Pain Is the Price of Being the CEO

There are two questions about the mind that are usually treated separately, and I think they are the same question.

The first: why do we have consciousness? A great deal of what we do could evidently be done without it. Reflexes, digestion, most of vision, a good deal of skilled movement, all run without anyone being aware of them. What is the awareness for?

The second: why do we have pain? Not damage detection, which is obviously useful, but pain, the awful experience. A signal that says tissue damage, left hand would do the job. Why must it hurt?

Notice how alike these questions are. Both ask why a feature exists when a cheaper version would apparently work. I think the resemblance is not a coincidence.

Three Theories of Consciousness

Set out the options for what consciousness is for.

The CEO model. Consciousness is the level of the system that is permitted to override everything below it. The instinctive and emotional machinery makes its recommendations, fast and automatic, and consciousness sits above it with the authority to say no, including to fight-or-flight itself. It is the chief executive: it does not do most of the work, but it can countermand any of it.

The redundant model. Consciousness does nothing. It arose but serves no function; it is a passenger on the bus, watching the driver, with no hands on the wheel. Everything that happens would happen the same way without it.

The emergence model. Consciousness is simply what a sufficiently complex brain does, the way wetness is what enough water molecules do. This is not really a rival to the other two; it says how consciousness came to be and is silent on what, if anything, it is for. You can hold it together with either of the first two.

The choice that matters is between CEO and redundant. And I think pain settles it.

Why a CEO Needs Pain

Suppose the CEO model is right. Consciousness can override anything, including the signals that protect the body.

That is a dangerous power to grant. A manager who can dismiss any alert will, sooner or later, dismiss one that mattered. So the system faces a design problem: how do you give the top level authority to ignore everything, while making sure it does not casually ignore the things that will kill it?

The answer is to make the ignored signal expensive. Not merely informative but costly, so that overriding it is a decision with a price, taken deliberately, and never forgotten while it is in force. That is what pain is. It is the alarm that cannot be silenced by acknowledging it.

Science fiction has the right intuition here. Picture a starship losing oxygen. The onboard computer flashes a red light and a message. The captain taps the screen, the alert clears, and he starts working the problem. Then other things go wrong, and other alerts arrive, and he forgets about the oxygen. No screenwriter would let the ship be built this way, and audiences would find it absurd if one did. The alarm has to keep sounding, get louder, refuse to be dismissed, precisely because the captain has the authority to dismiss it. A system with an override needs an alarm that survives the override.

Pain is that alarm. You may choose to keep your hand in the fire. The system permits it. But you will pay for the choice continuously, in a currency you cannot ignore, and that payment is what ensures you do not make such choices lightly.

What Pain Tells Us About Consciousness

Now run the argument backwards.

If consciousness were merely an observer, an experiencer with no power to intervene, pain would be pointless. There would be nobody to warn. A passenger on the bus does not need an unsilenceable alarm; the driver is handling it, and the passenger's suffering changes nothing. Under the redundant model, pain is an unexplained cruelty.

Under the CEO model, pain is exactly what you would build. The existence of pain is evidence that there is something in the system with the power to override, and which therefore needs to be prevented from overriding carelessly.

And that has a further consequence. A redundant consciousness is most plausibly a side effect, something evolution produced by accident and never removed because it cost nothing. A CEO consciousness is a mechanism with a job, and a mechanism with a job is something selection built on purpose, because it paid.

So the two views of consciousness, side effect and adaptation, make different predictions about pain. The side-effect view predicts none, or at least does not predict the intensity we have. The adaptation view predicts precisely the alarm we live with.

We have the alarm. I think that tells us which view to take.

A Caveat

I am aware that this is an argument from design logic rather than from data, and that evolution does not have to build things the way an engineer would. The claim is not that pain must have this function. It is that pain fits one theory of consciousness and sits awkwardly in the other, and that when two open questions turn out to have a single answer that makes both of them make sense, that is usually worth taking seriously.