Very interesting question. I’ll have a go at it, although these are 30-second thoughts: Pain is a warning system, very strongly correlated with damage and/or danger of death. Damage is bad, hence when we feel pain we want to stop whatever is causing damage; this has the incidental side effect (usually) of stopping the pain as well, so it feels as though we want to get rid of the pain—in other words, it feels as though the pain is bad, although what we really want is to stop the damage. A fitness-maximiser would want to stop the damage without the intervening step of pain.
With that said, though, I appear to have moved the question without really resolving it, because why is damage bad? Why is death bad? I don’t think these can be answered without appeal to the plain utility functions: DO NOT WANT. So at best I’ve resolved the problem with masochism (edit to add: as a counterexample to people wanting to avoid pain), in that it’s a rare BDSM scene which intentionally inflicts actual damage—piercings, at most. Accidents do happen, but intentional damage is very rare.
In my not terribly extensive experience with BDSM scene, I found that people who like pain like it extremely selectively—only right amount of it, of particular kind, and in sexual context. They avoid unpleasant experiences and pain outside this narrow context just like everyone else.
Very interesting question. I’ll have a go at it, although these are 30-second thoughts: Pain is a warning system, very strongly correlated with damage and/or danger of death. Damage is bad, hence when we feel pain we want to stop whatever is causing damage; this has the incidental side effect (usually) of stopping the pain as well, so it feels as though we want to get rid of the pain—in other words, it feels as though the pain is bad, although what we really want is to stop the damage. A fitness-maximiser would want to stop the damage without the intervening step of pain.
With that said, though, I appear to have moved the question without really resolving it, because why is damage bad? Why is death bad? I don’t think these can be answered without appeal to the plain utility functions: DO NOT WANT. So at best I’ve resolved the problem with masochism (edit to add: as a counterexample to people wanting to avoid pain), in that it’s a rare BDSM scene which intentionally inflicts actual damage—piercings, at most. Accidents do happen, but intentional damage is very rare.
In my not terribly extensive experience with BDSM scene, I found that people who like pain like it extremely selectively—only right amount of it, of particular kind, and in sexual context. They avoid unpleasant experiences and pain outside this narrow context just like everyone else.