If a person were immortal (that is, would never die), would they still feel physical pain?
It seems to me that they wouldn’t, since the purpose of pain is to avoid death – we feel pain when something brings us closer to death (getting stabbed for example). Therefore, if death wasn’t possible for an individual, wouldn’t they cease to feel pain? Since pain is only a function of preserving life.
One could argue “wounds which would normally cause pain (getting stabbed, cut, etc) would still take time and resources for the body to heal - and this could be the cause of pain.” But let’s assume for argument’s sake that any wounds inflicted upon the individual would heal immediately and without the expenditure of resources.
Furthermore, would they feel anything at all? Since all life is a matter of preserving life, then wouldn’t there be nothing left for the mind to do if the individual were immortal?
The two main philosophical concepts I am trying to evoke are: A) To what extent does the mind have control? Are all of the mind’s processes within a continuum? B) Will to Live versus Will to Power - would the mind feel anything at all if it were immortal - since it no longer has a purpose? The Will to Live might no longer be present, but perhaps the Will to Power would still be present, and the mind would still feel things. But if the Will to Power is only a function of the Will to Live (the reason we desire power is because more power means better odds of survival), then how could the mind still feel anything – since ‘power’ is relative (with no sense of having to preserve the body, ‘power’ has nothing to be relative to). Perhaps the individual would still have the desire to propagate his genes, and this might be the only source of purpose.
Actually yes, they would. Though, if wounds heal over imediately following, it would be fleeting, unless they were say, impaled, the object remaining in the body.
If you think about pain, it is not dependent on the threat to the body, but precognizent of it. It is a warning of threat, rather than only symptomatic. If I take a lancet, and press it firmly to my fingertip, though without actually piercing the skin or drawing blood, it still hurts.
This makes sense, especially if we think about why something like eating a habanero pepper can hurt - the mind may realize that there is no actual burning occurring, but still feels pain none-the-less.
But still, if the mind had come to the realization that it was no longer possible for actual threats to occur, then isn’t it still logical to think that pain would cease to be experienced – or the individual would at least be so desensitized to pain that it would merely be a bland dull sensation no different from anything else?
Habanero peppers cause pain because our nerves are attuned to detecting burning, and a chemical in habanero peppers lowers the threshold for those nerve endings sending a signal – but if getting burned was no longer possible (such as in the hypothetical case of an immortal person), would we still feel pain? The heat from a flame would still trigger a signal from the nerves on the immortal individual’s skin, even though no tissue was actually being damaged - but would their perception of that signal vary from ours?
Very likely, even now it would seem possible for mystics and freak-circus performers, to some extent, to supress pain, or at least desensitize themselves to it. So yeah, pain without the emotional context of horror/fear would soon cease to be little more than ‘just another sensation’ no different from our interpretations of rough or smooth. The immortal would probably just note “this feels painy” and move on with barely a blink.
If they were incapacitated by some event - being crushed, or as I said, impaled without chance of self removal, then I suppose pain would become interpreted as frustration. Though, I suppose extensive self-mutilation wouldn’t be out of the question, so even that’s dubious. I can imagine an immortal impaled on a spike simply cutting through their own torso in order to free themselves from it.
It is not so much that ‘the purpose of pain is to avoid death’ - this statement makes it sound like there is some form of rational intent behind pain, but there clearly isn’t. It is more that pain has evolved to be a feature of animals and humans because (presumably) feeling pain confers an evolutionary advantage in that it helps us avoid death. We can not un-evolve, nor can the physical make up of our brain be altered. ‘Pain’ is the result of hard wired neurological features - if a normal human being were to somehow become immortal, then it seems impossible that these features would change simply because they ‘know’ that they are immortal. This is stuff hat changes over long periods of time, not overnight.
In a similar light, men who are infertile (and know it) don’t generally stop being attracted to women, even though the desire to procreate is somewhat pointless. If the need for evolutionary function subsides, it doesn’t dimisnish the function instantaneously.
If we were a race of immortals, then feeling pain would have offered no evloutionary advantage. We therefore would not have evolved the feeling of pain (presumably). Then again, if we were immortal then evlolution would hardly occur at all (perhaps hideously ugly people would not be able to find anyone to fuck - and thus not have any children, but other than that…), so we would remain about the same as we were at the point at which we became imortal.
Finally, I don’t see how immortality would affect the will to live.
I don’t see how that differs from what I was saying
Depending on how you define “physical make up”, the physical make up of our brain is altered all the time. It re-wires itself, some neurons die, new neurons are made, new dendrites are created, the amount of neurotransmitters fluctuate, certain regions become more/less active than others, some regions are needed to perform other tasks and assigned new roles.
As for pain in particular, desensitization to pain is something that happens all the time. Imagine you have a toothe ache from a cavity. When you first notice that your tooth hurts, it might hurt quite a bit and cause you some concern, and you can’t stop thinking about it for minutes. After a while, you start to forget about it. Although in the background of your thought, you know you’re in pain, you’re still able to think about other things and push the pain off to the side. As days go by, you are able to carry on with life as usual, and only notice the pain from time to time.
Wouldn’t this same mechanism be at work in the case of an individual who is hypothetically immortal?
What about incidences such as when a person finds scrapes/cuts/bruises that they didn’t even know they had and don’t know how they got?
Or when a person gets a real serious injury and doesn’t even know about it? There’s this article about a lady who accidentally shot herself with a nailgun and didn’t realize it - it went through the roof of her mouth and a little bit up into her brain, but she didn’t even notice it. For a few days, she thought she just had a tooth-ache, and she went to the dentist.
The mind’s lack of attentiveness can make pain lessened or even absent completely.
This is a good point, and I can’t give a solid answer. One explanation is that our genetic code doesn’t make the mind instinctively aware of what sperm are, or how they are responsible for pregnancies - when it comes to our sexual desire, it would seem that our genetic code’s goal is to make us as little aware as possible as to what the purpose of sex is.
We also have no way of intuitively becoming aware of being infertile, we can’t see our lack of sperm, so our primitive mind doesn’t know any better. Not being able to die, on the other hand, is something that the individual would have to become directly aware of - and this knowledge would be fully integrated through all of our senses into every aspect of our mind.
When it comes to infertility, where is knowledge of this experienced first-hand? An individual has to trust what a doctor tells them – what do you think the primitive evolutionary aspect of our mind thinks about this? Another male telling you that you’re genitals are no good anymore and can’t produce offspring. Considering that throughout human history:
A) Genital removal and male envy has been commonplace; victors of battles/wars would often cut off the genitals of their opponents.
B) Male envy extends far further back than just human history; there are documented accounts on camera of male monkeys getting jealous of another male monkey, and attacking him/kicking him out of the clan – the male monkey doesn’t even have to see the sex take place, he just intuitively knows that his female partner has had sex with a different male monkey, which would lead us to believe that it is fairly instinctive ability that has been ingrained genetically. Not only monkeys show male envy, but a few hundred million years worth of evolutionary ancestors show indications of male competitiveness.
Our consciousness might believe the doctor when he tells us we’re infertile, but our Shadow - our primitive self that is hidden from us, the primitive self that contains forbidden evolutionary knowledge, and remains skeptical/suspicious of all other people - doesn’t believe it, and it would atleast want proof that could be confirmed with multiple senses first-hand.
My main post was talking about a mortal individual (a human being, like us) who then became immortal.
Its the main philosophical question I was trying to invoke with my original post! Is the will to live integrated within our brain to a great and complex enough extent such that essential features of human behaviour would become altered if the purpose for their existence - the independent variable of their function (if we express them as an equation) - was removed.
In terms of "f(x)=ny" mathematical logic:
[i]Pain = (resources spent)+deathvariables[/i]
If there is no death (or resources being spent for the recovery of wounds/ailments), how could there be pain?
Well said. ‘Immortality’ doesn’t necessarily entail being impervious to any threat or damage (which pain so aptly recognizes). I would imagine that even an immortal would show concern if his hair were on fire, for instance.
Also, I like that you included “fleeting” in your answer. To a person who considers time endless, and is forced to face the inevitability and persistence of change, I imagine such transitory things (such as our Passions) would loose significance, and subsequently influence.
(1) Evolution has no direction. There is no ‘un-evolve’.
(2) Of course it can. It last changed majorly about 150,000 years ago with the development of the - I think - Broca’s region, enabling complex speech. The pre-frontal cortex in-toto is also a relatively ‘new’ invention.
In context of your general point however, a baby born immortal, with instant healing, would never develop the aversion to pain that ‘normal’ children otherwise naturally aquire in their formative years. Later that net may well be ‘pruned’ out of the system altogether as the child’s brain passes into adolescence/adulcy - again a natural process.
Or perhaps regarded with confused Passions that evoke pleasure or some other sensation foreign to us. Instant healing still does not hold an implication of an utter absence of pain, although the sensation could only be experienced very briefly making it all the more seemless – or subject to misinterpretation otherwise. But, I agree, the general aversion to ‘pain’ would almost certainly be dulled or nonexistent.
As it pertains to the OP, I think we can say that an immortal would likely develop something other than a natural aversion to a “painful” sensation. Therefore, those Passions which affect our aversion would likely be nonexistent as well (or confused). That is to say, he would likely not feel “pain.”
Not too long ago I read about a man who was made to suffer so much pain that he developed the ability to heal himself instantly of any wound. There were eyewitnesses to his ability to do this.
Even if it was - as you mention in the case of the toothache - you still feel the pain from time to time. So this doesn’t help us in establishing the conclusion that an immortal person would feel no pain at all. Plus - it only kicks in after you’ve had a significant pain for a prolonged period.
Maybe if you subjected an immortal person to severe pain all over for extremely long periods of time they would become completely desensitised to pain. This is purely conjecture though, and there is no evidence I know of to suggest that the desensitisation would be permanent.
What I’m saying is - I agree that the brain has an abillity to screen pain, but again this is a built in evolutional function. If a normal person became immortal then this function would still function about the same. What seems unlikey to happen is that this function would simply kick in to overdrive and screen all pain completely.
Sorry, unclear writing. I meant one person can not un-evolve - “we” as in me and you and any other readers as opposed to the race. I chopped that paragraph up a bit before posting. Sorry.
I’m not sure I agree. I don’t think we aquire an aversion to pain purely because of the cuts and bruises it leaves. I also think we are adverse to pain because it is painful. They may be a lot braver than the normal person, but I’m sure they’d still object if, say, you shot them in the foot for fun because although it would heal instantly, it would still hurt, and pain is simply an unpleasant experience itself.
Let me re-write that equation to make it more accurate
For an individual who has been inflicted with some sort of wound:
Wound Inflicted = ((Probability of death)+(Resource spent for healing the wound))*variables
Pain=((Probability of death)+(Resource spent for healing the wound))*variables
Wound Inflicted = Pain
with ‘variables’ simply present as I assume there would be constants and other values needed to properly express such an equation.
Essentially, I am asking, does the human mind operate based on such an equation? Or is pain merely an undesirable signal, and a human being does not necessarily know why it exists?