Yeah. Leprosy causes nerve damage so victims don't feel pain. That's why lepers are often depicted as missing limbs. It's not because of the disease itself, it's because they get hurt and don't notice it until it's too late
Diabetics too. I have a friend with type 1 and he is always checking his feet for cuts. Says that if he doesn’t look he won’t know if he’s cut, then it can get infected so bad he might have to get the foot amputated.
In the movie Novocain Jack Quaids character can’t feel pain and has to set alarms to remind himself to go to the bathroom or his bladder might burst and he wouldn’t know. He also eats mostly soft food that doesn’t require a lot of chewing or he can bite his tongue off on accident.
As cool as they tried to make his condition in the movie it still came across as very horrible.
Or when they’re toddlers they rub their eyes and damage them. I remember one kid, they had to put goggles on her because she kept sticking her fingers in her eyes.
Referring her to pain geneticists at University College London and the University of Oxford they identified two mutations of note. One in a gene called Faah (Fatty Acid Amide Hydrolase), which is well known to pain researchers.
The FAAH gene plays a role in the body’s endocannabinoid system, the parts of the central nervous system which play a role in pain, memory and mood and which the compounds in cannabis act on.
Kind of points to physical pain and mental pain as having the same origin. This also might be the key to addiction. Opiates might be so addictive because the alleviate a common source of pain.
the origin is the brain so it literally is in our heads lol. I have Fibro as well. Something originating from your brain or nerves doesn't mean the pain isn't real.
Guess you haven’t been to a lot of doctors or aren’t a woman. I’ve never misinterpreted the intent of the doctor’s explanation. Medical gaslighting is real and happens to fibro patients probably more often than those with most other ailments. The only people it happens to more are WOMEN with fibromyalgia.
I am a woman with fibromyalgia and been to dozens of doctors over the last 20yrs of have fibro. Also look after a support group with a few thousand people with it. Medical gaslighting is real but this statement is the most misunderstood.
Not in my experience. The phenomenon of fibromyalgia is poorly understood, even in the medical community. There are vast swaths of doctors who don’t acknowledge that the pain is “real”, only that the patient is anxious and/or hysterical, suffering from some sort of psychological disorder. I’ve been labeled as drug seeking and doctor shopping when all I wanted was a doctor who acknowledged my pain was real and offered non-opioid pain medication or other methods of controlling my pain. I think you’re oversimplifying the medical experience because yours was simple or straightforward. I’ve had pain for as long as I can remember. Nearly half a century. I am just now starting to see changes in the way my medical complaints are being addressed. I’m barely starting to sense that the doctor isn’t skeptical of my symptoms. I acknowledge that there is 100% a psychological component, but the pain was present before the psychological toll.
some anecdotes doesn't mean that's the whole reality. and to their credit again anxiety is linked to fibro and can mess up the way body perceives pain. Our body and mind are not separate things. they work together.
It’s not that hard to tell the difference between a doctor explaining that pain is biopsychosocial, pain signals being interpreted in the brain, etc. and a doctor saying “it’s all in your head” like you’re hysterical. One is usually nice and explains how pain works, the other is condescending and dismisses you.
And then there's me, who's hypersensitive to pain and scars at the scratch of a fingernail. I'd be up for some gene therapy to reach a happy medium between me and this woman.
You would end up like me then. I feel pain but unless it is severe, I usually don't usuallly notice I am injured until someone points it out. This body excells at healing too.
Saw this video on a guy who does not feel pain. He said people have asked if he was given to chance to feel pain, would he. He said no, because at this point he had caused so much damage to his body that he would just be in constant pain.
This phenomenon has bioethical importance as well. In everything from laboratories using animals, to issues of abortion and euthanasia, pain awaeness is in fact paramount. For good reason. But what if someone is aware, and capable of consent - but lacks pain awareness? This woman is a living thought experiment, one that needs to be asked.
Whelp, you triggered my ADHD curiousity and made me dive headfirst into that rabbit hole. Sorry about infodumping the resulting wall of text, but it's your own fault for putting that thought experiment out there!
I think a good start would be noticing that pain has multiple roles and consequences, breaking those down, and being careful not to mix them up in these bioethical discussions.
Pain can be an immediate form of suffering in and of itself, a heuristic for harm, and a heuristic for the anticipation of harm. The latter two are why pain evolved in the first place. For example, to warn us to not use an injured limb to prevent the injury from getting worse. Suppressing that pain reduces the immediate, direct suffering from it, but if doing so leads to re-injury it increases harm.
Pain is one of multiple senses for harm-prevention. Nausea is another major one, for example. Emotions also take on this role: feeling sad can be a form of suffering, but may also signal that the cause of the sadness is harmful to us and requires action. I bring this up because one might ask if you could truly "experience" harm if you could not feel pain, as a philosophical hypothetical. Since there are many ways to suffer that do not involve any pain, I'd say you could.
Now to put all of that in the context of bioethics in the scenarios you mentioned.
If the absence of pain does not remove the ability to suffer in other ways, or experience harm, then I think main question of consent is about being able to anticipate harm. Without it, one should arguably not be considered able to give real informed consent.
The article states that this woman often would smell "her burning flesh before noticing any injury". The top comment in the thread mentions other people without a sense of pain going blind due to not realizing that they have dust in their eyes. The absence of pain means "harm awareness" is greatly reduced.
We normally use physical senses like pain to help us interpret our environment and ourselves. From this point of view the mind is a "guidance system" to help the body adequately respond to our senses. Let's look at that "guidance system" using dual process theory.
Dual process theory suggests that thoughts are formed via two types of processes that interact with each other: automatic, implicit processes versus controlled explicit processes. So we have senses, "automatic" thinking and "explicit" thinking.
Emotions are typically considered "automatic" thoughts, and contrasted with rationality and reason as explicit thought processes that have to be intentionally engaged. This is an oversimplification, in reality the mind probably not so neatly organized, but this is easier to ~~reason~~ explicitly think about.
The automatic system of emotions is ideally self-regulating, with negative emotions inhibiting overly positive ones and vice-versa. Emotions and other "implicit" thoughts are therefore the main drivers of our actions and decisions. By comparison reason and other "explicit" thoughts are somewhat limited to guiding the former. They also are limited in how much they can compensate for distortions in automatic thought processes.
Another important consequence is that conscious awareness, also being a form of explicit thinking, often requires an initial emotional trigger. The explicit system needs to be motivated to intervene, so to speak. That is one way of interpreting why a lack of pain, and emotional response to pain, results in a greatly reduced harm awareness. The "burnt flesh" anecdote illustrates this, but also shows how one may use "explicit" thinking in other ways to somewhat compensate: first, by explicitly learning that that burning oneself is harmful, and second by connecting that to smelling burnt flesh and reacting to that.
For people unable to feel pain, one may wonder if other negative signals like feeling bad about seeing family member worry about them may help motivate harm avoidance. Well, research shows that while feeling nauseous after eating a specific type of food triggers avoiding eating that food in the future, but stomach pains do not. Unless one explicitly reflects and conclused that they have a food intolerance. Negative emotions are not guaranteed to trigger future harm avoidance even when they are present. By which I'm trying to say that "coopting" other negative emotions for harm avoidacne likely requires explicit conscious engagement with that line of thought.
Another consideration is that we rely on past harmful experiences to anticipate future ones. If these do not include negative feelings and sensations as negative feedback, they may fail to engage the automatic system to motivate that avoidance harmful future scenarios. Again distorting the ability to reason about a potentially harmful future scenario, and therefore to giving informed consent.
The expected lack of emotional response to harmful hypotheticals due to a lack of negative associations with pain will also likely cause one to leave their guard down, resulting in greater vulnerability to being misinformed, manipulated, or exploited in that regard too.
So when it comes to giving consent, I think it boils down to whether we or not we can really compensate for a lack of "natural" harm awareness and anticipation through other means, show that this indirect process of truly making one aware of harm was actually done, and that a subject was indeed engaging and aware with these thoughts when they consented.
I'd say that that would be very difficult, if possible at all.
PS: I think no discussion of "pain" and "consent" would be complete without pointing out benign masochism, or "the enjoyment of negative bodily reactions and feelings in the context of feeling safe, or pleasure at “mind over body”", and the related hedonic reversal, or "the conversion of a (usually) innate negative experience into a positive experience". See "Glad to be sad, and other examples of benign masochism" for an overview. Benign masochism shows that we consciously manipulate and even enjoy "breaking" our heuristics of harm. This is not so relevant in the context of the bioethics of animal suffering, abortion or euthanasia, but it matters when it comes to interventions against self-harm in the broader sense.
PPS: there is the obvious follow-up question of the ethics of genetically manipulating animals into lacking pain awareness: the Ameglian Major Cow from the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy already posed that question in an absurd way. Based on everything I just wrote it should be easy to argue that choosing to cause an inability to judge self-harm properly is unethical, and in the case of the cow it's actually worse since it has been bred to desire self-harm and and suffers if people refuse to eat it.
Perhaps someone should link to this on the philosophy sub. I t should get very interesting.
> If the absence of pain does not remove the ability to suffer in other ways, or experience harm, then I think main question of consent is about being able to anticipate harm. Without it, one should arguably not be considered able to give real informed consent.
Well yes its more generally awareness of pleasure or discomfort; but physical pain is (at least in popular discussions) the yardstick. I think this is the ethically relevant definition of consciousness; other definitions of consciousness or sentience might exist, but in ethics, no other definition matters.
> Pain is one of multiple senses for harm-prevention. Nausea is another major one, for example. Emotions also take on this role: feeling sad can be a form of suffering, but may also signal that the cause of the sadness is harmful to us and requires action. I bring this up because one might ask if you could truly "experience" harm if you could not feel pain, as a philosophical hypothetical. Since there are many ways to suffer that do not involve any pain, I'd say you could.
The fact that the awareness of harm helps us to avoid it, confirms that pain is good. Just not in the ethical sense, ie. the domains of human moral obligation. As a philosophical what if, a world lacking all pain and trauma would be more dangerous, and not at all the same thing as a world without excess of pain and trauma. Of course this is a seperate discussion, but it is one people don't handle well, especially as regards appeal to nature. We are all brought up to avoid equating what is good with what is natural; but all morals must bear relation to human nature. Is it a paradox or not? It is good and natural to avoid and ease pain; yet pain itself is also natural and good. What is good is what is natural; but nature herself cannot give our moral answers.
> For people unable to feel pain, one may wonder if other negative signals like feeling bad about seeing family member worry about them may help motivate harm avoidance. Well, research shows that while feeling nauseous after eating a specific type of food triggers avoiding eating that food in the future, but stomach pains do not. Unless one explicitly reflects and conclused that they have a food intolerance. Negative emotions are not guaranteed to trigger future harm avoidance even when they are present. By which I'm trying to say that "coopting" other negative emotions for harm avoidacne likely requires explicit conscious engagement with that line of thought.
I think this is interesting.
> Another consideration is that we rely on past harmful experiences to anticipate future ones. If these do not include negative feelings and sensations as negative feedback, they may fail to engage the automatic system to motivate that avoidance harmful future scenarios. Again distorting the ability to reason about a potentially harmful future scenario, and therefore to giving informed consent.
Ah but the use of memory to anticipate future suffering, rests on awareness of past harm. Many people including myself, have memory of surgery under twilight sedation; we remember the feelings of tugging and pressure, but not the pain as we did not have pain awareness - nor were we awake - at the time. We still remember the wierdness of the feeling but not as a painful sensation. Maybe this isn't what you were thinking of, but its at least tangentical, the role of memory, The memory of being cut and burned is not the same thing as the pain of being cut and burned.
> PPS: there is the obvious follow-up question of the ethics of genetically manipulating animals into lacking pain awareness: the Ameglian Major Cow from the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy already posed that question in an absurd way. Based on everything I just wrote it should be easy to argue that choosing to cause an inability to judge self-harm properly is unethical, and in the case of the cow it's actually worse since it has been bred to desire self-harm and and suffers if people refuse to eat it.
So which should have the greater moral status; the creature's desire for self-harm, or its needs (as a living creature) not to be harmed? What about suicidal people? What about addicts?
There is a posthuman example in Man After Man. I've forgotten their names but there are genetically engineered humans that are harvested for food by cyborg humans whilst still alive. And they are engineered not to mind the physical sensations. In the Darwinist sense their niche sees that they will survive as long as their farmers need them; is their situation bad? Its a very extreme version of domestication, and ergo the old debates about wether domestication is symbiosis, or something more akin to parasitism by humans as the controlling partner. And yet they and their farmers - as forming a mutually dependent pairing - will be almost the only hominids to survive in that fictional timeline. But in the moral sense, is there still harm if there is no subjective suffering? Compared to the 'Ameglian Major Cow' it is not killed but harvested for chunks of meat and fat whilst living by surgical machines, that presumably see to the healing. Although the concept feels ghoulish it is clear that the human fauna is not capable of thoughts; the farmed creatures do not possess feelings.
Well harm is objective, suffering is not. Like the distinction disease =/= (subjective feelings of) sickness; there are plant diseases, yet they cannot 'feel sick'. But knowing that sickness is just an awareness of the harm, and that sickness may be delusional if the harm is imaginary - could it not be argued that harm have greater moral poignancy than sickness? I think sickness cannot be reduced to pathology itself, nor to the awareness of the pathology; a 'theory of parts' is called for. And i think this holds generally for matters of harm. You can have harm without suffering and suffering without harm.
>In addition to the mutation in FAAH, Cameron showed a heterozygous microdeletions downstream of FAAH overlapping a pseudogene.[13][3][2][5] This novel pseudogene was named FAAH-OUT and was considered likely to encode a long non-coding RNA (lncRNA).[13][2][5]
Hope her family prevents her from being made into a guinea pig by the scientific community, wonder what other organizations could intervene on her behalf? 🤔
The amount of people something like this could help is immense. Millions of people have chronic pain, so I’d actually hope this woman does everything she can to help humanity find some ways to deal with that better for everyone’s sake. Not to even mention all the other medical issues that this could help from the whole non scarring thing and other mental tie ins.
This is huge.
Until your appendix bursts and you don't feel the pain that tells you to go to the hospital!!
I'm pretty sure people with the not feeling pain disorders have way reduced lifespans because pain is the body letting you know something isn't right so they can't feel infections or similar.
She's 71? People who feel no pain rarely make it to adulthood. Absence of pain means serious problems go unnoticed: broken bones, infections. Imagine the usual teenage recklessness, but untempered by a fear of pain.
I dont believe this healing without scarring is impossible in any "real" wound. Unless the physiology of this individual is so massively and fundamentally different you could argue they are a different species.
I was going to make the joke that they are going to lock her up in a lab and give her an adamantium skeleton. But youre getting downvoted...so i did it anyway
PaddyMcGeezus | 10 days ago
People like this sometimes end up with vision problems or going blind because they can't feel when particles land in their eyes
ArcFurnace | 10 days ago
Yeah, the "heals without scarring" is definitely the more useful part of this. Total insensitivity to pain has a lot of well-documented issues.
g0ing_postal | 10 days ago
Yeah. Leprosy causes nerve damage so victims don't feel pain. That's why lepers are often depicted as missing limbs. It's not because of the disease itself, it's because they get hurt and don't notice it until it's too late
MyDamnCoffee | 10 days ago
I never knew that! Thank you for sharing
KerouacsGirlfriend | 10 days ago
Diabetics too. I have a friend with type 1 and he is always checking his feet for cuts. Says that if he doesn’t look he won’t know if he’s cut, then it can get infected so bad he might have to get the foot amputated.
Crying_Reaper | 10 days ago
It was depicted well in The Kingdom of Heaven Directors Cut when it shows the young king putting his hand over a candle and not feeling anything.
Lorgin | 10 days ago
Literally wolverine
dikbisqit | 10 days ago
A zero on the scale of anxiety depression seems like biggest biggest if them all.
EquipLordBritish | 10 days ago
Hopefully they aren't connected.
MentalDisintegrat1on | 10 days ago
I believe they also have to really watch every time they eat they can chew their own tongue off.
At glance it seems like a superpower until you realize it over rights all the ways your body is telling you something is wrong.
I wonder if they feel stomach pain like if they have to poop.
Caspur42 | 10 days ago
In the movie Novocain Jack Quaids character can’t feel pain and has to set alarms to remind himself to go to the bathroom or his bladder might burst and he wouldn’t know. He also eats mostly soft food that doesn’t require a lot of chewing or he can bite his tongue off on accident.
As cool as they tried to make his condition in the movie it still came across as very horrible.
atlantagirl30084 | 10 days ago
Or when they’re toddlers they rub their eyes and damage them. I remember one kid, they had to put goggles on her because she kept sticking her fingers in her eyes.
propargyl | 10 days ago
Referring her to pain geneticists at University College London and the University of Oxford they identified two mutations of note. One in a gene called Faah (Fatty Acid Amide Hydrolase), which is well known to pain researchers.
The FAAH gene plays a role in the body’s endocannabinoid system, the parts of the central nervous system which play a role in pain, memory and mood and which the compounds in cannabis act on.
Aside from her lack of pain, Cameron was additionally described as characteristically happy, friendly, talkative, optimistic, and compassionate, as well as exceedingly affectionate and loving towards family members.^([3])^([1])^([12])^([2])^([5]) Moreover, she was lacking in anxiety, depression, worry, fear, panic, grief, dread, and negative affect generally.^([3])^([1])^([2])^([5])
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Cameron
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatty-acid_amide_hydrolase_1#
Active_Builder_74 | 10 days ago
the body really said FAAH in response to pain
Evilsushione | 10 days ago
Kind of points to physical pain and mental pain as having the same origin. This also might be the key to addiction. Opiates might be so addictive because the alleviate a common source of pain.
Ssspaaace | 10 days ago
It's well documented that emotional and physical pain activate the same structures in the brain.
radome9 | 10 days ago
One heroin addict described heroin "like getting a hug from mum".
Otter_Pockets | 10 days ago
And maybe my fibromyalgia isn’t “all in my head” after all. Sigh.
rheetkd | 10 days ago
the origin is the brain so it literally is in our heads lol. I have Fibro as well. Something originating from your brain or nerves doesn't mean the pain isn't real.
Otter_Pockets | 10 days ago
I meant that in the hysterical sense. I do understand the brain/body connection and how pain signals work. Thanks though.
rheetkd | 10 days ago
yeah but when drs say its in your head they are not meaning the pain isn't real. Which is how a lot of people interpret it.
Otter_Pockets | 10 days ago
Guess you haven’t been to a lot of doctors or aren’t a woman. I’ve never misinterpreted the intent of the doctor’s explanation. Medical gaslighting is real and happens to fibro patients probably more often than those with most other ailments. The only people it happens to more are WOMEN with fibromyalgia.
rheetkd | 10 days ago
I am a woman with fibromyalgia and been to dozens of doctors over the last 20yrs of have fibro. Also look after a support group with a few thousand people with it. Medical gaslighting is real but this statement is the most misunderstood.
Otter_Pockets | 10 days ago
Not in my experience. The phenomenon of fibromyalgia is poorly understood, even in the medical community. There are vast swaths of doctors who don’t acknowledge that the pain is “real”, only that the patient is anxious and/or hysterical, suffering from some sort of psychological disorder. I’ve been labeled as drug seeking and doctor shopping when all I wanted was a doctor who acknowledged my pain was real and offered non-opioid pain medication or other methods of controlling my pain. I think you’re oversimplifying the medical experience because yours was simple or straightforward. I’ve had pain for as long as I can remember. Nearly half a century. I am just now starting to see changes in the way my medical complaints are being addressed. I’m barely starting to sense that the doctor isn’t skeptical of my symptoms. I acknowledge that there is 100% a psychological component, but the pain was present before the psychological toll.
rheetkd | 10 days ago
some anecdotes doesn't mean that's the whole reality. and to their credit again anxiety is linked to fibro and can mess up the way body perceives pain. Our body and mind are not separate things. they work together.
couverte | 10 days ago
It’s not that hard to tell the difference between a doctor explaining that pain is biopsychosocial, pain signals being interpreted in the brain, etc. and a doctor saying “it’s all in your head” like you’re hysterical. One is usually nice and explains how pain works, the other is condescending and dismisses you.
rheetkd | 10 days ago
no some are just shitty at communicating that's all.
Genroa1 | 10 days ago
There's good documentation that paracetamol works against emotional pain, so yup, it's pretty much a known fact by now
Own_Round_7600 | 10 days ago
I wonder what it feels like being Gods favourite.
shynotgay | 10 days ago
FAAH 🗣️🔊‼️gene
mildlyinterestingyet | 10 days ago
Shes like my evil twin. Um maybe shes the good one. We are opposites anyway. She probably has all my energy too.
mycatpartyhouse | 10 days ago
And then there's me, who's hypersensitive to pain and scars at the scratch of a fingernail. I'd be up for some gene therapy to reach a happy medium between me and this woman.
FuturAnonyme | 10 days ago
I was just thinking the same thing, that I have the reverse of this
I just have to gently bump into a wall and I know I will get a bruise
PTSDeedee | 10 days ago
Same ugh. I feel longing for what she must experience everyday.
louisa1925 | 10 days ago
You would end up like me then. I feel pain but unless it is severe, I usually don't usuallly notice I am injured until someone points it out. This body excells at healing too.
NapsAreAwesome | 10 days ago
"Novocaine"... great movie!
louisa1925 | 10 days ago
Was GreenDay in it? Because they want some.
Emotional-Chain9696 | 10 days ago
"...often smelling her burning flesh". How you ending up in these situations???
jkurratt | 10 days ago
Cooking
spearmint_wino | 10 days ago
"Wait, I didn't put bacon in the ratatouille..."
Round_Credit_5158 | 10 days ago
True, I've gotten second degree burning from boiling water falling into my hands.
Pardot42 | 10 days ago
cooking....
ravens-n-roses | 10 days ago
Well when you don't feel pain, pretty easily i imagine.
Frankly if I didn't feel pain I'd have died at my own recklessness before I was 18. Barely made it past 18 despite myself as it is.
Life_force_stealer | 10 days ago
Saw this video on a guy who does not feel pain. He said people have asked if he was given to chance to feel pain, would he. He said no, because at this point he had caused so much damage to his body that he would just be in constant pain.
FlameBoi3000 | 10 days ago
I swear I touch something hot or even burn myself every time I cook something. Easy to imagine
wendalls | 10 days ago
Slow learner huh 🤣
Terrible-Visit9257 | 10 days ago
No pain
CyberpunkAesthetics | 10 days ago
This phenomenon has bioethical importance as well. In everything from laboratories using animals, to issues of abortion and euthanasia, pain awaeness is in fact paramount. For good reason. But what if someone is aware, and capable of consent - but lacks pain awareness? This woman is a living thought experiment, one that needs to be asked.
vanderZwan | 10 days ago
Whelp, you triggered my ADHD curiousity and made me dive headfirst into that rabbit hole. Sorry about infodumping the resulting wall of text, but it's your own fault for putting that thought experiment out there!
I think a good start would be noticing that pain has multiple roles and consequences, breaking those down, and being careful not to mix them up in these bioethical discussions.
Pain can be an immediate form of suffering in and of itself, a heuristic for harm, and a heuristic for the anticipation of harm. The latter two are why pain evolved in the first place. For example, to warn us to not use an injured limb to prevent the injury from getting worse. Suppressing that pain reduces the immediate, direct suffering from it, but if doing so leads to re-injury it increases harm.
Pain is one of multiple senses for harm-prevention. Nausea is another major one, for example. Emotions also take on this role: feeling sad can be a form of suffering, but may also signal that the cause of the sadness is harmful to us and requires action. I bring this up because one might ask if you could truly "experience" harm if you could not feel pain, as a philosophical hypothetical. Since there are many ways to suffer that do not involve any pain, I'd say you could.
Now to put all of that in the context of bioethics in the scenarios you mentioned.
If the absence of pain does not remove the ability to suffer in other ways, or experience harm, then I think main question of consent is about being able to anticipate harm. Without it, one should arguably not be considered able to give real informed consent.
The article states that this woman often would smell "her burning flesh before noticing any injury". The top comment in the thread mentions other people without a sense of pain going blind due to not realizing that they have dust in their eyes. The absence of pain means "harm awareness" is greatly reduced.
We normally use physical senses like pain to help us interpret our environment and ourselves. From this point of view the mind is a "guidance system" to help the body adequately respond to our senses. Let's look at that "guidance system" using dual process theory.
Dual process theory suggests that thoughts are formed via two types of processes that interact with each other: automatic, implicit processes versus controlled explicit processes. So we have senses, "automatic" thinking and "explicit" thinking.
Emotions are typically considered "automatic" thoughts, and contrasted with rationality and reason as explicit thought processes that have to be intentionally engaged. This is an oversimplification, in reality the mind probably not so neatly organized, but this is easier to ~~reason~~ explicitly think about.
The automatic system of emotions is ideally self-regulating, with negative emotions inhibiting overly positive ones and vice-versa. Emotions and other "implicit" thoughts are therefore the main drivers of our actions and decisions. By comparison reason and other "explicit" thoughts are somewhat limited to guiding the former. They also are limited in how much they can compensate for distortions in automatic thought processes.
Another important consequence is that conscious awareness, also being a form of explicit thinking, often requires an initial emotional trigger. The explicit system needs to be motivated to intervene, so to speak. That is one way of interpreting why a lack of pain, and emotional response to pain, results in a greatly reduced harm awareness. The "burnt flesh" anecdote illustrates this, but also shows how one may use "explicit" thinking in other ways to somewhat compensate: first, by explicitly learning that that burning oneself is harmful, and second by connecting that to smelling burnt flesh and reacting to that.
For people unable to feel pain, one may wonder if other negative signals like feeling bad about seeing family member worry about them may help motivate harm avoidance. Well, research shows that while feeling nauseous after eating a specific type of food triggers avoiding eating that food in the future, but stomach pains do not. Unless one explicitly reflects and conclused that they have a food intolerance. Negative emotions are not guaranteed to trigger future harm avoidance even when they are present. By which I'm trying to say that "coopting" other negative emotions for harm avoidacne likely requires explicit conscious engagement with that line of thought.
Another consideration is that we rely on past harmful experiences to anticipate future ones. If these do not include negative feelings and sensations as negative feedback, they may fail to engage the automatic system to motivate that avoidance harmful future scenarios. Again distorting the ability to reason about a potentially harmful future scenario, and therefore to giving informed consent.
The expected lack of emotional response to harmful hypotheticals due to a lack of negative associations with pain will also likely cause one to leave their guard down, resulting in greater vulnerability to being misinformed, manipulated, or exploited in that regard too.
So when it comes to giving consent, I think it boils down to whether we or not we can really compensate for a lack of "natural" harm awareness and anticipation through other means, show that this indirect process of truly making one aware of harm was actually done, and that a subject was indeed engaging and aware with these thoughts when they consented.
I'd say that that would be very difficult, if possible at all.
PS: I think no discussion of "pain" and "consent" would be complete without pointing out benign masochism, or "the enjoyment of negative bodily reactions and feelings in the context of feeling safe, or pleasure at “mind over body”", and the related hedonic reversal, or "the conversion of a (usually) innate negative experience into a positive experience". See "Glad to be sad, and other examples of benign masochism" for an overview. Benign masochism shows that we consciously manipulate and even enjoy "breaking" our heuristics of harm. This is not so relevant in the context of the bioethics of animal suffering, abortion or euthanasia, but it matters when it comes to interventions against self-harm in the broader sense.
PPS: there is the obvious follow-up question of the ethics of genetically manipulating animals into lacking pain awareness: the Ameglian Major Cow from the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy already posed that question in an absurd way. Based on everything I just wrote it should be easy to argue that choosing to cause an inability to judge self-harm properly is unethical, and in the case of the cow it's actually worse since it has been bred to desire self-harm and and suffers if people refuse to eat it.
CyberpunkAesthetics | 10 days ago
Perhaps someone should link to this on the philosophy sub. I t should get very interesting.
> If the absence of pain does not remove the ability to suffer in other ways, or experience harm, then I think main question of consent is about being able to anticipate harm. Without it, one should arguably not be considered able to give real informed consent.
Well yes its more generally awareness of pleasure or discomfort; but physical pain is (at least in popular discussions) the yardstick. I think this is the ethically relevant definition of consciousness; other definitions of consciousness or sentience might exist, but in ethics, no other definition matters.
> Pain is one of multiple senses for harm-prevention. Nausea is another major one, for example. Emotions also take on this role: feeling sad can be a form of suffering, but may also signal that the cause of the sadness is harmful to us and requires action. I bring this up because one might ask if you could truly "experience" harm if you could not feel pain, as a philosophical hypothetical. Since there are many ways to suffer that do not involve any pain, I'd say you could.
The fact that the awareness of harm helps us to avoid it, confirms that pain is good. Just not in the ethical sense, ie. the domains of human moral obligation. As a philosophical what if, a world lacking all pain and trauma would be more dangerous, and not at all the same thing as a world without excess of pain and trauma. Of course this is a seperate discussion, but it is one people don't handle well, especially as regards appeal to nature. We are all brought up to avoid equating what is good with what is natural; but all morals must bear relation to human nature. Is it a paradox or not? It is good and natural to avoid and ease pain; yet pain itself is also natural and good. What is good is what is natural; but nature herself cannot give our moral answers.
> For people unable to feel pain, one may wonder if other negative signals like feeling bad about seeing family member worry about them may help motivate harm avoidance. Well, research shows that while feeling nauseous after eating a specific type of food triggers avoiding eating that food in the future, but stomach pains do not. Unless one explicitly reflects and conclused that they have a food intolerance. Negative emotions are not guaranteed to trigger future harm avoidance even when they are present. By which I'm trying to say that "coopting" other negative emotions for harm avoidacne likely requires explicit conscious engagement with that line of thought.
I think this is interesting.
> Another consideration is that we rely on past harmful experiences to anticipate future ones. If these do not include negative feelings and sensations as negative feedback, they may fail to engage the automatic system to motivate that avoidance harmful future scenarios. Again distorting the ability to reason about a potentially harmful future scenario, and therefore to giving informed consent.
Ah but the use of memory to anticipate future suffering, rests on awareness of past harm. Many people including myself, have memory of surgery under twilight sedation; we remember the feelings of tugging and pressure, but not the pain as we did not have pain awareness - nor were we awake - at the time. We still remember the wierdness of the feeling but not as a painful sensation. Maybe this isn't what you were thinking of, but its at least tangentical, the role of memory, The memory of being cut and burned is not the same thing as the pain of being cut and burned.
> PPS: there is the obvious follow-up question of the ethics of genetically manipulating animals into lacking pain awareness: the Ameglian Major Cow from the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy already posed that question in an absurd way. Based on everything I just wrote it should be easy to argue that choosing to cause an inability to judge self-harm properly is unethical, and in the case of the cow it's actually worse since it has been bred to desire self-harm and and suffers if people refuse to eat it.
So which should have the greater moral status; the creature's desire for self-harm, or its needs (as a living creature) not to be harmed? What about suicidal people? What about addicts?
There is a posthuman example in Man After Man. I've forgotten their names but there are genetically engineered humans that are harvested for food by cyborg humans whilst still alive. And they are engineered not to mind the physical sensations. In the Darwinist sense their niche sees that they will survive as long as their farmers need them; is their situation bad? Its a very extreme version of domestication, and ergo the old debates about wether domestication is symbiosis, or something more akin to parasitism by humans as the controlling partner. And yet they and their farmers - as forming a mutually dependent pairing - will be almost the only hominids to survive in that fictional timeline. But in the moral sense, is there still harm if there is no subjective suffering? Compared to the 'Ameglian Major Cow' it is not killed but harvested for chunks of meat and fat whilst living by surgical machines, that presumably see to the healing. Although the concept feels ghoulish it is clear that the human fauna is not capable of thoughts; the farmed creatures do not possess feelings.
Well harm is objective, suffering is not. Like the distinction disease =/= (subjective feelings of) sickness; there are plant diseases, yet they cannot 'feel sick'. But knowing that sickness is just an awareness of the harm, and that sickness may be delusional if the harm is imaginary - could it not be argued that harm have greater moral poignancy than sickness? I think sickness cannot be reduced to pathology itself, nor to the awareness of the pathology; a 'theory of parts' is called for. And i think this holds generally for matters of harm. You can have harm without suffering and suffering without harm.
Koltova | 10 days ago
She is [ Title Card ]
Redundedited | 10 days ago
Harvest a few cells and clone them? She shouldn't have to live in a lab to study this.
Stem cell injections for burn victims?
The lack of scars is the most impressive part to me.
AldurinIronfist | 10 days ago
>In addition to the mutation in FAAH, Cameron showed a heterozygous microdeletions downstream of FAAH overlapping a pseudogene.[13][3][2][5] This novel pseudogene was named FAAH-OUT and was considered likely to encode a long non-coding RNA (lncRNA).[13][2][5]
Lol
AnDraoi | 10 days ago
No pain is bad, no scarring is great
scrndude | 10 days ago
If they start talking about adamantium, run!!
SmokeInABottle | 10 days ago
I wish the article focused more on the rapid healing aspect as opposed to the lack of painful sensations.
I want to know if she's a crab person! JK
But for real the way she heals should be worth more than a potential painkiller gene.
rgbhdmi | 10 days ago
It’s only a flesh wound!
Color-Correction | 10 days ago
*Tis
Xzenor | 10 days ago
Not feeling pain is not uncommon.. it's a curse though. Not scarring is cool. That's absolutely special
Forward_Motion17 | 10 days ago
Yea I’m far more curious about this process of not scarring for her
SeaCraft6664 | 10 days ago
Hope her family prevents her from being made into a guinea pig by the scientific community, wonder what other organizations could intervene on her behalf? 🤔
GlassMunky | 10 days ago
The amount of people something like this could help is immense. Millions of people have chronic pain, so I’d actually hope this woman does everything she can to help humanity find some ways to deal with that better for everyone’s sake. Not to even mention all the other medical issues that this could help from the whole non scarring thing and other mental tie ins. This is huge.
SeaCraft6664 | 10 days ago
Such ends don’t overshadow the potential for abuse nor the importance of ensuring her safety in providing what could be a boon for mankind…
Ill_Mousse_4240 | 10 days ago
That would be amazing!
viralmessiah00 | 10 days ago
Until your appendix bursts and you don't feel the pain that tells you to go to the hospital!!
I'm pretty sure people with the not feeling pain disorders have way reduced lifespans because pain is the body letting you know something isn't right so they can't feel infections or similar.
Real-Olive-4624 | 10 days ago
Yeah, there's a reason why even plants have ways of detecting damage. It's a pretty necessary thing for survival
UCanBdoWatWeWant2Do | 10 days ago
They may be talking about the new treatments
RedBMWZ2 | 10 days ago
Snikkt
spankmydingo | 10 days ago
She is Unbreakable.
costsegregation | 10 days ago
Super soldier, yes now brain wash with social media.
deep_rover | 10 days ago
It's Wolverine!
BrazenlyGeek | 10 days ago
“Insensitive.”
Great episode of House.
Acceptable-Bell142 | 10 days ago
I have a genetic disorder that causes the opposite problem. I'm hypersensitive to pain and the brain interprets it as severe burning pain.
The therapies developed from conditions like this woman's are tested on patients like me. I hope this will lead to better pain relief for everyone.
Haveyounodecorum | 10 days ago
If they could harness this for those of us who are burn survivors…how amazing
Ok_Nectarine_4445 | 10 days ago
Can you imagine the Roman soldiers coming across a Scottish warrior like that?
Not enough of them I guess.
radome9 | 10 days ago
She's 71? People who feel no pain rarely make it to adulthood. Absence of pain means serious problems go unnoticed: broken bones, infections. Imagine the usual teenage recklessness, but untempered by a fear of pain.
Bum_Hunter | 10 days ago
I dont believe this healing without scarring is impossible in any "real" wound. Unless the physiology of this individual is so massively and fundamentally different you could argue they are a different species.
GlassMunky | 10 days ago
Tell us you don’t understand biology
Bum_Hunter | 10 days ago
Informative you must be a real contribution
Bum_Hunter | 10 days ago
The title is sensationalized bs and fake
GlassMunky | 10 days ago
lol ok bud. Guess you can’t read either….
It’s ok though, keep on yapping into the wild. Eventually you’ll feel better.
costafilh0 | 10 days ago
Poor woman will become a rat lab. As if her life has been easy already.
But I'll take her sacrifice for the humanity. Hopefully she at least gets well compensated for it.
svenner2020 | 10 days ago
Anyways.
There's this insane take.
Rickshmitt | 10 days ago
I was going to make the joke that they are going to lock her up in a lab and give her an adamantium skeleton. But youre getting downvoted...so i did it anyway