Pain
Previous post brought me on a tangent of pain.
Of course, it’s useful for identifying problems with the body. If your limb was severely hurt you’d definitely want some feedback to act upon it. For example, to reduce load on it while it’s healing.
But pain comes in so many different shapes, it makes me think about how i would tweak it.
Levels
If letting you know that something needs attention is the primary goal of pain, why did our bodies evolve to have it scalable? Tooth pain isn’t more urgent in terms of survival than a small fingertip cut, yet it can be much more powerful.
My guess is it’s simpler to implement. You just stick more neurons into most critical parts of the body to have them fully covered. You may also integrate hard-wired mech to trigger muscles in response to HIGH levels. But the side-effect is that now signal can be more powerful and is interpreted as such.
Sometimes the firing of neurons is so strong that it triggers other neural paths, when it comes closer to them up the network. For example, you might feel pain in adjasent fingers / teeth.
If the notification is the sole reason, then i would trim level of pain by having a “relay” of sorts. Relay doesn’t care about the frequency or the strength of incoming signals. It properly notifies the upper network, but never goes crazy on the scale. We basically do that with painkillers, which slow down chemistry that transmits signals between neurons, but that has some side-effects).
Pain is necessary for survival, but in my opinion, HIGH pain puts an organism into inoperable state, whereas LOW but noticeable pain can allow organism to find a way out.
Causality
This is what medicine is for. We have signals but it takes so much knowledge and experience to interpret those.
In some cases it’s clear how we could remedy the pain, for example: by taking the hand off of fire stove.
But other times it’s not clear. For example, a headache. There is so much that can be causing it. High blood pressure, dehydration, concussion, etc. What use does it have for a primordial men when all they can do is wait it out?
Maybe it would be more useful to coalesce some pain neurons with others that trigger thirst, temperature sensation or something to provide incentive to act in a certain way to remedy it, rather than firing more intensively.
References
This topic is so fruitful and interesting, will definitely link more thoughts here
