The important thing to point out is that the information signal we experience as pain is an instructive signal more than just an indicative signal. I mean to say that pain’s purpose is to make the organism react against whatever is hurting it, not just become aware of it. Since conscious decision making in humans is delayed at least 500ms (and sometimes up to 10 seconds!), signals such as pain have to be a result of low-level cybernetic reactions in the nervous system and not just a conscious experience after the fact. I’m sure if an intelligent designer created an intelligent agent instead of dumb evolution, she would have created it so as to take advantage of its intelligence to relay painless ‘bad’ signals without resorting to pain. Pain is a necessary legacy subsystem that came about due to the stupidity of evolution.
So what is bad about pain? It is a cruel hack built by a blind, dumb hacker with lots and lots of time on its hands.
The important thing to point out is that the information signal we experience as pain is an instructive signal more than just an indicative signal. I mean to say that pain’s purpose is to make the organism react against whatever is hurting it, not just become aware of it. Since conscious decision making in humans is delayed at least 500ms (and sometimes up to 10 seconds!), signals such as pain have to be a result of low-level cybernetic reactions in the nervous system and not just a conscious experience after the fact. I’m sure if an intelligent designer created an intelligent agent instead of dumb evolution, she would have created it so as to take advantage of its intelligence to relay painless ‘bad’ signals without resorting to pain. Pain is a necessary legacy subsystem that came about due to the stupidity of evolution.
So what is bad about pain? It is a cruel hack built by a blind, dumb hacker with lots and lots of time on its hands.