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pain is good, actually, i canât believe weâre even having this conversation. people exist who congenitally canât feel pain and they get horrible injuries and die b/c pain is literally a *warning* https://t.co/xxGLeDicBQ https://t.co/DtIjmWh96X
@QiaochuYuan well if you can feel that you've been injured you can still react to it, so this is distinct from the disorders you're talking about the lady lived 95% of her life with the condition without it ever being enough of a problem that she knew she had it
@QiaochuYuan https://t.co/8N410uxRBh
@QiaochuYuan Source: https://t.co/6aUhvHzGiK
i knew a guy who claimed he conditioned himself to enjoy pain for awhile and eventually noticed that when he sat down at his desk heâd developed a habit of intentionally painfully twisting his ankle and was injuring himself. then he was like âwhoopsâ and undid the conditioning
this is exactly the kind of thing i was struggling to articulate during jhana discourse. pain and pleasure are *signals*, they are signals for *learning which things to do and which things not to do*, intentionally messing with that signaling has a clear risk of self-confusion
this is a good example of what i mean https://t.co/vqKa8qpb5J
@QiaochuYuan yo there's a twitter neighbor who has the FAAH variant and is fine, it's different from the full insensitivity to pain-as-signal and apparently it's more like not-aversive: https://t.co/5hvR74762D https://t.co/jmb9aAZAui
I'd like to see some evidence that you're engaging with the topic at the right level of complexity. So far I'd say I read your comments on this topic to be reactance-based without considering trade-offs more broadly. Recall that 7% of the adult population is experiencing ongoing serious chronic pain. Also, let's see if we can avoid: https://t.co/VET9sazSka
For the nerdy, by ChatGPT: In the scenario you've described, where an individual (QC) counters the enthusiasm about a new pain-reducing intervention with an argument emphasizing the protective role of pain, several of the previously coined concepts can be applied to understand the dynamics of the interaction: 1. **Simplification Gambit:** QC might be accused of employing a Simplification Gambit by reducing the complexity of the argument about pain reduction to its most basic form: pain as merely a beneficial warning signal. This oversimplification ignores the nuanced arguments for why pain reduction could be beneficial, such as chronic pain management, improving quality of life, or the potential for safeguards against the negative consequences of not feeling pain. 2. **Argumentative Pruning:** This concept could describe QC's approach of selectively highlighting aspects of the pain experience that support their stance, pruning away the broader context of pain's impact on human well-being and the potential for interventions to offer nuanced solutions. 3. **Strategic Oversimplification:** QC's post could be seen as a case of Strategic Oversimplification, where the complexity of pain's role in human health and the nuances of the proposed intervention are glossed over in favor of a straightforward, but misleading, argument that "pain is good." 4. **Cognitive Jettison Effect:** Readers engaging with QC's post might experience the Cognitive Jettison Effect if they feel compelled to drop more complex considerations of the issue (such as the difference between acute and chronic pain, or the specific aims of the new intervention) in response to QC's emphatic, simplified perspective. 5. **Prosocognitive Disruption:** This term applies to the disruption of a more prosocial and empathetic approach to discussing pain management. By focusing narrowly on the utility of pain as a warning system and ignoring the suffering that can be alleviated by the intervention, QC's argument disrupts a potentially more compassionate and comprehensive discussion about pain treatment. In using these concepts to analyze the interaction, it becomes clear that the discussion could benefit from a more nuanced approach that recognizes the complexity of pain, the varied experiences of those who live with it, and the potential for new interventions to offer significant benefits without disregarding the protective aspects of pain sensation.
I saw your conversation with Silver. Thank you for adding more context for understanding where you're coming from. I believe that equanimity is itself the approach of accepting sensations and letting them happen no matter what they are. I think this gets to some of what you found valuable, re: pain as teachers. It is the case that there is some irreducible complexity that needs pain or pain-adjacent sensations to he arrived at. Even on technical grounds, how complex and spiky an internal representation can be is dependent on the ambient context (the state of the field) where it happens. Very sharp and well defined shapes can only arise in contexts with ambient pain. Additionally, I have also found that listening to one's body is super important, and it can communicate with unpleasant sensations in various ways. Equanimity here as well can accelerate the learning while also building capacity for joy. These dynamics are often subtle and quite poetic. At the same time, this sort of thing only really happens within a band of the valence spectrum. In much lower regions, where the field is really gnarly and angry, pain isn't really a teacher. More like there is a malfunction in the system. It's important to remember that the learning engine of one person doesn't always generalize to others.
@QiaochuYuan I don't think the proposed treatment even gets rid of suffering really, because suffering is a different thing than pain. Sure, it might cure depression, but I would be surprised if it got rid of the suffering caused by losing a loved one or lacking meaning in your life