What do you feel when you hurt yourself badly?
Is it the reaction instant or delayed.

damn rights,i'm the only one that voted,but for me personally,it depends on where and how i got hurt for it to be delayed or if its instant

I think that applies to most.

true,i have a question,whats the worst amount or pain that you have ever experienced or anyone else reading this

pain is simply nerves being stimulated, sending electrical signals to your brain, telling you what hurts, where it hurts and how much it hurts...

There are people that feels no pain because their nerves are unable to send the correct signals to the brain..

therefore, it's all in the mind... pain can be controlled... think about it

Luckily I have been very careful so far throughout my life and haven't been forced to expirience any pain that is even remotely close to unbearable. Simply put, I haven't even dislocated a finger.

You have to be really strong mentally to control some of the kinds of pain the human mind can be put to, but it can be done.

the worst thing thatd ever happened to me would be,when i sparined my thumb,or when,i came so close to breaking my arm,that hurt so bad

lol, thats nothing.

Pain can be very useful, like torture.
But it can force action, tyrants.

Care to expand on that?

Pain can be used to attain information, intelligence, or classified info.
Pain can also be used to influence, tyrants would cause tremendous pain to unloyal subjects to cause a level of fear form pain.

Your looking at pain as a method of torture, or how it can be used as a weapon. I thought we were discussing the importance of it as a human characterestic, but yes I get your point. Its definitely important, I cannot imagine a life without the ability to feel. There are ways to control it and live without it, but its not a life I would choose to live.

true i would prefer not to experience pain, but we all experience it, physical or mental.

Ahh, a subject I actually know a little something about! Pain makes ya grow up fast, and appreciate the little things in life.. and not make such a big deal over the big things! It's a bad bad thing that often has great results!

The only pain that I (so far) haven't been able to manage is some really bad migraines (one got so bad it damaged a nerve in my inner ear and left me in bed for 2 weeks). I did have my gall bladder removed but that was more because it was stupid not to. I have alot of other medical problems.. but pfft! piddy compared with the brain pains!

I'm convinced - computers don't feel pain. Sometimes we have "technology hunts". Put the bad hardware in a skeet and shoot at it once a year. I've never heard it scream!! It can however CAUSE pain, especially banging your head on the keyboard!

Pain is nothing more then a reaction of nerves to stimulus...
It’s a survival mechanism that has helped animals survive for quite a long time.
All it is in the real since is just a signal sent to the brain that causes certain involuntary reactions and discomfort to our perception...
Can this be done with computers?
Absolutely...

We have proof that pain is real...K+ and Na ions move in and out during the action potential.

Pain is a very useful teaching and survival tool. If you had no pain, and put your finger on a stove, you could possibly lose it without any movement. Pain tells you to stay away.

the worst pain Ihave ever felt is when my daughter was born and I had to have a c-section.
but it really wasn't that bad.

No kids yet here, I couldn't even imagine!!

it'd be pretty sweet if you could feel no physical pain,but then again,it wouldnt be because then you wouldn't learn from your mistakes as well

Despite its unpleasantness, pain is an important part of the existence of humans and other animals; in fact, it is vital to survival. Pain encourages an organism to disengage from the noxious stimulus associated with the pain.

Preliminary pain can serve to indicate that an injury is imminent, such as the ache from a soon-to-be-broken bone. Pain may also promote the healing process, since most organisms will protect an injured region in order to avoid further pain. People born with congenital insensitivity to pain usually have short life spans, and suffer numerous ailments such as broken bones, bed sores, and chronic infection.

The study of pain has in recent years diverged into many different fields from pharmacology to psychology and neurobiology. It was even proposed that fruit flies may be used as an animal model for pharmacological pain research [1]. Pain is also of interest in the search for the neural correlates of consciousness, as pain has many subjective psychological aspects besides the physiological nociception.

Interestingly, the brain itself is devoid of nociceptive tissue, and hence cannot experience pain. Thus, a headache is not due to stimulation of pain fibers in the brain itself. Rather, the membrane surrounding the brain and spinal cord, called the dura mater, is innervated with pain receptors, and stimulation of these dural nociceptors (pain receptors) is thought to be involved to some extent in producing headache pain. Some evolutionary biologists have speculated that this lack of nociceptive tissue in the brain might be because any injury of sufficient magnitude to cause pain in the brain has a sufficiently high probability of being fatal that development of nociceptive tissue therein would have little to no survival benefit.

Since pain is defined as a signal of present or impending tissue damage effected by a harmful stimulus, the ability to experience pain or irritation is observable in most multicellular organisms. Even some plants have the ability to retract from a noxious stimulus. Whether this sensation of pain is equivalent to the human experience is debatable.

Chronic pain, in which the pain becomes pathological rather than beneficial, is an exception to the idea that pain is helpful to survival. Furthermore, it is not clear what the survival benefit of sometimes extreme forms of pain (e.g. toothache) might be; and the intensity of some forms of pain (for example as a result of injury to fingernails or toenails) seem to be out of all proportion to any survival benefits.

LINK -> Pain

aww no one but me thinks it would be possible to make a computer feel pain?
come on it's just a reaction, we could hook up sensors for heat and cold and damage....

Yes computers can feel pain if it is programmed with sensors which over load with data, wires may burn out or the computer crashes. But computers will never be able to fell such pain like humans in both mental and physical.

Okay, I live in pain everyday. I've had MANY surgeries, two kids (naturally, not c-section), I get migraines. The worst pain I ever felt was after I had my daughter (second child). They gave me an epidural at the last possible moment and I ended up with a headache like I have never felt. It made a migraine feel like a walk in the park. I ended up having to get a blood patch done. (don't ask)

Sorry to read about it. It would also be good to know I don't wish any person to suffer like you did, but in a forced way like torture. So those people who have been unfortunate to have suffered such pain should be be given more credit than the receive today.

why is that?
it's just chemical reatctions in the neurons in the brain...
we might not understand how they all interact just yet but i think it would be very possible eventually to understand it, in the end it all amounts to chemical reactions and how we are programed to respond...

Computers could be developed to feel and with that pain could be felt, whether it reacts to the pain is different story.

again it's just programing...

Pain is more than just a reaction. It has an emotional element to it as well (at least in higher species).

A computer could be programmed to react to a damaging stimulus such as heat, but it would need to be programmed in advance that heat caused damage. In an animal pain occurs even if the animal has no advanced knowledge that it will be damaged by an action. This would be considerably more difficult to programme for.

Even if you could programme into a machine a set of reactions that simulated pain it would still not be the same. The machine would not feel the distress that animals feel when hurt.

A computer could have AI component which thinks and feels for itself and has the ability to understand emotions like in terminator, If a terminator failed it's mission It would feel a pain only an terminator could feel, which is failure.

Not in the foreseeable future it couldn't. Besides which in the science fiction film (notice the word fiction) Terminator weren't the machines un-feeling?

It could be argued that humans and all other organisms are just programming, aswell. Because really that's what we are; advanced organic computers.

that's what i was trying to say lol
good post

You should know science fiction is paving the way for modern day technology. Back in the 50's people would have only seen sic-fi movies to see supersonic airlines.