For example, I cut my arm and I immediately feel pain. Pain is there to notify me that something is wrong or that I’m injured, but now that I’m aware and that I’ve taken care of it (say poured some disinfecant and wrapped it up) why do I still feel that pain. Why can’t our brain know that the wound is not dangerous anymore?
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Natural selection doesn’t care about suffering, only passing on of genes, and what we have at the moment is good enough for that.
Pain fibres respond to tissue damage. Even when you’ve addressed the problem, that doesn’t mean the tissue damage has fully healed. That takes time and generally once it’s fully healed, the pain goes away. For the moment I’m ignoring things like neuropathic pain that can persist after healing.
Mechanistically, it’s much simpler for the body to simply respond to tissue damage than to have some mechanism to shut off pain signals after you’ve dealt with it. What if that system malfunctions and you don’t feel pain at all? We know that people with congential insensitivity to pain are much more prone to injuries. Also, for most of human history, we didn’t have the ability to deal with injuries well. We could bandage them, but that’s about it. We didn’t have disinfectant or antibiotics, or effective ways to suture wounds, or most other things we use today. If there was pain, it’s likely there was a problem that could still hurt you.
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