cold pain is more advanced, but still). So technically pain is way more simple then basic touch-and-feel. So the system isn't really that advanced.

Also, pain isn't something human specific.

Pain has to feel unpleasant so you can avoid further pain which is related to further damages. If you had a huge gaping wound and felt a pleasant indicator that you were damaged there would be less incentive to stop agitating it and leave it time to heal.

Duh.



That would hinder your sight instead of the area that is in pain and give you no indication of where the pain is located. To effectively deal with pain an organism has to first know where it is located and avoid further damaging that area. You can think of other systems for pain but none of them are as efficient as the experimentally evolved one that we already have.

When we are children, we lack the emotional and intellectual maturity to understand the meaning of the word: Consequence, but we do understand the meaning of pain. It is through pain that we learn what we should, and shouldn't, do. We learn by trial and error. So if we touch a stove, and burn ourselves, we learn not to touch the stove again. As children, we only see the world through cause and effect. If I cry, I will get fed. If I pull the cat's tail, I will get scratched.

As we grow up, we become more aware of our world and learn to anticipate things that will cause us pain, but not always. We learn that pain exists in different levels and intensities. It is true, that we can learn to desensitize ourselves to physical pain, but then we run the risk of forgetting that we can also cause pain to others.

Pain is an integral part of our maturing process, as people, and I do not think we can live without it in our society. As strange as it may sound, it is though our pains and experiences that we are formed into the individuals we are. Without the knowledge of pain, I think we would grow to be very amoral, unfeeling people. If we grew up at all.

As for developing another method of registering negative effect, I think it would require a complete restructuring of our nervous systems. Besides, any negative impulse would have to cause some sort of negative effect, even if it wasn't necessarily pain. Otherwise, it would likely be ignored, or misunderstood. Pain may be unpleasant, but it is never misunderstood even by the most primitive minds.

Please correct me if youtube videos are not welcome here, but I cannot find a better way to describe what pain is, any why it is there. It's a short scene from G.I. Jane.

Pain is hard to define. The current somewhat agreed definition of pain emphasises that it has a strong psychological component since perception of pain often varies between people.

Why is pain so painful you ask? Well that's really an odd question for a start. Pain is painful because of its name not much else. Pain is probably designed to be unpleasant so that you will not engage in whatever activity that brought about it again (this is of course excluding exceptions like masochism).

A rather interesting point is the fact that reflex arcs exist within the spinal cord that mediate withdrawal from nociceptive stimuli with delayed cortical perception of pain. Furthermore, many nerve fibres that carry pain are in fact the slowest type. This has led zoologists and clinical researchers to postulate the idea that while pain is as you say a "fail-safe" mechanism, a learning component is also present (i.e. hopefully once you realised that stepping on a nail is painful you won't do it again).

You ask whether pain is necessary. Well you have pretty much answered that for yourself. "Something" is certainly necessary to warn us against behaviours that lead to destruction of the body whether you call it pain or something else say "niap" it will end up representing the same concept.

The question of psychological pain is an interesting one which I will not dwell on since I do not really know too much about it myself.

Pain can sometimes be pleasure.

[font=segoe print bold]Not sure if that comment belongs here, but okay. Lets go with that.
Yes there are a few physical disorders that could lead to that, or if someone is a masochist.
Or the pain in your legs after a long run, or other muscles after other kind of training. I like this type of pain. It lets you feel you've actually accomplished something, grew a little stronger.

Pain is something that Humans need. As a firm believer in Evolution, I do sincerely think that Nature would have been able to factor pain out of the natural selection process if it didn't benefit us in some way (For example, wouldn't an animal who couldn't feel pain be a more potent killer?). Since almost all animals feel pain (as far as we can tell), it was obviously created early on, and serves as a warning system, not only for humans, but for animals as well.

For example, if I were to put my hand on the metal part of an iron, I would immediately feel the bun on the hot metal, and get away from it. If I felt no pain, that stimulus wouldn't exist, and my flesh would get burnt. For animals less complex than Humans, pain as a repeating stimulus drives the creature away from things that may not be good for them. If I get a stomach ache (which is essentially pain) from eating poisonous berries, I would learn not to eat them, and if I don't and eat too many next time, I will die.

So, in short, I feel that pain is not only a necessary part of human and animal survival, but I could make the point that, without pain, life couldn't exist at all. I mean, what if the first feeling creature on earth (invertebrates?) decided to stick his head in a sulfur vent? Bye bye, Human Civilization.