“Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”
[c-f] nociception -&gt; zero hits<p>This surprised me. Nociception is the term you will find in the biological literature because we can&#x27;t quantify how (for example) a mouse &quot;feels&quot; when it&#x27;s tail is dipped in hot water but we can quantify the behavioral response and use it as a proxy for the underlying biological mechanism.<p>Once you separate the biological and psychological responses in this manner the reasoning seems (to me) to become much cleaner.<p>Without higher level reasoning, nociception just needs to trigger <i>any</i> learning response in order to achieve survival. That&#x27;s an incredibly open ended requirement.<p>In the presence of higher level reasoning then, pain could be viewed as a secondary effect that in turn triggers some learning response. So if you have higher level reasoning you don&#x27;t necessarily need pain, but you probably do need nociception <i>plus some other robust downstream response</i> for a reliable organism. (This seems to mostly match up with the observations about useful nonpainful pain in the article.)