That does seem plausible but I think the opposite i more likely. Of course you need a reasoned response, but I’m not sure the magnitude of pain would necessarily help the association with the reasoned response
Harmful action leads to negative stimulus (perhaps painful) which leads to withdrawl and future cessation of that action. It seems unlikely to me that increasing the magnitude of that pain would make a creature more likely to stop doing an action. More like the memory and higher functions would need to be sufficient to associate the action to the painful stimuli, and then a form of memory needs to be there to allow a creature to avoid the action in future.
It is unintuitive to me that the “amount” of negative stimuli (pain) would be what matters, more the strength of connection between the pain and the action, which would allow future avoidance of the behaviour.
I use “negative stimuli” rather than pain, because I still believe we heavily anthropomorphise our own experience of pain onto animals. Their experience is likely to be so wildly different from ours (whether “better” or “worse”) that I think even using the word pain might be misleading sometimes.
More intelligent beings shouldn’t necessarily need pain at all to avoid actions which could cause you to “die and fail to reproduce”. I wouldn’t think to avoid actions that could lead to, or would need very minor stimulus as a reminder.
Actually it does seem quite complex the more I think about it/
That does seem plausible but I think the opposite i more likely. Of course you need a reasoned response, but I’m not sure the magnitude of pain would necessarily help the association with the reasoned response
Harmful action leads to negative stimulus (perhaps painful) which leads to withdrawl and future cessation of that action. It seems unlikely to me that increasing the magnitude of that pain would make a creature more likely to stop doing an action. More like the memory and higher functions would need to be sufficient to associate the action to the painful stimuli, and then a form of memory needs to be there to allow a creature to avoid the action in future.
It is unintuitive to me that the “amount” of negative stimuli (pain) would be what matters, more the strength of connection between the pain and the action, which would allow future avoidance of the behaviour.
I use “negative stimuli” rather than pain, because I still believe we heavily anthropomorphise our own experience of pain onto animals. Their experience is likely to be so wildly different from ours (whether “better” or “worse”) that I think even using the word pain might be misleading sometimes.
More intelligent beings shouldn’t necessarily need pain at all to avoid actions which could cause you to “die and fail to reproduce”. I wouldn’t think to avoid actions that could lead to, or would need very minor stimulus as a reminder.
Actually it does seem quite complex the more I think about it/
Its an interesting discussion anyway.