________________
Perceiving-Touching/Pain, Secing and Hearing
65
harmful situation and no viable organism can be without it. Such programs have obvious advantages for survival. Pain is a warning to avoid further damage. The complex pains that we suffer, are devices necessary for survival. Even the highest organisms have some simple withdrawal response. A child does not have to learn to draw away its hand from a hot object. The flex or reflex ensures that it pulls it away even before it fecls the pain and howls. But the child soon learns not to do it again.
All sensations are subjective. What is so special about pain and pleasure ? Experiences of pain are sensations, like the associated experiences of the material events that accompany them. The difference is that pains and pleasures are intimate and personal to oneself. They cannot strictly be shared because they are signals that carry warning or reward to that particular individual alone. D. Pain and Suffering
Suffering of pain varies a great deal between individuals. The same sensation signals from a toothache, for example, affects each person differently. The process by which the brain converts raw sensations into suffering is complicated. While the sensation is equal to the power of stimuli, suffering varies by many factors, some within the body and the others without, some examples show that the expression of pain depends upon past experience and culture which means that past experience has a great influence on what we feel and suffer, as it obviously does upon what we know.
Many investigators have sought for a special set of nerve-fibres carrying signals of pain, but no one has ever been able to prove that there is any particular type of nerve-ending in the skin that generates 'pain', as the rods and cones generate 'vision', the organs of the ear 'hearing', or those of the nose 'smell',. Those are all 'distance receptors', and the signals that they send serve to symbolize events far away. Pain, however, is essentially in or on the body, and it indicates that there is derangement of some sort in the bodily activities. In order to find the nature of this derangement,what we should look for is not specific pain-sense-organs,
