Reminds me of a joke where a kid in great pain is asked by a doctor to rate how much it hurts on a scale from 1 to 10 where 10 is the most pain he can imagine, and the kid says “1.”
What specific method of torture? I’d assume that many methods are designed to get as high as possible, but there are others that are much lower and instead involve other negative sensations besides pain.
Agreed. “Torture” as a concept doesn’t describe any particular experience, so you can’t put a specific pain level to it. Waterboarding puts somebody in fear for their life and evokes very well-ingrained terror triggers in our brain, but doesn’t really involve pain (to the best of my knowledge). Branding somebody with a glowing metal rod would cause a large amount of pain, but I don’t know how much—it probably depends in the size, location, and so on anyhow—and something very like this on a small scale this can be done as a medical operation to sterilize a wound or similar. Tearing off somebody’s finger- and toenails is said to be an effective torture, and I can believe it, but it can also happen fairly painlessly in the ordinary turn of events; I once lost a toenail and didn’t even notice until something touched where it should have been (though I’d been exercising, which suppresses pain to a degree).
If you want to know how painful it is to, say, endure the rack, I can only say I hope nobody alive today knows. Same if you want to know the pain level where an average person loses the ability to effectively defy a questioner, or anything like that...
This may be a silly question, if complex regional pain syndrome is 47 out of 50 on the McGill pain scale, where would ‘torture’ be?
Reminds me of a joke where a kid in great pain is asked by a doctor to rate how much it hurts on a scale from 1 to 10 where 10 is the most pain he can imagine, and the kid says “1.”
That is from xkcd.
What specific method of torture? I’d assume that many methods are designed to get as high as possible, but there are others that are much lower and instead involve other negative sensations besides pain.
Agreed. “Torture” as a concept doesn’t describe any particular experience, so you can’t put a specific pain level to it. Waterboarding puts somebody in fear for their life and evokes very well-ingrained terror triggers in our brain, but doesn’t really involve pain (to the best of my knowledge). Branding somebody with a glowing metal rod would cause a large amount of pain, but I don’t know how much—it probably depends in the size, location, and so on anyhow—and something very like this on a small scale this can be done as a medical operation to sterilize a wound or similar. Tearing off somebody’s finger- and toenails is said to be an effective torture, and I can believe it, but it can also happen fairly painlessly in the ordinary turn of events; I once lost a toenail and didn’t even notice until something touched where it should have been (though I’d been exercising, which suppresses pain to a degree).
If you want to know how painful it is to, say, endure the rack, I can only say I hope nobody alive today knows. Same if you want to know the pain level where an average person loses the ability to effectively defy a questioner, or anything like that...