On Pain

You could take everything I'll say here and mirror it to be “on happiness” but I'm in a mood so you'll have to do that work yourself.

Pain is fascinating.

Because we have preferences about it. Which is FUCKING INSANE.

Look you might not have done a bunch of reading on consciousness, but if I can highlight a point about it it's that it’s unexpected. So far there's basically zero reason we have to predict that it would have existed in our reality (consciousness that is, and pain is downstream of that).

We can easily imagine a reality without it. A world of rocks and volcanoes and waterfalls and no mind. No “what it is to be like x”.

I mean there's no reason evolution would have prioritized it. Or even how it could explain it. My brain and rocks are both made of quarks. Why my brain should, in the words of Tom Nagel, have some property of “there being something like what it is to be my brain”, is shocking at least and bewildering at most.

And even more specifically pain. You could imagine consciousness without pain. And neverthess pain is.

And I immediately hit a wall. What else is there to say of pain? It sucks? Why? We seek to avoid it? Why?

Maybe just because we do. Dreadfully simple, but perhaps all explanations end up either simple or silly or both.

Pain and happiness (oh, I guess maybe I'll bring up both myself, seems to be working out that way ).

Presumably magnets don't suffer when you press North Pole to North Pole, even as the physics resist it. (Fuck I hope not).

But we suffer. And we feel happiness. Does it stop at preference or are there more layers down? Do we dislike pain because of reasons beyond that dislike, or does it stop at the brute fact We Dislike Pain ?

And that quality is so unlike everything else. Things are red or fast or intelligent or spicy or unlikely or solid or transparent or numerous or antiquated or…..

Painful or pleasurable. And how different that is!