Why can’t we control out own sensations ? Why is our brain not able to just turn off the feeling of pain for the moment ? “I got it, something is bad, now stop hurting !” Or to just fall asleep whenever we want to.
In: Biology
Some people actually have conditions where these mechanisms don’t function properly. This is often hugely disadvantageous, leading to much greater injury, because it allows the individual (knowingly or otherwise) to exceed the limits the discomfort would place on them. Tearing a muscle, or failing to treat a cut. Babies with no sense of pain can significantly damage their eyes simply by curiously poking at them with their fingers.
By that same token, if we could switch them off at will, we could cause ourselves harm for convenience. This is a survival risk.
We can’t be trusted with a majority of our own body. If our brain gave our conscious selves complete control, a moment of curiosity could stop your heart, or put you into a coma.
Suffer enough pain and you’ll be able to deal with it a lot easier, you still feel it though, technically you can almost stop yourself smelling and you can reduce what you can hear, you can even block out hour vision. Touch and pain seem difficult.
I’m not helpful I know, sorry.
Because we’re not intelligently designed by an engineer.
We’re a happenstance collection of shit that worked and managed to survive long enough to aggregate this far.
Five minutes of comprehensive engineering would accomplish what billions of years of blind evolution cannot and will never achieve.
Pain is a much more basic thing than thinking. Being able to experience pain stops us from making things worse, even if we can not think. That goes for animals, and babies, and anything else.
Thinking is much more advanced and is not related in any way to those older systems, such as pain. They are not connected. So you can’t control them by thinking.
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