Basically, pain is a reinforcement signal. It, uh, is a signal that one part of your brain sends to another part of your brain, or an abstract sense part of your mind sends to another part of the mind to regulate its behavior. To tell it the behavior that you're currently

exhibiting should be improved. And this is the signal that tells you, uh, to move away from what you're currently doing and push into a different direction. So pain gives you a part of you, an impulse to do something differently, but sometimes this doesn't work because

the training part of your brain is talking to the wrong region, or because it has the wrong model of the relationships in the world. Maybe you're mismodeling yourself, or you're mismodeling the relationship of yourself to the world, or you're mismodeling the

dynamics of the world. So you're trying to improve something that cannot be improved by generating more pain, but the system doesn't have any alternative. So the, uh, it doesn't get better. What do you do if something doesn't get better and you want it to get better? You

increase the strength of the signal, and then the signal becomes chronic. When it becomes permanent without a change in sight, this is what we call suffering. And the purpose of consciousness is to deal with contradictions, with things that cannot be resolved. The purpose of consciousness, I think, is similar to a

conductor in an orchestra. And everything works well, the orchestra doesn't need much of a conductor, as long as it's coherent. But when there is a lack of coherence or something is consistently producing disharmony and mismatches, then the conductor becomes alert and

interacts with it, so suffering attracts the activity of our consciousness, and the purpose of that is ideally that we bring new layers online, new layers of modeling that are able to create a model of the dysregulation so we can deal with it. And this means that you typically get

higher-level consciousness, so to speak, right? We get some consciousness above our pay rate maybe if we have some suffering early in our life. Most of the interesting people had trauma early on in their childhood, and trauma means that you are suffering an injury for which

the system is not prepared, which it cannot deal with, which it cannot insulate itself from. So something breaks, and this means that the behavior of the system is permanently disturbed in a way that some mismatch exists now in a regulation that just by following your impulses, by following the

pain in the direction which it hurts, your situation doesn't improve but gets worse. And so what needs to happen is that you grow up. Yeah, that and that's part of this grown-up is able to deal with the part that is stuck in this earlier phase

Pain, Suffering,, Trauma

Joscha Bach Bits

Pain as a Reinforcement Signal and its Limitations

Pain signals the brain to regulate behavior and improve actions.

Ineffective pain response stems from brain misinterpretations of situations.

Mismodeling of self, world, or dynamics leads to ineffective pain response.

Increased pain signal strength leads to chronic pain and suffering when no improvement occurs.

Consciousness addresses contradictions and unresolved issues.

Consciousness acts like an orchestra conductor, addressing disharmony.

Suffering activates consciousness to develop new models for dealing with dysregulation.

Early trauma can lead to higher-level consciousness development.

Trauma disrupts the system, causing persistent mismatches in regulation.

Growth is needed to overcome the limitations of earlier phases.