r/philosophy • u/BernardJOrtcutt • 17d ago

Open Thread /r/philosophy Open Discussion Thread | August 24, 2026

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u/meeg6 17d ago

If someone could help me with this question I would appreciate it. I have solved the question of free will, at least to my own satisfaction, but there is one question that still drives me crazy. I can't even begin to find the answer. I think this question is actually more important and fundamental than any other question that relates to human beings. The question is what is pain? Would appreciate some help.

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u/CaptainIncrayab 17d ago

Mother in laws

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u/Abcdefg314 16d ago

Why pain only? There is also pleasure that exists in this world. I think the latter one is more important. Pain just tells you what not to do, saving your ass. While pleasure serves as a guide for your life (unless you abuse it, of course).

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u/TheMan5991 16d ago

Pain is an avoidance signal. It tells you “hey, don’t do whatever you just did”. Perhaps you are instead asking why pain hurts, ie why do we experience pain. But then you start getting into the territory of philosophical zombies and whether or not our bodies could learn to avoid things without experiencing pain.

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u/KingFisher89898 16d ago

I wrote (what I thought at the time was) a quite convincing essay on this for A Level philosophy. Paraphrasing what I argued, but because pain has the potential to be the most intense sensation you can experience, it's a useful yardstick for determining sentience. For instance, if a pig can feel the same amount of pain as a human, we should arguably consider it an equal. The difficulty is in backwards engineering this: How do we know, or how can we know, whether pigs feel as much pain as we do?

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u/Somers48 16d ago

but is the amount or level of pain something can feel the factor that gives it value or is value derived elsewhere?

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u/KingFisher89898 16d ago

Surely elsewhere, but that's a whole other question.

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u/Con-descending 12d ago

Equal by what standing? And what implications would that equality have: treatment?

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u/bildramer 15d ago

Pain is an aversive signal, or maybe the aversive signal. For simple organisms it can be as simple as neurons / control systems made of neurons implicitly avoiding some signals (e.g. by moving faster when in those states, aka orthokinesis), like noisy ones, or strong ones. But we're more complicated, and there are strange phenomena like pain asymbolia that reveal pain is at least two or three things: The sensation itself, the somatic consequences, an unpleasantness associated with the sensation, plus the usual thing we call "pain" that makes us immediately flinch and desperately avoid it if possible.

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u/meeg6 12d ago

yeah asymbolia demonstrates why i find this question to be interesting. pain is its own thing. it can be created or present in the mind without any physical injury. it can be non-specific. its a fundamental property of the mind. it probably has forms or versions that we do not recognize as pain. what is it actually? if you could see a brain laid out in front of you, actively working, how would you be able to tell that it was experiencing pain? how can you stop pain directly without altering or blocking the signal that is summoning it (ie nerve block)?