Why is Pain Painful?

This is not an easy questions but we love to philosophy. Laura Rathbone – one of our team members sharing her thoughts.

 

Pain is painful because it is pain. Painful feelings are painful because they are full of the experience of pain. Seems tautological to me because pain is simply the language we’ve decided to give something we experience and mutually agree upon.

 

I don’t think one can reasonably make any argument that doesn’t include an evolutionary perspective on the merit of feeling some sort of unpleasant experience tied to an increased likelihood of danger wether it be physical or psychological

Pain is pain because evolution has deemed it quite helpful…otherwise we likely wouldn’t be here and we wouldn’t see nocifensive behavior across just about every other living creature.

What pain (that word we ascribe that somewhat mutually defined experience to) means to each person is of course different…and in part I firmly believe that is mainly due to environmental/lifestyle, psychological, and sociological evolutions in humans that have far outpaced physical evolution