Ask HN: Is there a bug in the universe which allows pain and suffering? - cvaidya1986
======
java-man
It is not a bug, it is a feature. Pain and suffering are a feedback mechanism
that give the animals a chance to improve the situation.

~~~
cvaidya1986
Time to upgrade

------
BjoernKW
By design or not: Pain is a useful input.

There are medical conditions that inhibit pain perception. People suffering
from such conditions have to be especially careful because their bodies won’t
tell them when there’s something amiss (like a hand resting comfortably on a
hot plate).

------
Regardsyjc
The literal pain as others have mentioned is a biological feedback loop and
feature of the human brain and evolution. When a baby is born, the baby needs
to eat or it will feel pain. When you touch fire, you feel pain, so you avoid
fire. When you eat, you receive positive feedback, so it encourages you to eat
rather than starve.

Back in the hunter-gatherer days, life was hard so people needed to stay in
tight-knit groups or communities. Being kicked out of the group meant death-
that is why so many people have issues today with social media. Social media
can connect but it can also isolate, and that isolation can create a
psychological pain. So all those likes, upvotes, and positive feedback give
tiny dopamine hits and feel nice, but when you don't receive them, you start
craving them, and you can feel isolated. Also social media is probably not a
substitute for good human interaction.

Philosophically, if you decide to find some meaning in life, suffering can be
considered a gift.

I luckily don't have any literal chronic pain but I've been blessed to
experience a lot of pain in my life. It has helped me be thankful for what I
do have and I think it has helped me empathize with people who have faced
similar trials. It also gave me a mission and a desire to prevent or help
others from going through what I did. Of course, this could also be some
psychological feature that I'm not aware of, like the need to tell a story to
make my suffering feel meaningful.

But to support my point, one example could be this great blog post I read
today on why you need hardship for passion.
[https://brookeallen.com/2015/01/27/passion-requires-that-
you...](https://brookeallen.com/2015/01/27/passion-requires-that-you-hate-
something/)

One of my favorite theories, Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Integration,
suggests that pain is necessary to reach higher self-awareness. For example,
you realize one morning that the world is pretty messed up and that's a pretty
painful reality, so what do you do? It makes me feel better because it
suggests my mental health issues could be more societal than personal.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_disintegration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_disintegration)

------
AnimalMuppet
From a Christian perspective: Yes. The original design was not pain and
suffering. Unfortunately, we are not living in the original design.

~~~
Assossa
Continuing the analogy:

It has been patched, you just have to be willing to install the hotfix. It
will temporarily make the bug more manageable, but won't fully patch it until
you perform a full reboot.

~~~
qbrass
Manually rebooting flips a bit in the patch, which leads to an eternity of
pain and suffering. You have to install the hotfix, then follow the new EULA
until sysop performs the shutdown.

------
CuriouslyC
It isn't a bug. It's an unavoidable consequence of two facts:

1\. There is variation in pleasurability of stimuli.

2\. Experience of pleasurability is relative, rather than absolute.

So if your baseline for some sensation is 10 units on an absolute scale,
experiencing 10 units of that sensation feels normal, and 5 units is probably
uncomfortable. However, if your baseline was 5 units, it would feel completely
normal and 10 might be uncomfortable.

You can see this in action with the hedonic treadmill. New pleasurable stimuli
initially make you happy, but after a while you adapt, and to get a thrill you
need to push the envelope farther. Additionally, once you're adapted, losing
that pleasurable stimuli is actually painful, even though you were just fine
before without it.

------
mjul
Whether it is a "bug" or not, people do experience it, and there is probably
nothing we can do to change the way things are.

However, accepting that it is a possible and common experience we can have it
is more fruitful to examine if suffering and pain have a cause, if they have
an end and if there are methods to overcome them.

In other words, are pain and suffering hackable? And how?

------
cimmanom
In order for it to be a bug, wouldn't the universe have to be designed? I'd
say pain and suffering are an emergent property of a complex / chaotic system.
They're neither a feature nor a bug - they just are.

------
kahlonel
Think of universe as a reinforcement learning system. A system where its
creatures are subject to a cost-function, the output of which is pain and
suffering. You'll see how important it is for this world to evolve.

------
dang
If you really want to go down a long tunnel with this question, read
Schopenhauer. He's so uncompromising about it that it's surprising he occupies
even the grudging place in the Western canon he does have.

~~~
cvaidya1986
Please don’t post like this here. Just kidding will add to my reading list.

