> How does neural activity result in the feeling of pain
We can design synthetic chemical painkillers that work, suggesting at for this we actually know what’s going on. You can actually look up how these neurotransmitters etc work.
If you somehow want to suggest something else is going on you really need to support that argument extensively.
But how come people have different pain thresholds then?
I did a bunch of research on pain some years ago, and in order to "standardize" it, one would apply a treatment when the person said pain was greater than 7 out of 10 on a scale.
If pain were measurable "objectively", this wouldn't be necessary.
People are not uniform templates using identical DNA and histories. Our bodies are different which means our subjective experiences are different. That’s both consistent and expected.
As to measurement, we can design and build modern CPU’s but can’t inspect them in full speed operation. Similarly, mechanics often need to take something apart to test it. Living organisms present a more complex challenge, but the similarities are obvious.
Yes, but we cannot measure pain "objectively" at all. The equivalent would be if we could build a CPU, but could only determine how fast it could process by asking it to rate its processing power on a scale of 0 to 10.
Nothing is stopping a more technologically capable civilization from directly measuring our pain. You’re describing a purely technical limitation.
We have plenty of ways of directly measuring people‘s brains and CPU’s energy use etc. The issue is speed and resolution which is hardly a philosophical limitation.
> But how come people have different pain thresholds then?
Different signal sources and also differently configured/trained systems receiving and interpreting those signals.
But practically, it makes more sense to use the instrument already evolved and trained by their own experience to measure their pain: the person themselves.
We can design synthetic chemical painkillers that work, suggesting at for this we actually know what’s going on. You can actually look up how these neurotransmitters etc work.
If you somehow want to suggest something else is going on you really need to support that argument extensively.