this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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Pain is a detection of danger. If burning felt good, microbes, plants and animals wouldn't turn away.
Your body does a whole bunch of things in reaction to danger that don't register as pain. Sweating, contracting pupils, releasing insuline...
You could get philosophical and say that these are pains of your body's subsystems. And if microbes can feel pain then your body functions on the misery of billions of beings trapped inside of you. Not really something you can build a morality on.
Well what we feel as pain is ultimately chemical reactions. Now I can't go into the entire set of chemical reactions that another being would qualify as "pain", much less hypothesize as to what word another being would qualify anything. I'll leave the spectrum of chemical reactions and non-human pain thresholds to others.