Title but emphasis on extreme. Aren’t there situations where it would be better for the body to just not feel pain at all? Like torturing or a limb being sawed off or something? Why do we feel it and what makes it more painful than mild pain?
In: Biology
In many cases, the brain has mechanisms that mask extreme pain.
Adrenaline has already been mentioned, where the reflex of *fight or flight* takes immediate precedence over the majority of sensation of all but the most incapacitating of injuries.
In other circumstances, we tend to pass out when experiencing extreme pain, as it seems to temporarily overwhelm or disrupt our capacity to maintain the many neural pathways of cross-communication between the different parts of the brain necessary to produce what we call “consciousness”.
Pain is a very simple function of the body. It senses damage it produces hurt. So the brain might understand that the process is overall beneficial, but it cannot overrule that basic function. It can only be dampened by similarly basic functions like Adrenaline.
Because there’s no evelutionary advantage to having an upper limit to our pain response.
If the human body was designed by some intelligent being with a plan in mind, then allowing a body to experience extreme pain might seem like a bad design choice. For example, if I wanted to design a robot that would stop when it started doing something that was damaging it, I wouldn’t design a system that would become so overwhelming that the robot simply shut down while still in a dangerous situation.
OTOH, if natural selection and evolution was how things got where they are, then if experiencing pain provides a reproductive advantage, then pain becomes an inherited trait and it is passed down to descendents.
If creating an upper limit to the pain response provides a reproductive advantage then that too becomes a trait that starts becoming prevelent. Interestingly enough, we do no know that a human trait that encourages human reproduction (sexual arousal) actually does modify the experiencing of pain.
So, if getting your arm sawn off was a common feature of human reproduction, than being resistant to that pain would very likely be a human trait.
Either that, or the intelligent creator made some really unfortunate design choices. Maybe they just like watching the robot writhe around in the pain.
In our evolutionary past something that caused extreme pain was likely to be caused by something that killed you. This means that evolution would be “blind” to it. There’d be no selective pressure against the extreme pain because after it you would be dead from what caused the pain.
Evolution only “cares” about that which stops you from breeding. Pain stops you doing things which would lessen your chance of reproduction. However, if an injury, disease, etc is going to kill you then evolution doesn’t “care” what happens to you between that and your death.
To alert us to extremely dangerous situations. Same reason we have such a strong response to the smell of rotting bodies; as someone else said, there are situations dire enough that it doesn’t serve us to have an upper limit to our intensity of perception. On the other end, why does sex feel so good? It’s nature’s way of ensuring we carry on our most fundamental duty; reproduction.
Some things are important enough that we need visceral responses that override any mental discipline.
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