How would this model explain Cluster Headaches? They are not particularly more incapacitating than migraines, yet they are (possibly literally*) thousands of times more acutely painful than them. What is the role of this X1000 multiplier on phenomenal pain in such cases? As far as I can tell, in the ancestral environment nobody could have done anything to help you if you were having a Cluster Headache, and your chances of reproduction seem to be the same whether that pain was a thousand times less bad (which would still be VERY bad, but not in the level of ultra-Hellish pain). In particular, other species are known the have Cluster Headaches too, such as cats. So perhaps we should cluster pains into two buckets—those that have social significance and those that don’t. I worry that this study will make people dismiss extreme suffering in nonhuman animals, but that should only really apply to socially-useful pains. I suspect that there are many species-specific ultra-painful experiences that we will not discover (and prioritize!) unless we look for them.
One possibility, if this theory is correct, is that cluster headaches are a spandrel, i.e. a (very unfortunate) unintended side effect of the pain system being accidentally fired in a case when it isn’t beneficial for it to be but doesn’t get selected out because it doesn’t have much of an impact on differential reproduction rates.
Another is that causality is slightly different, pain is amped up in some cases to elicit altruism, but the mechanisms of pain are “lower in the stack” and so can be triggered by things other than those considered here, making cluster headaches something outside the bounds of what this model would need to explain since there can be many things accentuating pain and the considered cases are just one and the situation with cluster headaches is another.
Thanks for writing this.
How would this model explain Cluster Headaches? They are not particularly more incapacitating than migraines, yet they are (possibly literally*) thousands of times more acutely painful than them. What is the role of this X1000 multiplier on phenomenal pain in such cases? As far as I can tell, in the ancestral environment nobody could have done anything to help you if you were having a Cluster Headache, and your chances of reproduction seem to be the same whether that pain was a thousand times less bad (which would still be VERY bad, but not in the level of ultra-Hellish pain). In particular, other species are known the have Cluster Headaches too, such as cats. So perhaps we should cluster pains into two buckets—those that have social significance and those that don’t. I worry that this study will make people dismiss extreme suffering in nonhuman animals, but that should only really apply to socially-useful pains. I suspect that there are many species-specific ultra-painful experiences that we will not discover (and prioritize!) unless we look for them.
*See: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gtGe8WkeFvqucYLAF/logarithmic-scales-of-pleasure-and-pain-rating-ranking-and
One possibility, if this theory is correct, is that cluster headaches are a spandrel, i.e. a (very unfortunate) unintended side effect of the pain system being accidentally fired in a case when it isn’t beneficial for it to be but doesn’t get selected out because it doesn’t have much of an impact on differential reproduction rates.
Another is that causality is slightly different, pain is amped up in some cases to elicit altruism, but the mechanisms of pain are “lower in the stack” and so can be triggered by things other than those considered here, making cluster headaches something outside the bounds of what this model would need to explain since there can be many things accentuating pain and the considered cases are just one and the situation with cluster headaches is another.