There are people today who “suffer” from congenital analgesia—a total absence of pain.
They can’t feel a certain sensation. They can still suffer.
Could you delete pain and replace it with an urge not to do certain things that lacked the intolerable subjective quality of pain?
Considering addicting things can replace joy with an urge to do certain things that lacked the intolerable subjective quality of joy, I would expect the reverse to be possible. I strongly suspect that the only reason we know more about addiction is that people tend to keep doing addicting things, so they’re more noticeable.
Can you prevent the pain of a dust speck irritating your eye from being the new torture, if you’ve literally never experienced anything worse than a dust speck irritating your eye?
That one’s easy. You have no way of telling what happened to you. You have memory, but having a memory of being tortured does not have the subjective quality of pain that past!you would feel had you actually been tortured. That’s probably not the best way to do it, but it shows there is a way.
They can’t feel a certain sensation. They can still suffer.
Considering addicting things can replace joy with an urge to do certain things that lacked the intolerable subjective quality of joy, I would expect the reverse to be possible. I strongly suspect that the only reason we know more about addiction is that people tend to keep doing addicting things, so they’re more noticeable.
That one’s easy. You have no way of telling what happened to you. You have memory, but having a memory of being tortured does not have the subjective quality of pain that past!you would feel had you actually been tortured. That’s probably not the best way to do it, but it shows there is a way.