People who complain more – are they more sensitive to pain than people who complain less? Are they just loud mouths? How can we make sense of being “sensitive to pain?” When we say we are “sensitive to X,” we usually fill in the variable X with an object. For example, we can say our eyes are sensitive to the sun. The sun is an object. Pain is not an object; pain is a sensation itself. So how could we be sensitive, or hypersensitive to the sense of something? Perhaps in these sorts of cases what people mean by pain is actually “pain stimulus.” This makes sense because a pain stimulus would be an object. For example, a thorn could be a pain stimulus and a thorn is an object. Then by saying “hypersensitive to pain” one might mean something like: “If some pain stimulus – a thorn for example – were to come into contact with your body there would be a higher frequency and/or magnitude of APs generated in your nociceptors.”
But is it also possible that two people can have the same frequency and/or magnitude of APs generated in their nociceptors and still one complains more than the other? The answer is a resounding “Yes.” So then we’re back to square one.
Some people are born w/o the ability to feel pain. This disorder is called congenital analgia.. The life of a congenital analgiac is characterized by frequent bone fractures, a biting off of one’s tongue, and young death. Is it fair to say people “suffer” from this disorder? Isn’t pain a key component of suffering? But maybe suffering only implies psychic pain? But isn’t psychic pain still pain? And isn’t all pain really psychic? After all, pain isn’t in the pain stimulus for the APs of the nociceptors; pain is in the mind. Then really psychic and non-psychic pain are the same thing just with different primary causes.
Something a little more interesting: some people acquire the disorder pain asymbolia (usually from a brain lesion) where the sufferer can still feel pain, but the pain doesn’t hurt. The pain has no hedonic negativity. Note: these people still describe the sensation as pain (remember this disorder is acquired not congenital, so the people that have it do know what pain is). This has heavy implications on the nature of language: our definitions tell us that part of being “pain” is hurting, but then if we can discover a posteriori that in fact pain is not essentially bound to hurting, then perhaps words are not so much defined as they are discovered. If the meaning of a word is to be discovered then words are separate from our creation of them, and so they are separate from us and exist in the universe independently of us. Such implications are reminiscent of Plato’s forms.
But questions about hurting can become thornier. Masochists enjoy pain. Does this imply that, like pain asymbolics, masochists do not feel the hedonic negativity of pain and in fact feel hedonic positivity of pain? But it seems that masochists partly get pleasure out of the hurting of the pain. In this case a masochist does not not feel pain, and does not not feel hurting (i.e. the negativity of pain), but in fact does not feel the negativity of hurt, for which there is no word. We can see then the relationship between pain, hurt, and negativity of hurt as they can be analogized to higher deritives of distance.
Pain:Hurt:Hedonic Negativity of Hurt (for which there is no name)
Congenital analgia:pain asymbolia:masochism
Distance:speed:acceleration
First derivitve : second derivative : third derivative
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