Can pain cause brain/nerve damage? As in getting, for example,

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>>8992840
the body isnt always logical and perfect xdddd

You would just go into shock and fall unconscious pretty quickly.

Consider also that sometimes debilitating pain has an advantage, since most injuries are aggravated by movement. Just staying still and giving your body a chance to heal could save you in some situations.

>>8992840

Pain is pain its not disinhibiting completely. Even massive pain while disorienting can be compartmentalized

Massive pain is reliably followed shortly thereafter with endogenous dopamine production which helps you do useful things, like dial 911 with your stumps.

>>8992848

I doubt chronic or intense pain can be made into a story of an advantage. For most people, severe trauma that doesn't result in unconsciousness is not immediately painful to the point you couldn't react, and make decisions as to move out of the way of more trauma. So it is not existential for the individual.
You might make a story of social evolution in that your collective self learns not to do something from the pain of others by listening to them whine.
But the pain comes awhile after the trauma and is probably not a feature of survival, but a bug in a badly evolved system.

We never used to live so long or badly as to have chronic pain.

While you can make an argument for a particular trait as something that developed from a mutation as a feature simply because that trait didn't die out, and consequently make up a story that the lack of that trait did die out, it is more believable that traits like chronic pain never challenge existence enough to be turned into a story of a feature.

More likely, like old age, chronic pain is just a bug time hasn't fixed yet.

>>8992868
Chronic pain, like old age, is a problem that will never be fixed be evolution, because evolution can only select for traits that give benefits leading up to and including procreation. There's a slight social benefit to keeping old people around longer, but it's not strong enough or focused enough to actually select for.

>>8992868
I wasn't talking about chronic pain, I was talking about sudden and intense pain, such as described in the OP. Chronic pain and short bouts of extremely intense pain are completely different subjects of discussion.

I would argue that chronic pain is usually the result of a design flaw in the human body. Often a problem with the nerves themselves or a side effect of an injury or negative mutation.

>>8992885
>Chronic pain, like old age, is a problem that will never be fixed be evolution, because evolution can only select for traits that give benefits leading up to and including procreation.

That makes no sense. For example I have had chronic pain and overcame it.

Humans are intrinsically capable of healing and regeneration, you expect those traits to increase evolutionary success.

So in general evolution selected for a species (human) with an amazing range of pain tolerance and healing ability.

Our immune system, cellular and genetic repair mechanisms- not to mention our huge brains to figure out how to survive- are actually fairly distinctive compared to the animal kingdom.


Also, given that sperm can be sexually viable well into advanced age, so does the regenerative properties of the sexual organs. Women have the short end of the stick with their limited number of eggs, but men can and are able to continually generate gametes (one half-copy of each chromosome).

It seems science will discover a way to boost that capability, or regenerate it in advanced age.

Evolutionarily speaking, being reproductively capable in old age is about brains and how you act (behaviors) that preserve the body (and mind) as a whole.

Generally smart people tend to make babies later rather than sooner. This is partly because they can. They've secured mates and life strategies to enhance their fitness. They've preserved mind and body and are in the position to make a better choice, if at all, among numerous choices.

The young person who makes a baby too soon is enhancing evolution's imperatives, but not his own. So healing is the same way. A healing person intends to heal; he does things (washes wounds, lifts weights) that enhance his own- not evolutions- imperatives.

It is acting against evolution- in other words- taking your own actions when the alternatives are simply consequences of natural processes.

>>8992927
If you've experienced the kind of pain that can leave you permanently crippled, you'd probably be dead or about to die in the evolutionary environment. Evolution might select against whatever caused that pain in the first place, but in order to select against debilitating pain you'd need a substantial number of people that experienced that pain (uncommon), didn't die because of it (uncommon), and weren't so mentally crippled by it that they couldn't pass on the debilitating pain resistance gene (uncommon). There's just not a whole lot of evolutionary pressure there.

>>8992946
It doesn't matter of a 90 year old man is fertile; 90 year old men practically never conceive children at that age for a variety of reasons. Most children are born to parents between 15 and 45 years old, so evolution has practically no data to work with as to what comes after that. If we only allowed people over 70 to have children, we'd probably do a pretty good job of selecting for traits they are effective for reaching old age. But as it is, we're by design selecting for traits that are effective for reaching sexual maturity, with bonus points for living long enough to have a couple extra children and raise them.

>>8992885

Yes, but no. The mechanism of selection isn't to chose an advantage before mating but the disadvantage of death before mating, so you are half right.
Just like you can get diverse groups to have a common enemy, but you can't get diverse groups to agree on a common cause other than the elimination of their enemy, the mechanism of evolution does not select positive traits; it selects (kills off) non-positive (negative) traits. Although they seem like a contrapositive, they are not.
If evolution selected positive traits instead of eliminating negative traits, first there would have to be a priori design to the effectiveness of the trait over the long run, and second, we would see the advancement of many superficial mutations that were not weeded out because they were carried with the positive trait.
We don't. Therefore, selection of positive traits is not the contrapositive non-selection of non-positive traits. We are what we are because we are not the others that died, not by the choice of a trait that makes sense.

Epistemologically speaking, the conclusion chooses the givens of our argument then turns it around and fools us into thinking the givens lead to the conclusion. We say the positive trait was chosen for this or that reason when there is nothing in the story to make that so.

>>8992961
>It doesn't matter of a 90 year old man is fertile; 90 year old men practically never conceive children at that age for a variety of reasons. Most children are born to parents between 15 and 45 years old, so evolution has practically no data to work with as to what comes after that. If we only allowed people over 70 to have children, we'd probably do a pretty good job of selecting for traits they are effective for reaching old age. But as it is, we're by design selecting for traits that are effective for reaching sexual maturity, with bonus points for living long enough to have a couple extra children and raise them.

There are studies, check google scholar.

Besides ptsd, I cant find anything about a person whose pain reception, once alieviated, causing permanent brain damage.

>>8992948

I think you're what you're missing is the SCOPE of evolution.

Your anscestors endured massive - truly massive amounts of pain- to successfully pass those genes on to you. Just because you aren't experiencing it and using it doesn't mean its not there.

As far as I can tell, and I've experienced lots of pain, and normal pain itself cannot "cripple" you.

Case in point of chronic pain sufferer reproducing- Kurt Cobain. It didn't stop him from making God-tier punk music.

Lots of people in your everyday life are experiencing massive chronic pain. They just don't show it because they are enduring it. Its adaptive behavior all the way down to the genetic and cellular level, so it is part of the evolutionary repertoire. Modern American society just doesn't engage these latent capabilities. Some people seek these experiences. Some people seek pain to unlock these additional genetic capabilities.