the structure of pain

(written Oct 2024)

a hypothesis

how do we make pain feel real in a simulation?

at first it doesn’t feel like anything 

but if the system causes the simulated character to scream and cry involuntarily when they are hurt, and if the system causes them to involuntarily lose mobility, squirm and twitch when hurt, then i suspect after a couple rounds of such experiences, the pain would feel more real.

one must have had played a rpg game to appreciate that. sometimes when something undesirable happens to your character, you might feel “ouch” even if there is no physical pain. it’s as if there was some kind of mental pain that was triggered though slight.

but the effect is real. the effect is only subtle because the immersion is incomplete and we still have our normal senses outside of the game. but once we identify with the character in a more immersive simulation i predict the pain will become more real.

medically we already know that pain is not only physical but also in our minds. it can be evidence that is is not a “physically real” phenomenon though i am not yet convicted of this conclusion yet, just a possibility. i think more likely is that we can create sensations of real pain once we have a full immersion simulation and we map our senses into a simulated character with 99% accuracy (ie the simulated character and real person will have their senses matched 99%), then we can probably create real sensations of pain even though the real person’s body is not harmed. we already know that phantom pain (for lost limbs) exist and there’s no reason why we can’t create phantom pain with simulated technologies 

once we believe pain is “real”, we have fear. we are then locked in.

this might be why babies cry so much. the pain must feel real to make the simulation feel real. the involuntary crying even to the extent of risking the baby’s own suffocation is the thing that tells the mind this thing is real. this is a lock-in process. we learn to avoid pain. the higher mind is synchoronized with the human brain so it too learns to avoid pain. this avoidance is part of what constitutes fear. fear locks us in.

i never doubted that feelings are real. even if we are in a simulated world. subjective feelings are real because we believe in them. whatever we believe is real is real.

that said, i always wanted to know : why is pain painful? what is it that makes us avoid it (generally)? why don’t i just hurt myself? it must be because i learned that it is a bad thing. but why? the subjective feeling exists, but why is that feeling bad? are there inherently bad feelings that we know the first day we are born? maybe. but it’s hard to experiment on that.

one hypothesis i strongly suspect to be true is that we learned by observing our own involuntary responses to pain. we cry. we feel paralyzed, we reflectively avoid contact with the painful areas, and we feel nervous signals pulsing at the painful parts. they’re obnoxious and they make it clear something is wrong . we don’t like that feeling because of the involuntary responses, and we want to avoid that. we internalize that sensation as “pain”.