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Speaker 1: Then they fought furiously in close combat about the body

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Speaker 1: about Cathauus, wielding their long spears and their bronze armor.

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Speaker 1: About their bodies rang fearfully as they took aim at

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Speaker 1: one another in the press of the fight, while the

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Speaker 1: two heroes, Eneus and Idomeneus, peers of Mars, outvied everyone

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Speaker 1: in their desire to hack at each other with sword

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Speaker 1: and spear. Aeneas took aim first, but Adaminius was on

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Speaker 1: the lookout and avoided the spear, so it sped from

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Speaker 1: Eneas's strong hand in vain and fell quivering in the

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Speaker 1: ground Eddominius meanwhile smote Enimus in the middle of his

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Speaker 1: belly and broke the plate of his corselet, whereupon his

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Speaker 1: bowels came gushing out, and he clutched the earth in

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Speaker 1: the palms of his hands as he fell, sprawling in dust.

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Speaker 1: Idominius drew his spear out of the body, but could

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Speaker 1: not strip him of the rest of his armor, for

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Speaker 1: the reign of darts that were showered upon him. Moreover,

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Speaker 1: his strength was now beginning to fail him, so that

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Speaker 1: he could no longer charge, and could neither spring forward

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Speaker 1: to recover his own weapon, nor swerve aside to avoid

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Speaker 1: one that was aimed at him. Therefore, though he still

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Speaker 1: defended himself in hand to hand fight, his heavy feet

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Speaker 1: could not bear him swiftly out of the battle. Deiphobus

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Speaker 1: aimed a spear at him as he was retreating slowly

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Speaker 1: from the field, for his bitterness against him was as

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Speaker 1: fierce as ever. But again he missed him and hit Ascalaphus,

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Speaker 1: the son of Mars. The spear went through his shoulder,

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Speaker 1: and he clutched the earth in the palms of his

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Speaker 1: hands as he fell sprawling in the dust. Welcome to

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Speaker 1: stuff to blow your mind from how stuff dot com.

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Speaker 1: Hey you welcome is stuff to blow your mind. My

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Speaker 1: name Robert and I'm Joe McCormick. And of course that

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Speaker 1: was a reading from the one the Only the Iliad. Yes, yes,

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Speaker 1: a nice of violent passage, one of many violent passages.

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Speaker 1: Meant the Iliad is stupendously violent. It is like it

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Speaker 1: is like horror movie blood and guts and gore. Violent. Yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 1: there's a There are a number of passages that kind

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Speaker 1: of called out for possible use here. Another one that

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Speaker 1: I really enjoyed is he Achilles struck him in the

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Speaker 1: belly near the navel, so that all his bowels came

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Speaker 1: gushing out onto the ground, and the darkness of death

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Speaker 1: came over him as he laid gasping. I. Uh, there's

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Speaker 1: one that always stuck with me ever since, like years ago,

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Speaker 1: when I was reading this, I think in high school

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Speaker 1: or college whenever it was Uh, it's this, I've just

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Speaker 1: got to read it. I can't even describe it. Go

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Speaker 1: for it. I Dominius speared Aramis in the mouth. The

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Speaker 1: bronze point of the spear went clean through it beneath

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Speaker 1: the brain, crashing in among the white bones and smashing

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Speaker 1: them up his teeth, where all of them knocked out,

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Speaker 1: and the blood came gushing in a stream from both

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Speaker 1: his eyes. It also came gurgling up from his mouth

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Speaker 1: and nostrils, and the darkness of death enfolded him round about. Now.

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Speaker 1: It's interesting, of course, in the Iliot you often see,

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Speaker 1: as with also in the Odyssey, these like repeated lines

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Speaker 1: and phrases that occur over and over. Almost what we

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Speaker 1: heard clutching the earth with both hands exactly fell sprawling

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Speaker 1: in the dust as you're clutching the earth. And then uh,

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Speaker 1: and then you've got this idea of like the darkness

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Speaker 1: of death enfolded him round about. I think that's also

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Speaker 1: a repeated phrase. Though The interesting thing about that is

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Speaker 1: it almost the idea of the darkness of death coming

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Speaker 1: in suggests some kind of conscious awareness of death, which,

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Speaker 1: if we go back to our old episodes on bicameralism

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Speaker 1: and the Iliot, would seem to go counter Julian Jane's

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Speaker 1: ideas that you don't see indications of consciousness in the Iliot.

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Speaker 1: Though then again, it's hard to read exactly what that means, right,

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Speaker 1: And of course you could also you could also argue

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Speaker 1: that while the could these could be details that were

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Speaker 1: added later and don't don't relate to the oldest oral

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Speaker 1: traditions of the Iliad. I guess that would depend on

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Speaker 1: what the scholars of the text have to say about that.

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Speaker 1: But yeah, it's so interesting that you see all of

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Speaker 1: this horrific violence in the Iliad, but there's also a

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Speaker 1: weird kind of clinical quality to it, do you know

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Speaker 1: what I mean? Like when the spear goes into somebody,

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Speaker 1: it describes in disgusting detail all of the things that

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Speaker 1: happened to the bodies and the behavior that responds to it.

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Speaker 1: But we really don't get a lot of a sense

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Speaker 1: of what it feels like to be harmed in battle.

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Speaker 1: In the Iliad, it's more like a blow by blow,

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Speaker 1: like you're you're reading the results of a boxing match

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Speaker 1: or an m a match or something it. You know,

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Speaker 1: it reminds me too of a trend that you encounter

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Speaker 1: an Autherian legend. Um. I can't remember which text it was,

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Speaker 1: but I took a course on authori legends and back

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Speaker 1: in college, and I remember there there being one book,

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Speaker 1: one one version of the Tales in particular that was

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Speaker 1: just hideously violence, with a lot of people being like

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Speaker 1: stabbed through to the brain. And of course with those

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Speaker 1: tales you find, you know, equally examples where it's more

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Speaker 1: about the feeling, it's more about the characters and their emotions.

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Speaker 1: In other tellings, Yeah, exactly, I mean there there there's

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Speaker 1: so much that the idea of pain in battle or

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Speaker 1: or violent wounding in literature is bound up with, which

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Speaker 1: is that it's not just like burning your hand on

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Speaker 1: the stove. When you burn your hand on the stove

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Speaker 1: and you're like, oh, when you retract your hand, and

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Speaker 1: it's almost a reflective action. Your brain has been fed

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Speaker 1: information that something is being harmed and you want to

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Speaker 1: stop it as soon as possible, and you retreat. In

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Speaker 1: these battle stories, the idea of pain is is so

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Speaker 1: deeply emotional and and linked up with things like fear,

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Speaker 1: fear of death, uh, sort of the recognition of one's

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Speaker 1: own vulnerability and maybe contemplating the end of one's own life.

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Speaker 1: But you contrast that with these painless, almost robotic soldiers

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Speaker 1: that we see throughout so much of the war literature,

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Speaker 1: especially of the ancient world, like in the Iliad. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and the crazy thing. One of the things that we're

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Speaker 1: going to discuss at length in this episode is that

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Speaker 1: he you see this this sort of ancient trope of

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Speaker 1: the the the kind of painless soldier or soldier that

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Speaker 1: is at least not experiencing their pain in the heat

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Speaker 1: of the moment, right, even if it doesn't say that

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Speaker 1: they're painless, at least where it's not interested in telling

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Speaker 1: us about the pain. It's just like it's almost like

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Speaker 1: describing a battle bots or something. And then but then

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Speaker 1: when you look at where we are now, h well,

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Speaker 1: I mean you can you can go crazy looking at

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Speaker 1: the various video game scenarios here we have I think

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Speaker 1: We've discussed this on the show before. You have very

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Speaker 1: few war games that are really concerned with like like

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Speaker 1: an emotional level of pain, or certainly with things like PTSD.

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Speaker 1: And then we to the future and whether you're dealing

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Speaker 1: with actual military research or just a science fiction scenarios,

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Speaker 1: the idea of a of a painless super soldier, so

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Speaker 1: soldier doesn't feel remorse or pain. We keep coming back

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Speaker 1: to that again and again, be it some in something

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Speaker 1: like The Terminator or the Universal Soldier movies. Yeah, that

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Speaker 1: is a thing that often in our movies today, they

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Speaker 1: think that they make the villains scarier if the villain

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Speaker 1: doesn't seem to react to pain. I don't know if

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Speaker 1: that's actually always the case, uh, A villain who doesn't

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Speaker 1: seem to react to pain. One example I know you

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Speaker 1: gave Robert Is in the movie and the book No

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Speaker 1: Country for Old Men. It's definitely there in the movie

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Speaker 1: where you see Javier bardem Is playing this assassin character Anton, Yeah, Sugar, Sugar. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and he uh like because Josh Broland tries to call

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Speaker 1: him sugar. Oh yes, yes, yes that's right. But yeah,

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Speaker 1: so Anton Sugar, he gets like shot and all his

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Speaker 1: body parts and stuff, and he's doing surgery on himself

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Speaker 1: and he's like barely flinching, And I guess, I don't know.

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Speaker 1: I think that's a great movie, But I do think

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Speaker 1: that part is kind of funny looking back on it now,

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Speaker 1: because it's like, Oh, he's so tough, he does surgery

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Speaker 1: on himself and it doesn't even hurt. I don't know.

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Speaker 1: Maybe we should be just as scared or more scared

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Speaker 1: of a of an assassin who feels normal pain and

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Speaker 1: can lash out emotionally in response to it. Yeah, I mean,

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Speaker 1: I guess it's the it's the relentless nature of the character, right,

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Speaker 1: the idea that that it it cannot be We cannot

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Speaker 1: be stopped in the same way nor normal human can

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Speaker 1: be stopped. It can't be deterred in the normal way

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Speaker 1: like you, you can't count on it just reaching the

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Speaker 1: point where he's saying, oh, this is too painful a scenario,

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Speaker 1: This is too painful emission for me to keep going with. Ye. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: And then of course I guess that's the terminator, right.

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Speaker 1: The terminator will not stop. It doesn't feel pain, it

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Speaker 1: doesn't feel pity, it doesn't feel remorse. It will not

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Speaker 1: stop until it accomplishes its mission. And yet, as we

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Speaker 1: know from Terminator Too Are Old, Schwarzenegger does tell us

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Speaker 1: I sense injuries. The data could be called pain. I

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Speaker 1: forgot about that. Well, so he says he's aware of

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Speaker 1: when he gets hurt, but it just doesn't stop him

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Speaker 1: from doing anything, you know. Yeah, Well, in this we're

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Speaker 1: getting down to the key purpose of pain. That pain

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Speaker 1: is information about damage and potential damage and potential additional

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Speaker 1: damage that is happening to the body. So think about

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Speaker 1: the idea of a terminator that does not sense injuries.

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Speaker 1: That's not a very good terminator, right, Like, you could

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Speaker 1: blow its arm off, and then it would like maybe

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Speaker 1: still try to hit you with that arm and not

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Speaker 1: even realize it doesn't have one. Yeah, So in a

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Speaker 1: way it comes down you could you could look at

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Speaker 1: at at the Anton Sugar character as being just so

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Speaker 1: hyper focused on the mission that that pain doesn't matter.

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Speaker 1: It doesn't have this additional connotation of of like, oh man,

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Speaker 1: I'm wonder if my my arm is gonna work right anymore?

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Speaker 1: Is this going to keep hurting? Uh? It's more about

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Speaker 1: is this keeping me from continuing this mission? Because is

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Speaker 1: this stopping me in any way? No, it's not and

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Speaker 1: I'm going to keep moving right So there definitely does

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Speaker 1: appear to be more to pain than just the sensation

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Speaker 1: of injuries. We should come back to those multiple layers

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Speaker 1: in a minute, but I can't leave the discussion of

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Speaker 1: the Painless Super Soldier without mentioning the villain in maybe

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Speaker 1: one of the stupidest of many extremely stupid James Bond movies.

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Speaker 1: Do you remember The World Is Not Enough from the nineties?

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Speaker 1: Is this the one that had Madonna in it? I

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Speaker 1: don't remember, I don't. I don't really recall one had

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Speaker 1: Madonna and this one had Denise Richard's in it was

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Speaker 1: Jonathan Price. The villain in this one. No no, no, no,

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Speaker 1: no no. That is Tomorrow Never Dies. That's the one

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Speaker 1: where the villain is an evil media mogul who keeps

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Speaker 1: writing headlines that are causing wars. Yeah, yeah, I saw

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Speaker 1: that one, but I did not see the one that

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Speaker 1: came after that, so that this may be one that's

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Speaker 1: a gap in my Bond movie viewing history. You know,

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Speaker 1: they're all kind of dumb, but this is definitely not

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Speaker 1: one of the best. This is one of the dumbest

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Speaker 1: of the dumb and it's got like it's got something

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Speaker 1: about a nuclear submarine. I don't even remember the plot,

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Speaker 1: but anyway, the villain in it is this guy who

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Speaker 1: feels no pain. He's got some kind of injury or

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Speaker 1: condition that prevents him from feeling pain. And this this

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Speaker 1: is presented as so tough and so cool. Wow, he

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Speaker 1: can't feel pain. He's nothing can stop him, right, and

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Speaker 1: that The fact is that might sound like a superpower,

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Speaker 1: but it is not a superpower at all. If there

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Speaker 1: were actually a person who could not feel pain, and

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Speaker 1: in fact, I don't need to say if there were,

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Speaker 1: there are actually people who don't feel pain or don't

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Speaker 1: who generally don't feel pain in the same way we do.

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Speaker 1: Like there's a condition called congenital analgesia or congenital insensitivity

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Speaker 1: to pain. These people are born with a genetic condition

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Speaker 1: that prevents them from feeling pain normally. It's not a superpower.

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Speaker 1: It's a really unfortunate condition. If you don't have this condition,

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Speaker 1: you definitely don't want it. Because people with genetic insensitivity

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Speaker 1: to pain usually can't detect when their body is being injured,

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Speaker 1: so they tend to accumulate untreated injuries and diseases over

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Speaker 1: time without properly seeking treatment or allowing them to heal. Imagine,

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Speaker 1: you know, so you might think, oh, I hurt my

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Speaker 1: leg playing soccer or something, and I wish it would

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Speaker 1: stop hurting. But in a way, it's good that it

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Speaker 1: keeps hurting because that prevents you from putting too much

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Speaker 1: weight on it or something which would continue to maybe

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Speaker 1: exacerbate the injury that you initially had and make the

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Speaker 1: leg less usable and more and more injured over time. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: you hear accounts of people in various athletic or sporting

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Speaker 1: scenarios where they push through the pain and and they're

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Speaker 1: that's not good. Yeah, They're there, there are They're they're

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Speaker 1: definite cases where pushing through the pain ends up lengthening

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Speaker 1: the recovery time for an injury, and when they're making

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Speaker 1: the injury more severe because they we're ignoring the signal

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Speaker 1: from the side of the injury that said stop using

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Speaker 1: this limb, you know, don't keep going in this particular

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Speaker 1: athletic scenario. I mean, I can understand the idea of

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Speaker 1: wanting to encourage perseverance in people. Perseverance is an important

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Speaker 1: thing for for achieving your goals and all that, but

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Speaker 1: there's a difference between perseverance and continuing to hit the

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Speaker 1: punching bag after you've broken a couple of your fingers.

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Speaker 1: But tell that to the warriors of the alien right exactly.

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Speaker 1: You know. So, congenital analges is actually it's very unfortunate

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Speaker 1: for the people who have it, but they're there are

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Speaker 1: interesting things about it that it reveals about our nature

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Speaker 1: and what we would do if we didn't have access

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Speaker 1: to the data gathered by our pain sensation. Like one

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Speaker 1: thing I've read about is children with congenital analogies will

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Speaker 1: often injure their own mouths or fingers by biting them. Yes, yeah,

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Speaker 1: I mean you hear about this sometimes too with the

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Speaker 1: people who have been numbed up for various procedures. You know,

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Speaker 1: you have to one have to be careful about, say,

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Speaker 1: chewing the inside of your your your cheek. Yeah, while

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Speaker 1: you're all numbed numbed up. I'm not sure quite what

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Speaker 1: it is yet, I feel like I'm I'm tapping something

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Speaker 1: kind of interesting there, because it seems that there's this

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Speaker 1: drive within us to perform certain behaviors that, if unchecked

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Speaker 1: by the feedback of pain, would naturally be self destructive.

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Speaker 1: Maybe self grooming behaviors or just nervous behaviors. Yeah. Indeed,

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Speaker 1: at what point does um does the relief of scratching

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Speaker 1: become the irritation of scratching, and then become the pain

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Speaker 1: of scratching? You know that it's it's sort of by

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Speaker 1: degree that one descends ever towards the pain. Scratching is

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Speaker 1: a good example though, because it shows that there are

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Speaker 1: certain mental priming conditions that that modulate how we feel pain. Like,

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Speaker 1: for example, if you've got an itch, you will be

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Speaker 1: more able to tolerate repeated scratching behavior on the side

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Speaker 1: of the itch than you would if you didn't have

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Speaker 1: an there. Like if you try to scratch yourself just

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Speaker 1: on the arm or something as much as you would

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Speaker 1: if it was itching real bad. But it's not itching.

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Speaker 1: It starts to hurt and you need to stop. But

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Speaker 1: but the brain because it's itching just sort of like

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Speaker 1: cuts that off right, It says no, keep going. So

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Speaker 1: obviously we're talking about itching here in reference to pain.

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Speaker 1: Before we proceed any any further with this episode, I

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Speaker 1: do want to drive home the fact that obviously Joe

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Speaker 1: and I are professional writers and podcasters. We are not soldiers. Uh,

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Speaker 1: We have. I think it would be fair to say

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Speaker 1: limited experience with physical pain. Um, and I know that

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Speaker 1: various listeners out there are either active members of the

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Speaker 1: military or they have served in the military, or have

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Speaker 1: experience with intense pain, maybe even chronic pain. So, uh,

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Speaker 1: I just want to go ahead and get that out there,

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Speaker 1: make that that obvious and say that yes, if if

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Speaker 1: you have additional insight based on this episode due to

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Speaker 1: euro own experiences with pain, we would love to hear

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Speaker 1: from you. So one of my favorite books on the

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Speaker 1: topic of pain that I've actually mentioned on the podcast

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Speaker 1: in the past is Elaine Scaries, The Body and Pain.

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Speaker 1: This is a dense and deep meditation on the vulnerability

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Speaker 1: of the human body and she she points out that

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Speaker 1: when you compare pain to other psychic, somatic, or perceptional states,

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Speaker 1: it's the only one that has no object interesting. Uh,

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Speaker 1: this is this is a quote from the book. The objectlessness,

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Speaker 1: the complete absence of referential content almost prevents it from

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Speaker 1: being rendered in language. Objectless, it cannot easily be objectified

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Speaker 1: in any form, material or verbal. But it is also

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Speaker 1: it's objectlessness that may give rise to imagining by first

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Speaker 1: occasioning the process that eventually brings forth the dense sea

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Speaker 1: of artifacts and symbols that we make and move about in.

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Speaker 1: And then she continues, the only state that is as

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Speaker 1: anomalous as pain is the imagination. That's very interesting, and

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Speaker 1: I think there's some truth to that. Now. Obviously, you

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Speaker 1: can think of the idea of pain as something that

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Speaker 1: would have an object in some scenarios, as in, uh,

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Speaker 1: you know, something similar to touch, Like if there's a

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Speaker 1: source of heat on the hand, that could be pain,

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Speaker 1: and that could maybe be thought of as an object.

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Speaker 1: But then again, pain can exist independent of a specific

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Speaker 1: stimulus like that. It's just it's almost like the pain

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Speaker 1: takes place in a theater of the mind that's deeply

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Speaker 1: connected with the experience of touch in the body. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: I love how she compares it to imagination here, and

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Speaker 1: it reminds me of the theories of our old friend,

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Speaker 1: American psychologist Julian Jaynes, who we just mentioned earlier, Yeah,

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Speaker 1: who wrote of imagination and the quote dance of the self.

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Speaker 1: As you probably remember from our episode on the bicameral mind. Uh,

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Speaker 1: he explored the idea that ancient humans were not conscious

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Speaker 1: in the modern sense of the word, and it prior

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Speaker 1: to roughly b C. The brain used language to convey

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Speaker 1: experience from the right to left hemisphere. Modern consciousness, therefore

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Speaker 1: is a learned development tied to metaphorical language. Yeah, so

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Speaker 1: the idea here was that we modern humans use conscious

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Speaker 1: thought to entertain and simulate responses to a novel stimuli.

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Speaker 1: So when something new and unexpected happens and you can't

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Speaker 1: deal with it just by you know, sort of like

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Speaker 1: wrote learned behavior and you need to do something novel,

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Speaker 1: we think about it, right, We have a conscious experience

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Speaker 1: where we try to work out what to do, whereas

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Speaker 1: pre conscious people instead would have this bicameral situation. They

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Speaker 1: would encounter a situation that called for novel behavior, and

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Speaker 1: instead they would experience a hallucinated voice that would internally

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Speaker 1: tell them what to do. And James believed this to

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Speaker 1: be the non dominant hemisphere of the brain synthesizing information

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Speaker 1: and planning behavior and then delivering those behaviors as hallucinated

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Speaker 1: commands to the dominant hemisphere to be acted out. And

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Speaker 1: of course he called this hypothetical unconscious hallucinating past human

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Speaker 1: a bicameral person. But if you go with james hypothesis,

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Speaker 1: which of course is unproven. It's a very interesting hypothesis,

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Speaker 1: but I think we're still waiting for, you know, more

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Speaker 1: good evidence to evaluate its merits. But since we've established

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Speaker 1: that so much of what we think about when we

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Speaker 1: think about pain is not just the sensory uh data,

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Speaker 1: but some kind of conscious experience, some relationship to the imagination,

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Speaker 1: that his theory would definitely change what like a bicameral

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Speaker 1: person would have to experience pain differently, right, yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 1: And he he actually considered this a little bit. He

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Speaker 1: wrote a paper titled Sensory Pain and Conscious Pain and

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Speaker 1: it was published in a edition of Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

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Speaker 1: In this he discussed the differences between sensory pain and

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Speaker 1: conscious pain. On one hand, we have pain with a purpose.

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Speaker 1: Pain is an instructional sensation intended to alert us to harm.

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Speaker 1: You can call it a depending on where you're approaching

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Speaker 1: it from. You may call it acute pain or no

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Speaker 1: no se acceptive pain, or sensory pain as Jains like

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Speaker 1: to call it. But then there's chronic pain, uh, psychological

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Speaker 1: pain or is Jains calls it conscious pain. And and

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Speaker 1: this is where we have a would have a conscious

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Speaker 1: reaction to the sensory pain. Okay, So in Jain's formulation,

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Speaker 1: the terminator would probably be kind of like the bicameral person, right,

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Speaker 1: who might who would have access to sensory pain? I

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Speaker 1: sense injuries. The data could be called pain, But the

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Speaker 1: pain doesn't necessarily bother him, right, bother the terminator that

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Speaker 1: it doesn't like linger in the mind and have these

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Speaker 1: echoing conscious effects through the imagination. It is just data

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Speaker 1: that is received about something happening to the body. Right now, Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I mean, I'm reluctant to go with a full on

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Speaker 1: terminator explanation because I think one of the based on

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Speaker 1: my readings of the bi caameraal mind, I don't want to.

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Speaker 1: I don't want to fall into the habit of making

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Speaker 1: it seem too much like the bi cameral human is

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Speaker 1: a complete machine, and you know and that they are inhuman.

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Speaker 1: But but anyway, in this paper Jane's he explores this idea.

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Speaker 1: It's important to note that a lot of this is

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Speaker 1: Jane's just asking questions. In this paper, He's not saying

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Speaker 1: this is my definite theory on on pain sensation in

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Speaker 1: ancient people's He's saying, well, I have this theory called

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Speaker 1: bi cameral. The bi cameral mind. Perhaps you've heard of it. Um,

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Speaker 1: here are some questions I have about about pain. How

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Speaker 1: would this apply? Yeah? And uh? And so he he

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Speaker 1: draws on some examples he from his his typical resources

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Speaker 1: generally uh, uh, you know, ancient classical history. And he

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Speaker 1: points out that we find no examples of chronic pain

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Speaker 1: in ancient literature. And he points to a few examples

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Speaker 1: to support this idea. He says that ancient Proto Indo

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Speaker 1: European languages before on two thousand BC had no word

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Speaker 1: for pain or hurt at all, only for cuts and wounds.

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Speaker 1: I wonder if that's true. Uh, Experts out there listening

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Speaker 1: of ancient languages, does that? Is that true to you? Or?

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Speaker 1: Or can you think of counter examples? Yeah? I would

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Speaker 1: I would love to hear. Uh. And you know, James,

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Speaker 1: we should also point out he admitted pretty openly that

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Speaker 1: he did not speak say Mandarin or or Hindi, so

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Speaker 1: he he himself did not explore evidence for or against

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Speaker 1: his theories with any real depth in those cultures. So

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Speaker 1: if you have you have some linguistic evidence from either

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Speaker 1: of those cultures or other cultures that James didn't cover,

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Speaker 1: I'd love to hear from you. He also points out

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Speaker 1: that the oldest parts of the Iliad, written down in

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Speaker 1: eight fifty BC de based on older oral traditions. Uh

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Speaker 1: that in these cases we have extremely glory depictions of

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Speaker 1: battle wounds, but hardly any notice of discomfort. These examples,

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Speaker 1: he says, pain is merely pain behavior. Now, I did

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Speaker 1: a quick search to see what was mentioned about pain

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Speaker 1: and the Iliad, and I found plenty of examples of

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Speaker 1: what seemed to me to be something like conscious pain.

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Speaker 1: Just one example is when a wounded king Menelais is

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Speaker 1: promised that he'll be given herbs by a surgeon to

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Speaker 1: relieve his pain from wounds. So that sounds like conscious

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Speaker 1: pain to me, right, Like, if he's seeking relief of

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Speaker 1: the pain through some kind of medication, that would indicate

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Speaker 1: consciousness of the pain. But then again, perhaps these are references. Uh.

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Speaker 1: These references might be parts of the narrative that are

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Speaker 1: what what James is considering later additions to the manuscript tradition,

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Speaker 1: and not part of the early core of the text.

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Speaker 1: I don't know enough about the manuscript history of the

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Speaker 1: Iliad to speculate on that. Yeah, it could conceivably be

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Speaker 1: an example of an editor coming along and saying, shouldn't

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Speaker 1: we add something about how this feels here? This seems

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Speaker 1: like a reddit painful situation, and there are plenty of

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Speaker 1: examples of that kind of thing in the ancient world,

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Speaker 1: like a lot of ancient texts appear to be composed

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Speaker 1: in multiple stages. Now again, in all of this, James

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Speaker 1: was was asking a lot of questions and he he

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Speaker 1: points out that if this were the case, it would

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Speaker 1: mean that infants and animals would be incapable of true

427
00:24:14,840 --> 00:24:19,560
Speaker 1: chronic pain, such as, for instance, phantom limbs. Uh So,

428
00:24:20,320 --> 00:24:22,960
Speaker 1: if anyone out there has any additional information on that,

429
00:24:23,000 --> 00:24:24,840
Speaker 1: I would love to hear from you. I did some

430
00:24:24,840 --> 00:24:26,800
Speaker 1: some brief research on the matter, and I could not

431
00:24:26,920 --> 00:24:31,919
Speaker 1: find any accounts of animals with phantom limbs where you know,

432
00:24:31,960 --> 00:24:36,840
Speaker 1: where an individual has lost a limb and is experiencing, uh,

433
00:24:37,440 --> 00:24:41,160
Speaker 1: the sensation of pain from where that limb should be. Now,

434
00:24:41,200 --> 00:24:43,280
Speaker 1: as I've said on the podcast before, I always want

435
00:24:43,320 --> 00:24:46,040
Speaker 1: to be careful about the bicameral mind, maybe mainly because

436
00:24:46,040 --> 00:24:49,520
Speaker 1: it's one of those things that's so interesting. I feel

437
00:24:49,560 --> 00:24:51,719
Speaker 1: like I have to be suspicious of it, you know,

438
00:24:51,760 --> 00:24:54,359
Speaker 1: I have to be too careful that I'm not getting

439
00:24:54,359 --> 00:24:57,080
Speaker 1: sucked in by it just because it's fascinating and fun

440
00:24:57,160 --> 00:25:00,080
Speaker 1: to think about. But of course, as we as we

441
00:25:00,160 --> 00:25:03,280
Speaker 1: said before, it remains unproven. I think the jury is

442
00:25:03,320 --> 00:25:06,680
Speaker 1: still out about where the evidence fits into the hypothesis.

443
00:25:06,720 --> 00:25:09,440
Speaker 1: But it is always interesting to play around with. Yeah,

444
00:25:09,440 --> 00:25:10,680
Speaker 1: and I'd love to come back to it at some

445
00:25:10,760 --> 00:25:12,920
Speaker 1: point and discuss it a bit more on the show.

446
00:25:13,400 --> 00:25:15,399
Speaker 1: Uh Now, one one thing to keep in mind and

447
00:25:15,440 --> 00:25:17,760
Speaker 1: all of this is that, you know, we we're talking

448
00:25:17,800 --> 00:25:20,520
Speaker 1: about James take on this sort of dual system of pain,

449
00:25:21,000 --> 00:25:24,359
Speaker 1: and uh, no matter what the status of James is,

450
00:25:24,560 --> 00:25:28,280
Speaker 1: larger theory is the dual systems of pain. This is

451
00:25:28,320 --> 00:25:30,800
Speaker 1: widely accepted, and it gives us an idea of what

452
00:25:30,920 --> 00:25:34,440
Speaker 1: war without pain in the ancient world or in the

453
00:25:35,000 --> 00:25:38,280
Speaker 1: not too distant future might be. Like, so we're gonna

454
00:25:38,320 --> 00:25:40,239
Speaker 1: take a quick break and when we come back, we

455
00:25:40,280 --> 00:25:44,080
Speaker 1: will discuss this pain that is all in your head.

456
00:25:47,000 --> 00:25:49,840
Speaker 1: All right, we're back. You know, pain can be more

457
00:25:49,880 --> 00:25:53,399
Speaker 1: tricky to define than you might think, because pain is

458
00:25:53,440 --> 00:25:57,600
Speaker 1: something you definitely know when you experience it. But if

459
00:25:57,600 --> 00:26:00,879
Speaker 1: you're trying to like put down an objective, third party

460
00:26:00,920 --> 00:26:04,000
Speaker 1: definition that will cover everything, that is pain and not

461
00:26:04,080 --> 00:26:07,720
Speaker 1: cover anything that is not pain. It's kind of difficult, right, like,

462
00:26:07,760 --> 00:26:11,720
Speaker 1: oh yeah, what is the difference between pain and discomfort?

463
00:26:11,800 --> 00:26:14,800
Speaker 1: If you've got your leg tucked up under you while

464
00:26:14,840 --> 00:26:18,119
Speaker 1: you're sitting in a chair, and over time that leg

465
00:26:18,359 --> 00:26:21,040
Speaker 1: starts to feel not good and you want to move

466
00:26:21,080 --> 00:26:23,720
Speaker 1: it because it's been stuck that way for a while,

467
00:26:24,640 --> 00:26:30,080
Speaker 1: is that pain or is that discomfort? And what's the difference? Yeah,

468
00:26:30,119 --> 00:26:32,040
Speaker 1: I mean this is encountered all the time by medical

469
00:26:32,040 --> 00:26:36,199
Speaker 1: professionals trying to diagnose an illness, like determining, all right,

470
00:26:36,200 --> 00:26:40,160
Speaker 1: well where does where does your pain? Uh scale on say,

471
00:26:40,200 --> 00:26:42,320
Speaker 1: on one to tend? And then how am I supposed

472
00:26:42,359 --> 00:26:43,800
Speaker 1: to use that information? But then what is it? What

473
00:26:43,920 --> 00:26:45,919
Speaker 1: is one to tend for you? I feel like when

474
00:26:45,960 --> 00:26:48,120
Speaker 1: I'm asked that by a physician, I'm always like, well,

475
00:26:48,160 --> 00:26:53,080
Speaker 1: obviously I have not felt anything from you know, an

476
00:26:53,119 --> 00:26:56,600
Speaker 1: eight up, so I'm not going to classify anything I've

477
00:26:56,680 --> 00:26:59,719
Speaker 1: I'm feeling now that high on the scale. But some

478
00:26:59,720 --> 00:27:02,720
Speaker 1: people might start with the ten yeah, and then you

479
00:27:02,760 --> 00:27:04,960
Speaker 1: all And it's also like an example that comes to

480
00:27:05,000 --> 00:27:11,160
Speaker 1: mind is during yoga. Um generally, what most yoga practitioners

481
00:27:11,160 --> 00:27:13,400
Speaker 1: will say is you know, don't do anything that feels

482
00:27:13,480 --> 00:27:17,440
Speaker 1: painful if if you're experiencing pain, you need to pull back.

483
00:27:18,200 --> 00:27:21,480
Speaker 1: But I see this all occasionally with individuals who are

484
00:27:21,520 --> 00:27:25,560
Speaker 1: taking classes that I'm in. I'll see that there there's

485
00:27:25,560 --> 00:27:28,240
Speaker 1: some people who think it is more tolerable to push

486
00:27:28,280 --> 00:27:31,560
Speaker 1: through a certain amount of discomfort into pain where they're

487
00:27:31,600 --> 00:27:34,160
Speaker 1: not just merely working the body part, but they are.

488
00:27:34,200 --> 00:27:36,440
Speaker 1: They are working it too hard, but they don't realize

489
00:27:36,440 --> 00:27:38,439
Speaker 1: they should back up. So we all have this, we

490
00:27:38,520 --> 00:27:40,520
Speaker 1: all have a different It's almost like we all have

491
00:27:40,520 --> 00:27:43,600
Speaker 1: a different translation of the pain, a different kind of

492
00:27:43,920 --> 00:27:49,040
Speaker 1: emotional translation of the basic information that our our mind

493
00:27:49,160 --> 00:27:51,320
Speaker 1: is presented with. On the other end of the scale,

494
00:27:51,359 --> 00:27:54,680
Speaker 1: I guess going into the more conscious or chronic type

495
00:27:54,720 --> 00:27:58,280
Speaker 1: thing that we were discussing earlier, pain like what's the

496
00:27:58,280 --> 00:28:04,080
Speaker 1: difference between pain and fear or pain and sadness and

497
00:28:04,200 --> 00:28:07,200
Speaker 1: all these emotions that I mean, there are cases where

498
00:28:07,240 --> 00:28:09,800
Speaker 1: there seems to be a relationship between the idea of

499
00:28:09,840 --> 00:28:12,919
Speaker 1: somatic pain, like I've got chronic pain in my body

500
00:28:13,480 --> 00:28:16,600
Speaker 1: and I can't move like it hurts to move about,

501
00:28:17,000 --> 00:28:20,680
Speaker 1: can be deeply linked to psychological conditions in the brain,

502
00:28:20,720 --> 00:28:23,880
Speaker 1: like depression, and yet everything is getting rolled up under

503
00:28:23,880 --> 00:28:27,399
Speaker 1: this rubric of pain, which is, you know, essentially pain

504
00:28:27,520 --> 00:28:30,480
Speaker 1: at its most basic level is as we've said, information.

505
00:28:30,600 --> 00:28:33,520
Speaker 1: It tells you about when something is being injured or

506
00:28:33,960 --> 00:28:37,239
Speaker 1: is suffering a disease. But anyway, just to get a

507
00:28:37,320 --> 00:28:40,800
Speaker 1: definition on the table that we can maybe work with,

508
00:28:41,000 --> 00:28:43,840
Speaker 1: the International Association for the Study of Pain says that

509
00:28:44,480 --> 00:28:49,360
Speaker 1: quote pain is an unpleasant, sensory and emotional experience that

510
00:28:49,520 --> 00:28:54,800
Speaker 1: is associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described

511
00:28:54,800 --> 00:28:57,720
Speaker 1: in such terms. That last clause seems to do a

512
00:28:57,720 --> 00:29:00,440
Speaker 1: lot of work that kind of twist, It kind of

513
00:29:00,440 --> 00:29:03,440
Speaker 1: expands the umbrella of the definition, doesn't it. Yeah, But

514
00:29:03,520 --> 00:29:05,920
Speaker 1: I think it's interesting there that even in their definition

515
00:29:05,960 --> 00:29:10,080
Speaker 1: they roll up the emotional experience with the idea of

516
00:29:10,120 --> 00:29:14,080
Speaker 1: the sensory experience right like it's it's totally baked in indeed.

517
00:29:14,080 --> 00:29:15,800
Speaker 1: But do we see that in the origin of the

518
00:29:15,800 --> 00:29:18,000
Speaker 1: word itself. Well, I was wondering about this. So the

519
00:29:18,040 --> 00:29:22,080
Speaker 1: origins of the English word pain do not come from

520
00:29:22,200 --> 00:29:25,880
Speaker 1: the idea of sensations in the body. Uh. The word

521
00:29:25,960 --> 00:29:32,680
Speaker 1: pain originally comes from Latin poena or pena, meaning punishment

522
00:29:32,880 --> 00:29:35,400
Speaker 1: or penalty, and you can think about this and if

523
00:29:35,440 --> 00:29:38,360
Speaker 1: you think about like the archaic usages of pain and

524
00:29:38,880 --> 00:29:42,840
Speaker 1: in medieval language, right, what what happens to you if

525
00:29:42,920 --> 00:29:45,400
Speaker 1: you break the king's laws while you break them on

526
00:29:45,680 --> 00:29:49,760
Speaker 1: pain of death? It's like the penalty specified for something.

527
00:29:50,280 --> 00:29:54,680
Speaker 1: And of course, when you think about official um punishment,

528
00:29:54,880 --> 00:29:57,080
Speaker 1: either in the turn you know, be be it a

529
00:29:57,120 --> 00:30:00,920
Speaker 1: public execution or some sort of public torment, there's there's

530
00:30:00,960 --> 00:30:05,320
Speaker 1: generally some sort of arguably emotional context to it, some

531
00:30:05,360 --> 00:30:08,280
Speaker 1: sort of humiliation that is involved, or at least something

532
00:30:08,320 --> 00:30:11,560
Speaker 1: instructional for the society. It's been pointed out to me

533
00:30:11,600 --> 00:30:15,720
Speaker 1: before that you look back on these various modes of

534
00:30:16,240 --> 00:30:20,080
Speaker 1: public punishment or public execution and there's always there, there's

535
00:30:20,120 --> 00:30:23,800
Speaker 1: always some level of drama there, there's some level of

536
00:30:24,240 --> 00:30:28,960
Speaker 1: instruction that is baked into it that the individuals perceiving,

537
00:30:29,520 --> 00:30:32,760
Speaker 1: uh the act or hearing of it would would be

538
00:30:32,800 --> 00:30:35,080
Speaker 1: privy to. Well. I mean you think about this in

539
00:30:35,560 --> 00:30:38,440
Speaker 1: depictions of hell in the ancient world. I think of

540
00:30:38,520 --> 00:30:41,960
Speaker 1: either say Dante's Inferno, or if you look at like

541
00:30:42,040 --> 00:30:46,440
Speaker 1: some of the apocryphal Gospels and revelations where they see

542
00:30:46,520 --> 00:30:49,080
Speaker 1: visions of hell, I'm seeing there's like a there's some

543
00:30:49,160 --> 00:30:51,960
Speaker 1: early apocalypse of Peter. It's not in the Bible, it's

544
00:30:52,000 --> 00:30:55,400
Speaker 1: this apocryphal text, but where Jesus reveals visions of hell

545
00:30:55,520 --> 00:30:58,239
Speaker 1: to Peter. And in a lot of these stories you

546
00:30:58,280 --> 00:31:02,840
Speaker 1: get very ironic punishment. So it's not just that a

547
00:31:02,920 --> 00:31:06,480
Speaker 1: wicked person or an unredeemed person is being punished in

548
00:31:06,560 --> 00:31:09,520
Speaker 1: hell in a kind of generally unpleasant way, but the

549
00:31:09,560 --> 00:31:11,959
Speaker 1: pain that is inflicted on them seems to have some

550
00:31:12,040 --> 00:31:17,080
Speaker 1: ironic relationship to what they did wrong. You know, blasphemers

551
00:31:17,080 --> 00:31:21,440
Speaker 1: will have their mouths burned or something like that. Yeah, exactly. Now.

552
00:31:21,440 --> 00:31:23,800
Speaker 1: Of course, in all of this again, pain is information,

553
00:31:24,200 --> 00:31:26,480
Speaker 1: and then the brain receives that information, it decides what

554
00:31:26,640 --> 00:31:29,520
Speaker 1: sort of attention it deserves. So if the if the

555
00:31:29,520 --> 00:31:32,520
Speaker 1: brain were running a newspaper, it would decide whether it

556
00:31:32,600 --> 00:31:35,560
Speaker 1: demanded front page treatment, if it went above or below

557
00:31:35,600 --> 00:31:38,840
Speaker 1: the fold, and how big the font needed to be. Uh.

558
00:31:38,880 --> 00:31:41,240
Speaker 1: And in the same way that a newspaper editor might

559
00:31:41,400 --> 00:31:44,680
Speaker 1: enhance or downplay a bit of news, so too does

560
00:31:44,680 --> 00:31:47,720
Speaker 1: the brain determine whether a particular pain signal at a

561
00:31:47,760 --> 00:31:52,000
Speaker 1: given point should be amplified or reduced. Right, I mean

562
00:31:52,040 --> 00:31:54,760
Speaker 1: this might be given in our scratching example, right, like

563
00:31:54,800 --> 00:31:57,000
Speaker 1: sometimes you scratch too much and that feels really bad.

564
00:31:57,040 --> 00:31:59,200
Speaker 1: But if you've got an itch, the brain just says, okay,

565
00:31:59,280 --> 00:32:01,280
Speaker 1: go go ahead to go to town. Yeah, it's kind

566
00:32:01,280 --> 00:32:03,280
Speaker 1: of like an itch would be below the fold. Story

567
00:32:03,400 --> 00:32:10,600
Speaker 1: like mosquito by the produces mild your irritation for the human,

568
00:32:11,160 --> 00:32:13,240
Speaker 1: but then once you scratched it enough, it gets above

569
00:32:13,280 --> 00:32:16,160
Speaker 1: the fold, and said said, dumb human has scratched mosquito

570
00:32:16,240 --> 00:32:19,640
Speaker 1: by to the point of of of actual physical pain.

571
00:32:19,800 --> 00:32:21,680
Speaker 1: But then you go back to the brain. But you

572
00:32:21,720 --> 00:32:25,560
Speaker 1: made me do that. That's your fault. Uh. Yeah, that

573
00:32:25,720 --> 00:32:28,400
Speaker 1: that's the media work and the scratching should have heard earlier.

574
00:32:29,080 --> 00:32:31,960
Speaker 1: Now it's pointed out by David Lyndon, a professor of

575
00:32:32,000 --> 00:32:35,680
Speaker 1: neuroscience at John Hopkins University. We we see we see

576
00:32:35,720 --> 00:32:39,280
Speaker 1: this in battle scenarios all the time. Uh, and you

577
00:32:39,320 --> 00:32:41,920
Speaker 1: can you can easily argue that this is what's happening

578
00:32:41,920 --> 00:32:45,320
Speaker 1: in the Iliad. A soldier receives a wound and barely

579
00:32:45,400 --> 00:32:48,320
Speaker 1: feel that feels it at all, at least at that time,

580
00:32:48,600 --> 00:32:50,960
Speaker 1: and then later they might recoil at the prick of

581
00:32:50,960 --> 00:32:54,520
Speaker 1: a doctor's needle during treatment. So the brain here, of course,

582
00:32:54,600 --> 00:32:58,120
Speaker 1: is using two systems to process incoming pain signals. One

583
00:32:58,160 --> 00:33:02,440
Speaker 1: system determines the location, intensity, and characteristics. So, to go

584
00:33:02,440 --> 00:33:07,280
Speaker 1: back to our Iliad example, UH, enomous his brain registers

585
00:33:07,320 --> 00:33:11,760
Speaker 1: intense smoting damage to his lower abdomens damage. And then

586
00:33:11,800 --> 00:33:14,400
Speaker 1: meanwhile you have this other system that deals with the

587
00:33:14,480 --> 00:33:18,680
Speaker 1: emotional character characteristics of the wound. And this would be

588
00:33:19,440 --> 00:33:24,680
Speaker 1: enomous thinking by the gods it Dominius, that Cretian villain

589
00:33:25,080 --> 00:33:27,640
Speaker 1: just sliced me open, and I'm dying so far from

590
00:33:27,680 --> 00:33:30,800
Speaker 1: the kingdom of piece of falling into the kingdom of

591
00:33:30,800 --> 00:33:36,960
Speaker 1: the dead, etcetera. Right, there's this emotional context to the injury. Uh.

592
00:33:37,000 --> 00:33:39,880
Speaker 1: And so these two systems work together and influence how

593
00:33:39,960 --> 00:33:44,680
Speaker 1: we actually experience pain. If you feel safe, calm, and protected,

594
00:33:45,000 --> 00:33:48,080
Speaker 1: then that can lessen the pain. Likewise, Lended points out

595
00:33:48,080 --> 00:33:52,760
Speaker 1: that humiliation UH and an unpredictable schedule of pain these

596
00:33:52,800 --> 00:33:57,160
Speaker 1: have aided tortures for centuries, being able to make the

597
00:33:57,480 --> 00:33:59,960
Speaker 1: torture victim feel like they don't know when the pain

598
00:34:00,200 --> 00:34:02,400
Speaker 1: is going to come at them. And adding this just

599
00:34:02,520 --> 00:34:06,160
Speaker 1: intensified emotional context to it. Oh, totally, I mean the

600
00:34:06,160 --> 00:34:10,959
Speaker 1: emotional context of pain is incredibly powerful. And here's something

601
00:34:11,040 --> 00:34:13,360
Speaker 1: I've got a lot of you out there have experienced. Robert,

602
00:34:13,400 --> 00:34:15,400
Speaker 1: I wonder if this has ever happened to you. Do

603
00:34:15,480 --> 00:34:18,840
Speaker 1: you ever go to the doctor with a pain that

604
00:34:18,920 --> 00:34:21,520
Speaker 1: you're worried about, like something's hurting on your body, you

605
00:34:21,520 --> 00:34:23,640
Speaker 1: don't know what's causing it. You go to the doctor,

606
00:34:24,040 --> 00:34:27,920
Speaker 1: doctor looks at it, says, can't find anything wrong, and

607
00:34:27,960 --> 00:34:33,160
Speaker 1: the pain just goes away. Well, I don't, like immediately,

608
00:34:33,320 --> 00:34:35,759
Speaker 1: I don't think I've had that exact scenario, but I

609
00:34:35,840 --> 00:34:39,120
Speaker 1: have had situations where, like I a shoulder problem that

610
00:34:39,160 --> 00:34:40,759
Speaker 1: it was bothering me for a while, went to the

611
00:34:40,840 --> 00:34:42,680
Speaker 1: doctor and they were like, I don't know, we can't

612
00:34:42,680 --> 00:34:45,360
Speaker 1: figure it out. We could do more tests, I guess,

613
00:34:45,800 --> 00:34:47,560
Speaker 1: and so I just I was just kind of at

614
00:34:47,560 --> 00:34:49,439
Speaker 1: that point, I said, well, I guess I'll just keep

615
00:34:49,440 --> 00:34:51,080
Speaker 1: doing what I'm doing and see what happens. And it

616
00:34:51,239 --> 00:34:54,880
Speaker 1: went away. So maybe that's like a less uh direct

617
00:34:56,239 --> 00:34:59,680
Speaker 1: manifestation of the same thing. I mean, I think I've

618
00:34:59,719 --> 00:35:02,240
Speaker 1: heard of out of other people telling stories like this before,

619
00:35:02,280 --> 00:35:04,840
Speaker 1: where you've just got some complaint in your body. Often

620
00:35:04,920 --> 00:35:07,720
Speaker 1: it is a pain that seems to be localized somewhere

621
00:35:08,040 --> 00:35:10,560
Speaker 1: and as soon as you're told it's nothing to worry about,

622
00:35:10,719 --> 00:35:13,480
Speaker 1: it basically just leaves you. Yeah. Well, I mean, not

623
00:35:13,520 --> 00:35:14,960
Speaker 1: only are you being told not to worry about it,

624
00:35:14,960 --> 00:35:16,759
Speaker 1: but you're going to a place where you're going to

625
00:35:16,880 --> 00:35:20,960
Speaker 1: feel rather safe in control, Like even before the doctor

626
00:35:20,960 --> 00:35:24,920
Speaker 1: looks at you, you're in an environment of perceived safety

627
00:35:25,000 --> 00:35:28,520
Speaker 1: regarding the injury. Like at least now I'm among the

628
00:35:28,560 --> 00:35:30,520
Speaker 1: experts and they'll be able to weigh in on it.

629
00:35:30,560 --> 00:35:32,799
Speaker 1: But if it can leave like that, that makes you

630
00:35:32,880 --> 00:35:36,799
Speaker 1: wonder where did it come from? Right? What caused this

631
00:35:36,920 --> 00:35:39,759
Speaker 1: thing to make my brain think I was hurting in

632
00:35:39,800 --> 00:35:41,640
Speaker 1: a place where as soon as I was told I

633
00:35:41,640 --> 00:35:44,360
Speaker 1: didn't actually need to be hurting there, I stopped hurting.

634
00:35:44,719 --> 00:35:47,040
Speaker 1: You know, we're not gonna get into faith healers in

635
00:35:47,080 --> 00:35:49,479
Speaker 1: this episode, but it does make one think of all

636
00:35:49,520 --> 00:35:53,640
Speaker 1: the various, uh, you know, religious healers throughout history who

637
00:35:53,719 --> 00:35:57,680
Speaker 1: have either just merely laid hands on an injury um

638
00:35:58,040 --> 00:36:01,359
Speaker 1: or you know, or on a forehead, or or administered

639
00:36:01,440 --> 00:36:06,120
Speaker 1: some form of treatment that ultimately is nothing more than placebo.

640
00:36:06,320 --> 00:36:09,520
Speaker 1: But another big way that psychology that like the state

641
00:36:09,560 --> 00:36:12,480
Speaker 1: of the mind, can influence the experience of pain can

642
00:36:12,520 --> 00:36:15,080
Speaker 1: be not just like the relief of pain, but like

643
00:36:15,280 --> 00:36:18,560
Speaker 1: failing to notice pain to begin with. Right, Yeah, And

644
00:36:18,600 --> 00:36:21,160
Speaker 1: though we have account of that from throughout recorded history.

645
00:36:21,360 --> 00:36:24,080
Speaker 1: One of the most frequently quoted passages about this comes

646
00:36:24,080 --> 00:36:28,319
Speaker 1: from the Roman philosopher uh Lucretious from around he lived

647
00:36:28,400 --> 00:36:33,240
Speaker 1: ninety four through PC. And he's talking about the scythe

648
00:36:33,280 --> 00:36:37,080
Speaker 1: to to chariots. So these chariots with these big rolling blades,

649
00:36:37,120 --> 00:36:39,520
Speaker 1: you know, on their on the wheels, I said, the

650
00:36:39,760 --> 00:36:45,240
Speaker 1: scythe chariots reeking with indiscriminate slaughter, suddenly chop off the limbs.

651
00:36:45,239 --> 00:36:48,120
Speaker 1: Such is the quickness of the injury and the eagerness

652
00:36:48,200 --> 00:36:51,040
Speaker 1: of the man's mind that he cannot feel the pain.

653
00:36:51,480 --> 00:36:54,040
Speaker 1: And because his mind is given over to the zest

654
00:36:54,080 --> 00:36:58,000
Speaker 1: of battle, named though he be, he plunges afresh into

655
00:36:58,040 --> 00:37:02,279
Speaker 1: the fray and the slaughter. Uh No, in reality, that's

656
00:37:02,280 --> 00:37:06,120
Speaker 1: not funny. But the zest of battle, yea, it makes

657
00:37:06,160 --> 00:37:10,319
Speaker 1: it sound like a soap commercial, right, like zesty battle dressing. Yes,

658
00:37:10,520 --> 00:37:14,080
Speaker 1: zestfully dead that sort of thing. Um. But so the

659
00:37:14,120 --> 00:37:18,200
Speaker 1: idea there is that a really rapidly inflicted wound on

660
00:37:18,200 --> 00:37:20,799
Speaker 1: a soldier who's engaged in the heat of battle, like

661
00:37:20,960 --> 00:37:23,240
Speaker 1: it chops their arm off. They might not even notice.

662
00:37:23,360 --> 00:37:25,600
Speaker 1: They just keep trying to fight. Yeah, and it's only

663
00:37:25,800 --> 00:37:30,480
Speaker 1: later that they may experience the emotional pain of what's happening.

664
00:37:31,120 --> 00:37:34,520
Speaker 1: So I was I was reading, uh something some information

665
00:37:34,560 --> 00:37:38,200
Speaker 1: about this, and Joanna Bork, writing for The Conversation, she

666
00:37:38,360 --> 00:37:45,080
Speaker 1: points to surgeon A. Copland Hutchinson's writings in eighteen sixteens

667
00:37:45,120 --> 00:37:49,040
Speaker 1: some practical observations in surgery, and he wrote that soldiers

668
00:37:49,080 --> 00:37:52,880
Speaker 1: and semen with limbs that required amputation didn't realize the

669
00:37:52,920 --> 00:37:55,719
Speaker 1: extent of the damage. Quote at the time of their

670
00:37:55,760 --> 00:37:59,880
Speaker 1: being wounded, they were scarcely sensible of the circumstance to

671
00:38:00,120 --> 00:38:03,759
Speaker 1: informed of the extent of their misfortune by the inability

672
00:38:03,800 --> 00:38:08,120
Speaker 1: of moving their limb. So war surgeons, they've tended to

673
00:38:08,200 --> 00:38:10,840
Speaker 1: chalk this up to the excitement of battle, that zest

674
00:38:10,920 --> 00:38:15,960
Speaker 1: of battle, or to the ideological ideals that animated them,

675
00:38:16,640 --> 00:38:20,960
Speaker 1: or to the the psychological effects that of the battle

676
00:38:21,000 --> 00:38:23,719
Speaker 1: that put them in a sort of trance. You know, now,

677
00:38:23,719 --> 00:38:28,000
Speaker 1: we mentioned the placebo effect briefly. Uh. The father of

678
00:38:28,000 --> 00:38:32,440
Speaker 1: the placebo effect was an eesthetist, Henry K. Beecher, who

679
00:38:32,560 --> 00:38:35,440
Speaker 1: questioned some two hundred and fifteen wounded men in Italy

680
00:38:35,520 --> 00:38:40,640
Speaker 1: between nineteen ninety five, and he found no necessary correlation

681
00:38:40,719 --> 00:38:43,799
Speaker 1: between the severity of the wound and the amount of

682
00:38:43,880 --> 00:38:47,080
Speaker 1: pain that the men expressed. So yet again it seems

683
00:38:47,120 --> 00:38:50,440
Speaker 1: to be highly contingent on psychological factors. Right, Yeah, you

684
00:38:50,480 --> 00:38:52,480
Speaker 1: can't just say, okay, this is this is the amount

685
00:38:52,520 --> 00:38:57,440
Speaker 1: of discomfort that is the companies say the loss of

686
00:38:57,440 --> 00:39:00,839
Speaker 1: a hand, which is funny because that seems to make

687
00:39:00,880 --> 00:39:04,240
Speaker 1: it very difficult to create a standardized scale of pain.

688
00:39:04,800 --> 00:39:07,560
Speaker 1: Which are you mentioned the one to tend scale to

689
00:39:07,600 --> 00:39:09,840
Speaker 1: ask you at the doctor's office or at the hospital.

690
00:39:10,400 --> 00:39:14,920
Speaker 1: I've thought about before, like, uh, there have been attempts

691
00:39:14,960 --> 00:39:18,440
Speaker 1: to rate on a standardized scale how much it hurts

692
00:39:18,800 --> 00:39:22,400
Speaker 1: to get attacked by certain types of insects. Have you

693
00:39:22,400 --> 00:39:26,120
Speaker 1: ever read about this, the sting scale. I don't. I

694
00:39:26,120 --> 00:39:29,319
Speaker 1: don't recall exactly who the researcher was, but there was

695
00:39:29,360 --> 00:39:32,120
Speaker 1: a guy who put one of these together and he

696
00:39:32,280 --> 00:39:34,640
Speaker 1: was like, I've been attacked by a bullet ant and

697
00:39:34,640 --> 00:39:37,759
Speaker 1: a tarantilla hawk and all of the worst insects, and

698
00:39:37,760 --> 00:39:40,920
Speaker 1: I've ranked them on a scale of how bad it hurts,

699
00:39:41,200 --> 00:39:43,680
Speaker 1: and it just seems like you can't actually do that,

700
00:39:43,800 --> 00:39:47,240
Speaker 1: can you. Like, some things probably will reliably hurt most

701
00:39:47,280 --> 00:39:49,840
Speaker 1: of the time more than other things. But pain is

702
00:39:49,960 --> 00:39:53,400
Speaker 1: very much in the brain of the receiver of the injury,

703
00:39:53,600 --> 00:39:55,400
Speaker 1: and we're still trying to figure out how the brain

704
00:39:55,520 --> 00:39:59,839
Speaker 1: regulates our individual perceptions of pain. Now, now beet Ramse.

705
00:40:00,000 --> 00:40:03,480
Speaker 1: He initially expected that the men who expressed little or

706
00:40:03,480 --> 00:40:07,879
Speaker 1: no pain were insensitive due to some chemical or hormonal imbalance,

707
00:40:08,160 --> 00:40:11,040
Speaker 1: but he later theorized that they were they were not suffering,

708
00:40:11,080 --> 00:40:14,560
Speaker 1: or were suffering less, because to be injured and off

709
00:40:14,560 --> 00:40:17,760
Speaker 1: the front lines during this time was to be safe,

710
00:40:18,160 --> 00:40:21,440
Speaker 1: to be removed from the prime place of danger. Now

711
00:40:21,480 --> 00:40:24,839
Speaker 1: you compare that to the average civilian situation, where if

712
00:40:24,880 --> 00:40:27,279
Speaker 1: you're suddenly in a hospital, you were you were in

713
00:40:27,320 --> 00:40:29,320
Speaker 1: the place of danger. You were in the place where

714
00:40:29,320 --> 00:40:33,719
Speaker 1: people uh not always but a place where people may

715
00:40:33,760 --> 00:40:36,640
Speaker 1: often die. This is the place of injury, the place

716
00:40:36,840 --> 00:40:39,840
Speaker 1: of h I mean not only of physical injury, but

717
00:40:40,000 --> 00:40:45,160
Speaker 1: say emotional, financial injury, all the these uh, these anxieties

718
00:40:45,160 --> 00:40:49,160
Speaker 1: that are swarming around actual physical ailment. Whereas again, on

719
00:40:49,200 --> 00:40:51,640
Speaker 1: the front lines of battle, if you were in the hospital,

720
00:40:51,960 --> 00:40:54,520
Speaker 1: then you are in a place of safety. Well, I can't.

721
00:40:54,760 --> 00:40:56,799
Speaker 1: I've never thought about it like that before, but that

722
00:40:56,840 --> 00:41:00,920
Speaker 1: does make sense. Yeah, And so Beacher's work and that

723
00:41:01,000 --> 00:41:04,120
Speaker 1: of others, they reveal the truth of the matter. Emotions

724
00:41:04,320 --> 00:41:08,840
Speaker 1: matter in war, fear and anxiety and anxiety matter in war.

725
00:41:09,440 --> 00:41:11,240
Speaker 1: But then what are we to do with it both

726
00:41:11,280 --> 00:41:16,040
Speaker 1: for the betterment of humanity, uh, and to improve our

727
00:41:16,640 --> 00:41:19,640
Speaker 1: ability to wage war? Well, yeah, you can think about

728
00:41:19,680 --> 00:41:22,400
Speaker 1: this in two very different ways. So we have the

729
00:41:22,440 --> 00:41:24,600
Speaker 1: idea of people who are always going to be injured

730
00:41:24,640 --> 00:41:27,799
Speaker 1: and harmed in war, and so there's sort of like

731
00:41:27,880 --> 00:41:31,400
Speaker 1: the good magic of coming up with ways to relieve

732
00:41:31,520 --> 00:41:34,280
Speaker 1: chronic pain for people, especially people who have been injured

733
00:41:34,280 --> 00:41:36,759
Speaker 1: in battle. You want them to be able to live

734
00:41:36,920 --> 00:41:39,640
Speaker 1: normal lives, to live without pain and suffering, and like,

735
00:41:39,680 --> 00:41:42,320
Speaker 1: how can we help them? And then there's the darker

736
00:41:42,360 --> 00:41:45,120
Speaker 1: magic aspect of it, which is people trying to figure

737
00:41:45,120 --> 00:41:47,799
Speaker 1: out how can I make more effective soldiers who are

738
00:41:47,800 --> 00:41:50,600
Speaker 1: not hampered by pain? Yeah, we see this time and

739
00:41:50,600 --> 00:41:53,200
Speaker 1: time again. Of course, with technology, you can look to

740
00:41:53,239 --> 00:41:56,480
Speaker 1: the see the advancements in chemistry from the nineteenth and

741
00:41:56,680 --> 00:42:01,319
Speaker 1: early twentieth century, advancements that were you you essentially had

742
00:42:01,360 --> 00:42:03,279
Speaker 1: the chemistry of life, and you had the chemistry of

743
00:42:03,280 --> 00:42:07,240
Speaker 1: death and some of our most nefarious chemical weapons exactly.

744
00:42:07,280 --> 00:42:09,399
Speaker 1: And so maybe you're wondering, like, wait a minute, why

745
00:42:09,440 --> 00:42:12,040
Speaker 1: would trying to create a soldier who doesn't feel pain

746
00:42:12,080 --> 00:42:14,200
Speaker 1: on the battle battlefield? Like why would that be the

747
00:42:14,280 --> 00:42:16,319
Speaker 1: dark magic? Why? Why would you be worried about that?

748
00:42:16,360 --> 00:42:19,000
Speaker 1: Isn't that good if they're not feeling pain? I would

749
00:42:19,000 --> 00:42:21,800
Speaker 1: say no, not necessarily, because we come back to yet again.

750
00:42:21,880 --> 00:42:25,760
Speaker 1: Pain is important information on the battlefield. You don't want

751
00:42:25,800 --> 00:42:29,360
Speaker 1: people who have left the battlefield to have to feel

752
00:42:29,440 --> 00:42:32,080
Speaker 1: chronic pain all their lives, right, You would like to

753
00:42:32,080 --> 00:42:34,120
Speaker 1: be able to give them relief for that. But if

754
00:42:34,160 --> 00:42:36,080
Speaker 1: you're in the heat of battle, if you're still in

755
00:42:36,120 --> 00:42:39,880
Speaker 1: a situation where threats are continuously coming your way and

756
00:42:39,920 --> 00:42:42,000
Speaker 1: you haven't made it back to the hospital or back

757
00:42:42,040 --> 00:42:45,080
Speaker 1: to your regular life, pain is important. That's something you

758
00:42:45,120 --> 00:42:47,600
Speaker 1: need to know that could save your life. If you're

759
00:42:47,640 --> 00:42:50,640
Speaker 1: not if you're not getting the data and if you're

760
00:42:50,640 --> 00:42:54,480
Speaker 1: not uh feeling the pain, that will help prevent you

761
00:42:54,640 --> 00:42:58,680
Speaker 1: from you know, moving forward with a life threatening, threatening injury,

762
00:42:59,040 --> 00:43:01,560
Speaker 1: you are putting yourself off at risk. Indeed, and of

763
00:43:01,600 --> 00:43:04,719
Speaker 1: course there's some additional ethical concerns there that we'll we'll

764
00:43:04,719 --> 00:43:06,799
Speaker 1: get to later on in the episode. All Right, we're

765
00:43:06,840 --> 00:43:08,480
Speaker 1: gonna take a break, and when we come back, we'll

766
00:43:08,480 --> 00:43:13,400
Speaker 1: discuss some of the some past examples of attempts to

767
00:43:13,520 --> 00:43:17,200
Speaker 1: um manipulate the way that we feel pain, as well

768
00:43:17,239 --> 00:43:21,719
Speaker 1: as some some current and near future advancements that might

769
00:43:21,880 --> 00:43:28,239
Speaker 1: change the way soldiers experienced pain than Alright, we're back

770
00:43:28,520 --> 00:43:32,560
Speaker 1: now on this podcast, we've covered pharmacological alterations of soldiers

771
00:43:32,640 --> 00:43:35,040
Speaker 1: for better service. Right, I think Robert, you and Christian

772
00:43:35,080 --> 00:43:38,560
Speaker 1: did an episode on combat stems, right, Yes, yes, we did.

773
00:43:38,760 --> 00:43:42,600
Speaker 1: Like all of the drugs that armed forces authorities have

774
00:43:42,680 --> 00:43:44,879
Speaker 1: tried to make soldiers take in order to be more

775
00:43:44,920 --> 00:43:47,960
Speaker 1: alert and more effective, with one notable exception which we're

776
00:43:47,960 --> 00:43:51,160
Speaker 1: going to correct in this episode. But yes, but obviously,

777
00:43:51,280 --> 00:43:55,120
Speaker 1: one more way to enhance a soldier, again, as I

778
00:43:55,120 --> 00:43:57,520
Speaker 1: said earlier, at the expense of their safety and long

779
00:43:57,640 --> 00:44:00,319
Speaker 1: term survival, is to make them on a able to

780
00:44:00,320 --> 00:44:03,399
Speaker 1: feel pain. But of course just pumping a soldier full

781
00:44:03,440 --> 00:44:06,440
Speaker 1: of like OxyContin or vicodin or morphine is running the

782
00:44:06,560 --> 00:44:09,440
Speaker 1: risk of addiction and overdose. But also these drugs come

783
00:44:09,440 --> 00:44:14,920
Speaker 1: with side effects that could make soldiers less effective, right, drowsiness, lethargy, complacency, Yeah,

784
00:44:14,960 --> 00:44:17,759
Speaker 1: because you need your soldier to be effective in their role.

785
00:44:18,320 --> 00:44:23,760
Speaker 1: And so whatever is correcting one, uh perceived area of weakness,

786
00:44:23,760 --> 00:44:26,560
Speaker 1: you don't need it to weaken other areas as well. Right, So,

787
00:44:26,719 --> 00:44:29,799
Speaker 1: if you're one of these, you know, imagineers of war,

788
00:44:29,960 --> 00:44:32,480
Speaker 1: the people who are trying to come up with ways

789
00:44:32,560 --> 00:44:36,360
Speaker 1: for soldiers to press on in battle and continue to

790
00:44:36,400 --> 00:44:39,279
Speaker 1: be more effective, often at the expense of the soldier themselves.

791
00:44:39,680 --> 00:44:41,640
Speaker 1: One thing that would be amazing to come up with

792
00:44:41,680 --> 00:44:45,640
Speaker 1: would be like a pain vaccine, and there have apparently

793
00:44:45,640 --> 00:44:48,520
Speaker 1: been efforts in exactly this area. So the defense journalist

794
00:44:48,560 --> 00:44:53,080
Speaker 1: Annie Jacobson has a article in the Atlantic about attempts

795
00:44:53,120 --> 00:44:56,440
Speaker 1: at DARPA over the years to re engineer the human

796
00:44:56,480 --> 00:45:00,279
Speaker 1: body for war, and here's one story she tells. In

797
00:45:00,360 --> 00:45:05,440
Speaker 1: nineteen DARPA created a sub department called the Defense Services Office,

798
00:45:05,560 --> 00:45:07,560
Speaker 1: or the d s O, which was run by a

799
00:45:07,600 --> 00:45:11,799
Speaker 1: biologist and venture capitalist named Michael J. Goldblatt, who, incidentally

800
00:45:11,840 --> 00:45:14,200
Speaker 1: I looked up what he's up to now. He appears

801
00:45:14,200 --> 00:45:17,200
Speaker 1: more recently to have been appointed to the Scientific Advisory

802
00:45:17,200 --> 00:45:21,680
Speaker 1: Board of an organization called cannabis science. So he's he's

803
00:45:21,719 --> 00:45:25,120
Speaker 1: gotten gotten away from the darkest stuff as far as

804
00:45:25,120 --> 00:45:28,880
Speaker 1: we know now. Jacobson writes that gold Black quote believed

805
00:45:28,960 --> 00:45:33,160
Speaker 1: that defense sciences could demonstrate that the next frontier was

806
00:45:33,239 --> 00:45:36,879
Speaker 1: inside of our own selves, and he became a pioneer

807
00:45:36,880 --> 00:45:41,800
Speaker 1: in military based transhumanism, the notion that man can alter

808
00:45:41,960 --> 00:45:45,759
Speaker 1: the human condition fundamentally by augmenting the body with machines

809
00:45:45,840 --> 00:45:49,600
Speaker 1: and other means. And so gold Black's got this trans

810
00:45:49,719 --> 00:45:52,279
Speaker 1: human idea, but it sounds like he's working out the

811
00:45:52,719 --> 00:45:56,160
Speaker 1: baby steps getting you towards trans humanism by starting with

812
00:45:56,200 --> 00:46:00,160
Speaker 1: the military. Well, it's it's when you look at it

813
00:46:00,160 --> 00:46:02,439
Speaker 1: would where advancements take place. I mean, it's it's pretty

814
00:46:02,440 --> 00:46:04,840
Speaker 1: sensible if you want to if you want the budget

815
00:46:05,320 --> 00:46:10,880
Speaker 1: to to elevate the human experience via technology, the military

816
00:46:10,960 --> 00:46:13,080
Speaker 1: is the right place to go refunding. I mean, honestly,

817
00:46:13,120 --> 00:46:15,160
Speaker 1: when you look at a lot of these darker contracts,

818
00:46:15,200 --> 00:46:17,239
Speaker 1: you really get the sense that a lot of the

819
00:46:17,280 --> 00:46:21,200
Speaker 1: researchers working on this stuff are just trying to advance

820
00:46:21,520 --> 00:46:27,560
Speaker 1: some obscure scientific, uh medical or technological field and they're

821
00:46:27,600 --> 00:46:31,040
Speaker 1: coming up with whatever justifications they can to make it

822
00:46:31,080 --> 00:46:34,839
Speaker 1: sound like this is relevant to military technology. Yeah, I mean,

823
00:46:35,280 --> 00:46:37,279
Speaker 1: not to use him as a as an example for

824
00:46:37,360 --> 00:46:41,839
Speaker 1: all for all military researchers by any means, but we

825
00:46:41,840 --> 00:46:43,960
Speaker 1: we of course explored that with John C. Lily. Uh.

826
00:46:44,560 --> 00:46:46,920
Speaker 1: He seemed to have always been interested about connecting with

827
00:46:46,920 --> 00:46:49,719
Speaker 1: other minds and understanding what other mind states consisted of.

828
00:46:50,320 --> 00:46:52,680
Speaker 1: And early on in his career that meant that meant

829
00:46:52,760 --> 00:46:56,520
Speaker 1: working for the government and uh and exploring some kind

830
00:46:56,560 --> 00:47:00,360
Speaker 1: of frightening concepts. Uh. He was. He was game, I

831
00:47:00,400 --> 00:47:02,680
Speaker 1: want some psychic dolphins. How can I get some war

832
00:47:02,800 --> 00:47:06,560
Speaker 1: money to do it? Well sort of yes, no, sorry,

833
00:47:06,640 --> 00:47:09,920
Speaker 1: that's not well. The dolphins came later, but but I mean,

834
00:47:10,480 --> 00:47:12,560
Speaker 1: as we explored in that episode, certainly that's where the

835
00:47:12,600 --> 00:47:16,319
Speaker 1: isolation tanks were born. Yeah. So going back to the

836
00:47:16,360 --> 00:47:18,160
Speaker 1: story of the d s O. So, Goldblatt ran the

837
00:47:18,239 --> 00:47:21,400
Speaker 1: d s O until two thousand four, and when he

838
00:47:21,520 --> 00:47:24,840
Speaker 1: spoke to Jacobson, there were still many classified aspects of

839
00:47:24,880 --> 00:47:26,960
Speaker 1: his work that he couldn't reveal, but he did say

840
00:47:26,960 --> 00:47:31,920
Speaker 1: he believed that quote soldiers having no physical, psychological, or

841
00:47:31,920 --> 00:47:36,799
Speaker 1: cognitive limitation will be key to survival and operational dominance

842
00:47:36,840 --> 00:47:39,920
Speaker 1: in the future. With the age of robotics. I'm not

843
00:47:39,960 --> 00:47:42,240
Speaker 1: sure if many people would still say that's the case,

844
00:47:42,400 --> 00:47:48,880
Speaker 1: Like if you just need no physical, psychological, or cognitive limitations,

845
00:47:49,360 --> 00:47:51,120
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe it would be better to be

846
00:47:51,120 --> 00:47:55,480
Speaker 1: putting robots in those risky scenarios. But well, but then,

847
00:47:55,760 --> 00:47:59,280
Speaker 1: but then you get into the various challenges to making

848
00:47:59,320 --> 00:48:03,040
Speaker 1: the ideal robotic combatants. That's true. Well, humans can of

849
00:48:03,040 --> 00:48:05,759
Speaker 1: course do many things that robots can't yet do, right,

850
00:48:05,880 --> 00:48:09,560
Speaker 1: and including make certain judgment calls, even though certain judgment

851
00:48:09,560 --> 00:48:11,680
Speaker 1: calls are going to be challenging even to a human

852
00:48:12,000 --> 00:48:15,640
Speaker 1: in various combat scenarios, especially in concerns when it concerns say,

853
00:48:15,760 --> 00:48:19,040
Speaker 1: noncombatants and being able to tell when an individual is

854
00:48:19,080 --> 00:48:23,320
Speaker 1: a noncombatants, etcetera. Right, So, for if you had like ideal,

855
00:48:24,080 --> 00:48:26,680
Speaker 1: ideal ethical war, though that seems like, you know, it's

856
00:48:26,680 --> 00:48:29,080
Speaker 1: a difficult thing to try to work out, but it

857
00:48:29,120 --> 00:48:32,000
Speaker 1: would be full of ethical soldiers who were operating on

858
00:48:32,080 --> 00:48:36,759
Speaker 1: ethical principles using human judgment that's difficult for robots to master. Right.

859
00:48:37,160 --> 00:48:39,799
Speaker 1: But along the lines of what Goldblatt said, there was

860
00:48:39,880 --> 00:48:43,520
Speaker 1: one DSO project which was known as Persistence in Combat,

861
00:48:44,080 --> 00:48:47,600
Speaker 1: and it sought to eliminate three problems that limit a

862
00:48:47,680 --> 00:48:50,600
Speaker 1: soldier's effectiveness on the field of battle, and these problems

863
00:48:50,600 --> 00:48:57,160
Speaker 1: are pain, wounds and excessive bleeding. And for the pain part, quote,

864
00:48:57,239 --> 00:49:01,719
Speaker 1: Goldblatt hired a biotechnology firm to develop up a pain vaccine.

865
00:49:02,200 --> 00:49:06,000
Speaker 1: If a soldier got shot, Goldblatt explained, the vaccine would

866
00:49:06,080 --> 00:49:10,239
Speaker 1: quote reduce the pain triggered by inflammation and swelling, the

867
00:49:10,280 --> 00:49:14,239
Speaker 1: desired result being quote ten to thirty seconds of agony

868
00:49:14,600 --> 00:49:18,240
Speaker 1: than no pain for thirty days. So basically the level

869
00:49:18,440 --> 00:49:23,320
Speaker 1: of of of of pain that Arnold Schwarzenegger's character experiences

870
00:49:23,320 --> 00:49:25,920
Speaker 1: in the movie Commando, right, where he's like shot in

871
00:49:25,960 --> 00:49:28,160
Speaker 1: the shoulder and it's like ah at first, but then

872
00:49:28,160 --> 00:49:31,000
Speaker 1: he's just running around like normal, right, yeah, okay, And

873
00:49:31,040 --> 00:49:33,960
Speaker 1: of course what's the goal of that. Well, Jacobson comes

874
00:49:33,960 --> 00:49:35,920
Speaker 1: out and says the goal is that a vaccine like

875
00:49:35,960 --> 00:49:39,279
Speaker 1: that would allow the fighter to continue fighting as long

876
00:49:39,320 --> 00:49:42,440
Speaker 1: as the bleeding could be stopped. Again, this sounds like

877
00:49:42,480 --> 00:49:45,320
Speaker 1: putting the soldier at more risk of death and permanent injury,

878
00:49:45,360 --> 00:49:47,319
Speaker 1: but that seems to be what they were trying to

879
00:49:47,320 --> 00:49:50,000
Speaker 1: figure out how to do. Uh And as a side note,

880
00:49:50,000 --> 00:49:53,160
Speaker 1: apparently their planned to immediately stop bleeding do you know

881
00:49:53,200 --> 00:49:57,799
Speaker 1: what this was? On the battlefield. A soldier's bleeding a lot.

882
00:49:57,840 --> 00:50:00,239
Speaker 1: And their plan was to inject the soldier with a

883
00:50:00,320 --> 00:50:04,319
Speaker 1: payload of millions of tiny magnets which could then be

884
00:50:04,400 --> 00:50:08,120
Speaker 1: directed to coagulate in the blood with the positioning of

885
00:50:08,160 --> 00:50:11,279
Speaker 1: a magnetic wand so, so either they would have a

886
00:50:11,320 --> 00:50:13,080
Speaker 1: wand or there would be like a field medic that

887
00:50:13,120 --> 00:50:14,680
Speaker 1: would come up and just sort of wand of the

888
00:50:14,719 --> 00:50:18,320
Speaker 1: wound and then that would cause the magnetic particles to

889
00:50:18,400 --> 00:50:21,560
Speaker 1: a symbol. Yeah. Wow, No word on whether that's still

890
00:50:21,600 --> 00:50:25,360
Speaker 1: in development. Now. We mentioned, uh, the previous episode of

891
00:50:25,360 --> 00:50:28,399
Speaker 1: Stufforable your Mind that dealt with combat stems. Well, there

892
00:50:28,440 --> 00:50:32,319
Speaker 1: was one particular drug that we we did not cover

893
00:50:32,360 --> 00:50:36,280
Speaker 1: in that episode, and that was pervatine, an early version

894
00:50:36,280 --> 00:50:38,920
Speaker 1: of what we now call crystal meth and and it

895
00:50:39,040 --> 00:50:42,279
Speaker 1: was available quite legally in Nazi Germany and used through

896
00:50:42,520 --> 00:50:46,560
Speaker 1: throughout the military engine of the Third Reich. Crystal meth.

897
00:50:46,680 --> 00:50:50,080
Speaker 1: Huh yeah, essentially it was crystal. It was essentially a

898
00:50:50,320 --> 00:50:54,279
Speaker 1: meth amphetamine. Now, as Megan Gerber pointed out in her

899
00:50:54,480 --> 00:50:58,520
Speaker 1: her excellent Atlantic article, Uh Pilot Salt, the Third Reich

900
00:50:58,719 --> 00:51:03,520
Speaker 1: kept its soldiers alert meth. The benefits went beyond mere wakefulness.

901
00:51:04,600 --> 00:51:08,040
Speaker 1: So she she writes that the author Heinrich Ball uh

902
00:51:08,120 --> 00:51:11,759
Speaker 1: and In and influential post WARAR two German writer uh

903
00:51:11,840 --> 00:51:14,839
Speaker 1: he Was wrote about this a bit. He was conscripted

904
00:51:14,840 --> 00:51:18,080
Speaker 1: into the German military in his early twenties and uh

905
00:51:18,160 --> 00:51:20,759
Speaker 1: and at the time even he wrote about the use

906
00:51:21,120 --> 00:51:24,279
Speaker 1: of privatein he said that when using the drug he

907
00:51:24,320 --> 00:51:27,200
Speaker 1: was able to forget for a while about the trials

908
00:51:27,200 --> 00:51:29,880
Speaker 1: and tribulations of war. So it sounds like a numbing

909
00:51:30,160 --> 00:51:34,240
Speaker 1: of numbing of psychological pain exactly now. At the time,

910
00:51:34,520 --> 00:51:38,800
Speaker 1: their Spiegel described the drug produced by drugmaker uh timular

911
00:51:38,920 --> 00:51:43,320
Speaker 1: Virka as quote the ideal war drug. Uh and so,

912
00:51:43,480 --> 00:51:45,880
Speaker 1: so the I issue would have an army of euphoric

913
00:51:45,960 --> 00:51:49,560
Speaker 1: soldiers uh In. The millity German military pumped millions of

914
00:51:49,600 --> 00:51:52,760
Speaker 1: these pills out to its troops, where it was also

915
00:51:52,920 --> 00:51:58,640
Speaker 1: known as as panzer Schokocolade or tank chocolate and pilot

916
00:51:58,719 --> 00:52:01,880
Speaker 1: salt in the Luftwaffe. But according to and according to

917
00:52:01,920 --> 00:52:05,520
Speaker 1: Gerber quote, between April and July of nineteen forty, more

918
00:52:05,560 --> 00:52:09,520
Speaker 1: than thirty five million, three milligram doses of pervoteam were

919
00:52:09,560 --> 00:52:13,120
Speaker 1: manufactured for the German army and air force. But again

920
00:52:13,160 --> 00:52:16,000
Speaker 1: this was this was essentially crystal math. There were side

921
00:52:16,000 --> 00:52:21,920
Speaker 1: effects heart failure, psychotic phases, suicide. The British also experimented

922
00:52:21,960 --> 00:52:24,480
Speaker 1: with the with the a similar substance, and they found

923
00:52:24,560 --> 00:52:28,480
Speaker 1: that it resulted in just too much agitation, aggressiveness, and

924
00:52:28,680 --> 00:52:32,920
Speaker 1: impaired judgment. But as far as pain goes well a

925
00:52:33,040 --> 00:52:36,680
Speaker 1: nineteen forty eight article in the American Journal of Psychiatry,

926
00:52:37,080 --> 00:52:39,920
Speaker 1: it hits on a few points related to the emotional

927
00:52:39,960 --> 00:52:43,759
Speaker 1: side of pain that the paper states, quote perva team

928
00:52:43,840 --> 00:52:48,000
Speaker 1: produces an emotionally charged free flow of material, which may

929
00:52:48,080 --> 00:52:54,880
Speaker 1: include painful memories, traumatic experiences, intimate personal fantasies, and delusional ideas.

930
00:52:55,160 --> 00:52:58,760
Speaker 1: Most patients experienced a dramatic relief of tension and feeling

931
00:52:58,760 --> 00:53:03,560
Speaker 1: of relaxation. Mild depressions are often delayed. The psychologically rich

932
00:53:03,680 --> 00:53:08,400
Speaker 1: response evoked by pervotein is helpful both diagnostically and therapeutically.

933
00:53:08,600 --> 00:53:11,920
Speaker 1: Now from this though, it sounds like you're you're again

934
00:53:12,000 --> 00:53:17,480
Speaker 1: coming down to an individual's pre existing um psychological state

935
00:53:18,160 --> 00:53:20,760
Speaker 1: and how they perceive pain, because it sounds like privotein

936
00:53:20,880 --> 00:53:24,520
Speaker 1: could suppress the emotional aspects of the pain or cause

937
00:53:24,640 --> 00:53:27,440
Speaker 1: them to surge up to the surface depending on the individual.

938
00:53:27,520 --> 00:53:29,600
Speaker 1: I mean, I would have to observe. Yet again, as

939
00:53:29,640 --> 00:53:32,480
Speaker 1: we've seen with many of these things so far, the

940
00:53:32,520 --> 00:53:36,120
Speaker 1: idea here seems not so much for the benefit of

941
00:53:36,160 --> 00:53:39,879
Speaker 1: the soldier themselves, but for the benefit of the war

942
00:53:40,000 --> 00:53:44,120
Speaker 1: aims as a whole, at the expense of the soldier. Yes. Now,

943
00:53:44,160 --> 00:53:47,520
Speaker 1: another idea that comes up a lot in uh in

944
00:53:47,840 --> 00:53:50,600
Speaker 1: the literature surrounding this topic is the is the idea

945
00:53:50,640 --> 00:53:54,520
Speaker 1: of an anti remorse pill. Oh that's a horrible idea, Yeah,

946
00:53:54,560 --> 00:53:56,560
Speaker 1: I mean, because but it makes sense, right, If fear

947
00:53:56,600 --> 00:53:59,400
Speaker 1: and remorse interfere with the soldier's ability to inflict pain

948
00:53:59,480 --> 00:54:03,720
Speaker 1: and and or suffer pain themselves, then it would seem

949
00:54:03,800 --> 00:54:06,759
Speaker 1: natural to simply remove it. But of course, at the

950
00:54:06,760 --> 00:54:11,400
Speaker 1: same time, nothing could be more unnatural. So as as

951
00:54:11,560 --> 00:54:14,520
Speaker 1: as of now, there is no such thing as a

952
00:54:14,600 --> 00:54:19,880
Speaker 1: true anti remorse pill. But Columbia University researchers have isolated

953
00:54:19,880 --> 00:54:22,840
Speaker 1: the gene behind a protein in mice that inhibits fear,

954
00:54:23,280 --> 00:54:27,400
Speaker 1: and meanwhile, trauma inducing drugs have been trialed at at

955
00:54:27,480 --> 00:54:31,960
Speaker 1: Harvard University for car accident victims. Dr Gregory Quirk of

956
00:54:32,000 --> 00:54:34,520
Speaker 1: the University of Puerto Rico has experimented with the use

957
00:54:34,520 --> 00:54:38,440
Speaker 1: of magnetic stimulation to aid patients in un learning fear.

958
00:54:39,280 --> 00:54:41,320
Speaker 1: And these were just a you know, a few examples

959
00:54:41,360 --> 00:54:43,640
Speaker 1: brought up by Joe and Greta Bird in their two

960
00:54:43,680 --> 00:54:47,040
Speaker 1: thousand five article Human Rights in the Military The Chemical

961
00:54:47,120 --> 00:54:51,040
Speaker 1: Soldier that was published in Alternative Law Review. Now a

962
00:54:51,120 --> 00:54:54,840
Speaker 1: quick note on on on Dr Gregory Quirk. His work

963
00:54:55,280 --> 00:54:59,680
Speaker 1: continues he since he continues his work into pain and

964
00:55:00,080 --> 00:55:04,720
Speaker 1: study mentioned above was the effect of repetitive transcranial magnetic

965
00:55:04,760 --> 00:55:08,400
Speaker 1: stimulation on fear extinction in rats, and that was published

966
00:55:08,400 --> 00:55:12,719
Speaker 1: in the journal Neuroscience. His finding suggested that quote repeated

967
00:55:12,719 --> 00:55:17,640
Speaker 1: transcranial magnetic stimulation paired with trauma reminding stimuli enhance his

968
00:55:17,800 --> 00:55:22,000
Speaker 1: fear extinction and that r t m S in conjunction

969
00:55:22,040 --> 00:55:26,800
Speaker 1: with exposure therapy is potentially useful for facilitating extinction memory

970
00:55:26,840 --> 00:55:30,440
Speaker 1: in the treatment of PTSD. So a lot of this

971
00:55:30,560 --> 00:55:33,919
Speaker 1: research does seem to be aimed more at treating PTSD,

972
00:55:33,960 --> 00:55:37,759
Speaker 1: which would certainly benefits soldiers. But but I wonder if

973
00:55:37,840 --> 00:55:40,640
Speaker 1: it's a bit much to describe it as an anti

974
00:55:40,760 --> 00:55:43,680
Speaker 1: remorse pill. Well, yeah, what that conjures to mind is

975
00:55:43,760 --> 00:55:47,280
Speaker 1: like a pill that you would give a soldier before

976
00:55:47,680 --> 00:55:50,280
Speaker 1: going onto the battlefield so that they can like commit

977
00:55:50,320 --> 00:55:53,839
Speaker 1: atrocities and not worry about it. Uh, if it's just

978
00:55:54,120 --> 00:55:57,799
Speaker 1: to help a soldier after they've come home to like

979
00:55:57,920 --> 00:56:01,120
Speaker 1: not experienced PTSD, that sounds stimil a good thing. Yeah,

980
00:56:01,160 --> 00:56:03,120
Speaker 1: But I guess it comes back and down back again

981
00:56:03,160 --> 00:56:06,800
Speaker 1: to the dual nature of technology. Like if you're working

982
00:56:06,800 --> 00:56:09,279
Speaker 1: on the cure, then you're then there's then a lot

983
00:56:09,360 --> 00:56:12,440
Speaker 1: of times the same science is involved in in creating

984
00:56:12,480 --> 00:56:15,000
Speaker 1: a more effective poison. I guess that's true. I mean

985
00:56:15,040 --> 00:56:18,640
Speaker 1: you mentioned the idea of treating car accident victims. I mean,

986
00:56:18,760 --> 00:56:21,759
Speaker 1: no matter what, if you are working on ways to

987
00:56:22,880 --> 00:56:26,680
Speaker 1: to help extinguish fear in the mind and help people

988
00:56:26,719 --> 00:56:29,400
Speaker 1: get over trauma, you can certainly see ways that that

989
00:56:29,520 --> 00:56:34,160
Speaker 1: same knowledge and technology and medicine could be leveraged to

990
00:56:34,160 --> 00:56:37,000
Speaker 1: try to get people to do things that they shouldn't

991
00:56:37,000 --> 00:56:41,239
Speaker 1: want to do. Indeed, now, in two thousand fifteen, then

992
00:56:41,360 --> 00:56:45,520
Speaker 1: DARPA program manager Doug Weber challenged labs quote to develop

993
00:56:45,640 --> 00:56:49,759
Speaker 1: tools that will establish direct communication and delivery of information

994
00:56:49,800 --> 00:56:53,040
Speaker 1: through the nervous system. This, according to the Christian Science Monitor,

995
00:56:53,120 --> 00:56:57,040
Speaker 1: the key reason here to manipulate their nerves, enabling the

996
00:56:57,080 --> 00:57:00,800
Speaker 1: control of blood pressure as well as the manipulation of

997
00:57:00,840 --> 00:57:05,040
Speaker 1: adrenaline to curb fear and anxiety. And then Weber says,

998
00:57:05,080 --> 00:57:08,680
Speaker 1: quote that would be especially useful for our war fighters

999
00:57:08,719 --> 00:57:12,040
Speaker 1: who have to deal with very stressful environments. So the

1000
00:57:12,120 --> 00:57:14,719
Speaker 1: challenge here is of course, to create drugs and drug

1001
00:57:14,760 --> 00:57:17,280
Speaker 1: delivery systems that operate with a certain amount of balance

1002
00:57:17,280 --> 00:57:20,480
Speaker 1: and dependability. You want your soldiers calm and collected, but

1003
00:57:20,600 --> 00:57:22,600
Speaker 1: not doped out or apped up to the point where

1004
00:57:22,640 --> 00:57:26,400
Speaker 1: they make irrational decisions. Likewise, you don't want crippling dependency

1005
00:57:26,480 --> 00:57:30,040
Speaker 1: or hangover effects. You. So, the the the the alchemy

1006
00:57:30,160 --> 00:57:34,600
Speaker 1: of the perfect soldier seems to be uh rather detailed.

1007
00:57:34,640 --> 00:57:36,480
Speaker 1: You know, you you have to have your you want

1008
00:57:36,480 --> 00:57:39,280
Speaker 1: to have your soldier just right and uh and if

1009
00:57:39,280 --> 00:57:43,360
Speaker 1: you're trying to manipulate the stats uh in one direction

1010
00:57:43,440 --> 00:57:46,400
Speaker 1: or the other, you risk putting the entire um, the

1011
00:57:46,560 --> 00:57:49,360
Speaker 1: entire algorithm out of balance. Now I know we are

1012
00:57:49,440 --> 00:57:51,360
Speaker 1: in the last minutes here are going to get into

1013
00:57:51,440 --> 00:57:54,240
Speaker 1: discussing the idea of super soldiers of the future. But

1014
00:57:54,320 --> 00:57:57,520
Speaker 1: before we go to that, I want to ask the question,

1015
00:57:58,160 --> 00:58:03,640
Speaker 1: if you are manipulating soldiers pharmacologically, technologically, trying to alter

1016
00:58:03,800 --> 00:58:06,320
Speaker 1: their psychology and their response to pain. If you're you're

1017
00:58:06,320 --> 00:58:10,480
Speaker 1: making all these tweaks, are the interests of the soldier

1018
00:58:10,560 --> 00:58:12,760
Speaker 1: as a person who just wants to be a person

1019
00:58:12,880 --> 00:58:15,880
Speaker 1: and try to live their life always going to be

1020
00:58:16,160 --> 00:58:20,160
Speaker 1: at odds with the interests of the commanders and the

1021
00:58:20,200 --> 00:58:22,720
Speaker 1: people who are coming up with the war aims and

1022
00:58:22,760 --> 00:58:27,120
Speaker 1: the strategies. Are these things just inevitably intention or could

1023
00:58:27,240 --> 00:58:30,919
Speaker 1: could there be scenarios where those interests are aligned, where

1024
00:58:30,920 --> 00:58:33,360
Speaker 1: they're the same thing? Well, certainly in this we're getting

1025
00:58:33,400 --> 00:58:36,680
Speaker 1: into a number of the the ethical concerns and right

1026
00:58:36,760 --> 00:58:39,760
Speaker 1: here and luckily they are individuals who have been writing

1027
00:58:39,760 --> 00:58:42,040
Speaker 1: about this and continue to write about this UH in

1028
00:58:42,120 --> 00:58:45,320
Speaker 1: order to inform the individuals who are in the position

1029
00:58:45,360 --> 00:58:49,000
Speaker 1: to make decisions about our use of treatment and preventative

1030
00:58:49,000 --> 00:58:52,400
Speaker 1: measures for for pain on the battlefield. In two thousand fifteen,

1031
00:58:52,920 --> 00:58:56,920
Speaker 1: Dave Shunk explored the idea in ethics and the Enhanced

1032
00:58:56,920 --> 00:59:00,800
Speaker 1: Soldier of the near Future for the Military Review and UH.

1033
00:59:01,120 --> 00:59:03,400
Speaker 1: He made the following points. He said that first of all,

1034
00:59:03,440 --> 00:59:09,680
Speaker 1: the soldier of the future likely will be enhanced through neuroscience, biotechnology, nanotechnology, genetics,

1035
00:59:09,680 --> 00:59:12,440
Speaker 1: and drugs. He said, they will perform more like a

1036
00:59:12,480 --> 00:59:15,120
Speaker 1: machine than a human. And he says that there's a

1037
00:59:15,160 --> 00:59:19,880
Speaker 1: basic ethical problem with using therapeutic drugs for performance performance enhancement,

1038
00:59:20,240 --> 00:59:23,120
Speaker 1: but we have to also worry about the quote unforeseen

1039
00:59:23,160 --> 00:59:27,080
Speaker 1: ethical challenges and the second and third order effects of

1040
00:59:27,120 --> 00:59:30,120
Speaker 1: such warfare. He says, what are the ethics of fighting

1041
00:59:30,120 --> 00:59:33,240
Speaker 1: an enemy enhanced soldier who does not feel pain? Will

1042
00:59:33,280 --> 00:59:35,760
Speaker 1: the only way to stop that soldier in battle be

1043
00:59:35,960 --> 00:59:38,800
Speaker 1: to cause severe trauma or death? Yeah, this is sort

1044
00:59:38,840 --> 00:59:41,120
Speaker 1: of what I was imagining. So imagine on the other

1045
00:59:41,160 --> 00:59:43,840
Speaker 1: side of the battle, there are people who are coming

1046
00:59:43,880 --> 00:59:48,479
Speaker 1: at you, and they are they're also soldiers on their side.

1047
00:59:48,520 --> 00:59:51,520
Speaker 1: They're just doing what they're commanded by their commanders, and

1048
00:59:51,560 --> 00:59:54,480
Speaker 1: they've been given, say, a version of this pain vaccine

1049
00:59:54,560 --> 00:59:57,160
Speaker 1: that the d s O is trying to create, and

1050
00:59:57,240 --> 01:00:02,040
Speaker 1: you basically can't stop them without aiming or killing them.

1051
01:00:02,080 --> 01:00:05,160
Speaker 1: And if the soldiers on your side have have equal

1052
01:00:05,320 --> 01:00:09,000
Speaker 1: types of enhancements, maybe you can't be stopped without being

1053
01:00:09,120 --> 01:00:12,080
Speaker 1: maimed or killed. Does this increase the body count on

1054
01:00:12,120 --> 01:00:15,440
Speaker 1: both sides? Yeah? Joe and greta bird in the two

1055
01:00:15,480 --> 01:00:18,760
Speaker 1: thousand five article Human Rights in the Military. The Chemical Soldier,

1056
01:00:18,760 --> 01:00:22,640
Speaker 1: which we referenced earlier. They they summarize this, this idea

1057
01:00:22,640 --> 01:00:26,480
Speaker 1: of this this fear quite nicely quote the context of

1058
01:00:26,560 --> 01:00:30,400
Speaker 1: twentieth century warfare is characterized by a movement to dehumanize

1059
01:00:30,400 --> 01:00:33,720
Speaker 1: the enemy. The enemy does not have a face. Military

1060
01:00:33,760 --> 01:00:37,160
Speaker 1: training tends to turn the other into non human and

1061
01:00:37,240 --> 01:00:40,560
Speaker 1: the self into the machine, in the sense that to

1062
01:00:40,600 --> 01:00:43,160
Speaker 1: be human is to have emotions of empathy, fear, and

1063
01:00:43,200 --> 01:00:48,200
Speaker 1: compassion and remorse. Both sides are dehumanized. And that that's

1064
01:00:48,200 --> 01:00:49,880
Speaker 1: what we keep coming back again and again and too

1065
01:00:49,920 --> 01:00:52,400
Speaker 1: again and again in this situation, is that you're not

1066
01:00:52,440 --> 01:00:58,919
Speaker 1: only dehumanizing the enemy, you're dehumanizing the military on your

1067
01:00:59,000 --> 01:01:02,640
Speaker 1: side as well. You're talking about making them less human

1068
01:01:02,880 --> 01:01:06,400
Speaker 1: to better aid them in this endeavor. Well, there are

1069
01:01:06,440 --> 01:01:10,120
Speaker 1: a lot of conventions of military behavior that are clearly

1070
01:01:10,640 --> 01:01:15,760
Speaker 1: premised on psychological d individual ation. Right, Why does the

1071
01:01:15,800 --> 01:01:19,080
Speaker 1: military all where matching uniforms. You can think, well, that's

1072
01:01:19,080 --> 01:01:22,200
Speaker 1: somewhat useful because you can see who's on your side

1073
01:01:22,240 --> 01:01:24,680
Speaker 1: if they've got the same uniform. But also when people

1074
01:01:24,680 --> 01:01:27,360
Speaker 1: put on uniforms, they start to act more like a

1075
01:01:27,480 --> 01:01:31,600
Speaker 1: team and less like an individual making individual decisions. You're

1076
01:01:31,600 --> 01:01:33,720
Speaker 1: more just sort of like a cog in the machine

1077
01:01:33,920 --> 01:01:37,160
Speaker 1: functioning smoothly. Now, that might be useful in getting some

1078
01:01:37,280 --> 01:01:40,400
Speaker 1: things done, but it also might remove some of your

1079
01:01:40,400 --> 01:01:44,000
Speaker 1: individual sense of judgment about what you should do. And this,

1080
01:01:44,080 --> 01:01:46,560
Speaker 1: of course isn't just like a recent discovery, like you know,

1081
01:01:47,000 --> 01:01:49,560
Speaker 1: these types of uniforms and things like this go way

1082
01:01:49,600 --> 01:01:52,680
Speaker 1: back into ancient history. How to go back to the

1083
01:01:53,720 --> 01:01:56,400
Speaker 1: writings of Joe and Greta Bird here they said remorse

1084
01:01:56,520 --> 01:02:00,800
Speaker 1: is regarded as a marker of the psychologically health the individual.

1085
01:02:01,200 --> 01:02:06,840
Speaker 1: The failure to experience this emotion is an indication of psychopathy.

1086
01:02:06,880 --> 01:02:10,800
Speaker 1: Even anti remorse drug is developed and administered, as soldiers

1087
01:02:10,800 --> 01:02:13,600
Speaker 1: sense of remorse could be chemically altered so that they

1088
01:02:13,640 --> 01:02:16,760
Speaker 1: could kill or rape civilians in the context of war

1089
01:02:16,880 --> 01:02:21,160
Speaker 1: without the guilt experience by healthy individuals. This chemical enhancement

1090
01:02:21,160 --> 01:02:25,560
Speaker 1: of soldiers would not affect the state's liability at international law,

1091
01:02:26,160 --> 01:02:29,280
Speaker 1: so which was again one of the primary ideas here

1092
01:02:29,280 --> 01:02:31,880
Speaker 1: because it was an alternative law journal. But but still

1093
01:02:31,920 --> 01:02:33,959
Speaker 1: I feel like they really hit a nerve you're talking

1094
01:02:34,000 --> 01:02:37,760
Speaker 1: about this, that the dehumanizing aspect of these this kind

1095
01:02:37,800 --> 01:02:41,680
Speaker 1: of scenario where you're creating a better soldier and but

1096
01:02:41,720 --> 01:02:44,320
Speaker 1: in doing so, you're creating a less human soldier. And

1097
01:02:44,360 --> 01:02:46,640
Speaker 1: then what does that do to war as a human

1098
01:02:46,720 --> 01:02:50,040
Speaker 1: enterprise as a whole. Well, yeah, it just makes me

1099
01:02:50,080 --> 01:02:54,400
Speaker 1: worry that. Obviously, the removal of chronic pain from a

1100
01:02:54,440 --> 01:02:57,360
Speaker 1: person who has returned to civilian life, that seems like

1101
01:02:57,400 --> 01:03:01,960
Speaker 1: definitely a good thing. Um. But then again, the removal

1102
01:03:02,080 --> 01:03:05,880
Speaker 1: of pain from war seems in every conceivable way to

1103
01:03:05,960 --> 01:03:08,920
Speaker 1: potentially make war worse, to mean more people would end

1104
01:03:09,000 --> 01:03:14,200
Speaker 1: up being killed, more questionable ethical situations would arise. It

1105
01:03:14,720 --> 01:03:18,960
Speaker 1: just seems like it. Uh, it is a lubricant on

1106
01:03:19,000 --> 01:03:22,440
Speaker 1: the process of war, and the process of war ultimately

1107
01:03:22,520 --> 01:03:25,440
Speaker 1: is not a good process. It's like a thing that

1108
01:03:25,520 --> 01:03:29,400
Speaker 1: you want to limit the extent of however possible. Right, Yeah,

1109
01:03:29,520 --> 01:03:32,160
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean, certainly there's a whole discussion here

1110
01:03:32,160 --> 01:03:35,480
Speaker 1: to be had about the use of drones at combat. Um.

1111
01:03:35,560 --> 01:03:38,680
Speaker 1: And I guess ideally, if you had drones battling drones

1112
01:03:39,360 --> 01:03:43,640
Speaker 1: without any human element involved, which is largely not what

1113
01:03:43,720 --> 01:03:45,960
Speaker 1: we see in the current state of drone warfare, it

1114
01:03:46,040 --> 01:03:49,600
Speaker 1: is generally drones versus humans humans. But if it were

1115
01:03:49,640 --> 01:03:51,520
Speaker 1: just drones against drones, and I guess you could say,

1116
01:03:51,520 --> 01:03:53,360
Speaker 1: all right, well, left, fewer humans are being hurt and

1117
01:03:53,360 --> 01:03:55,880
Speaker 1: it's all taking place at the robotic end. Like I

1118
01:03:55,880 --> 01:03:58,320
Speaker 1: think there's a classic episode of Star Trek that explored

1119
01:03:58,360 --> 01:04:02,000
Speaker 1: a similar scenario. Let me try to explore a counter scenario. What,

1120
01:04:02,280 --> 01:04:04,640
Speaker 1: because it seems to me that every time you make

1121
01:04:04,760 --> 01:04:09,680
Speaker 1: war easier, things somehow get worse without you imagining it.

1122
01:04:09,720 --> 01:04:12,520
Speaker 1: Like you can imagine the introduction of air power in

1123
01:04:12,560 --> 01:04:15,560
Speaker 1: some ways made war easier, so now you could inflict

1124
01:04:15,640 --> 01:04:19,480
Speaker 1: massive damage on the enemy by dropping bombs without having

1125
01:04:19,520 --> 01:04:23,160
Speaker 1: to like physically send soldiers into an area. And yet

1126
01:04:23,480 --> 01:04:25,760
Speaker 1: you know that might sound more humane, but actually it

1127
01:04:25,840 --> 01:04:28,640
Speaker 1: leads to more deaths in war over time, just because

1128
01:04:28,680 --> 01:04:31,840
Speaker 1: it's so much easier to inflict all that damage. So

1129
01:04:31,920 --> 01:04:34,000
Speaker 1: let's say we make it way, way, way easier and

1130
01:04:34,040 --> 01:04:36,280
Speaker 1: you don't even have to have human soldiers in battle.

1131
01:04:36,320 --> 01:04:39,120
Speaker 1: It is just your drones versus their drones. Well, I'm

1132
01:04:39,120 --> 01:04:42,120
Speaker 1: thinking even more so if you have robot versus robot warfare,

1133
01:04:42,240 --> 01:04:45,560
Speaker 1: then that would maybe lead to even more destruction of infrastructure,

1134
01:04:45,600 --> 01:04:48,720
Speaker 1: which has downstream effects on public health and on the

1135
01:04:48,760 --> 01:04:51,800
Speaker 1: ability of economies to produce the necessities of life and

1136
01:04:51,840 --> 01:04:54,640
Speaker 1: things like that. It seems like part of the problem

1137
01:04:54,920 --> 01:04:59,680
Speaker 1: is that war, that pain is a necessary part of war. Yeah.

1138
01:04:59,760 --> 01:05:01,920
Speaker 1: I mean you can think of in a way you

1139
01:05:02,000 --> 01:05:03,960
Speaker 1: have to think of war. Is this this sort of

1140
01:05:04,000 --> 01:05:08,160
Speaker 1: infection on the body of humanity, right, and it needs

1141
01:05:08,280 --> 01:05:11,400
Speaker 1: it hurts, and it needs to hurt because if there

1142
01:05:11,480 --> 01:05:14,600
Speaker 1: is too much of it, then it totally ravages the host. Uh.

1143
01:05:14,800 --> 01:05:17,160
Speaker 1: There there has to be a certain amount of pain

1144
01:05:17,200 --> 01:05:19,600
Speaker 1: associated with it, and a and a pain that is

1145
01:05:19,760 --> 01:05:23,840
Speaker 1: uh that is appreciated at at every level of society.

1146
01:05:24,280 --> 01:05:27,160
Speaker 1: I absolutely see that, and I think I agree with

1147
01:05:27,200 --> 01:05:28,960
Speaker 1: that in the abstract. But then again, if you come

1148
01:05:29,000 --> 01:05:32,880
Speaker 1: down to the individual level, an individual, certain soldier maybe

1149
01:05:32,920 --> 01:05:34,920
Speaker 1: hurting and they don't want to hurt anymore, and it's

1150
01:05:34,920 --> 01:05:38,800
Speaker 1: hard to argue with that. Yeah. So that's kind of

1151
01:05:38,840 --> 01:05:43,520
Speaker 1: the the conundrum that we're perpetually stuck with, right, how

1152
01:05:43,560 --> 01:05:47,160
Speaker 1: to how to help those that are that are damaged

1153
01:05:47,200 --> 01:05:50,440
Speaker 1: by war, how to prevent war, but also make sure

1154
01:05:50,480 --> 01:05:53,280
Speaker 1: that we're really good at it. Uh gosh, I mean

1155
01:05:53,400 --> 01:05:55,880
Speaker 1: it's all kind of entertangled too. When you get into

1156
01:05:56,480 --> 01:06:00,240
Speaker 1: the idea of of a military uh technology, you as

1157
01:06:00,280 --> 01:06:03,240
Speaker 1: a deterrent. But in all of this, and I realized

1158
01:06:03,240 --> 01:06:04,680
Speaker 1: that we cover a lot of ground in this episode.

1159
01:06:04,680 --> 01:06:06,360
Speaker 1: I feel like we keep coming back to the idea

1160
01:06:06,440 --> 01:06:08,680
Speaker 1: that to make a more perfect warrior, we kind of

1161
01:06:08,720 --> 01:06:10,840
Speaker 1: have to be willing to make a more damaged person.

1162
01:06:11,320 --> 01:06:13,600
Speaker 1: Because what sort of soldier outside of our sort of

1163
01:06:13,640 --> 01:06:17,160
Speaker 1: Captain America fantasies, can be pushed and pushed and pushed

1164
01:06:17,560 --> 01:06:21,880
Speaker 1: through the traumatic situations without either breaking or being prebroken.

1165
01:06:22,200 --> 01:06:23,919
Speaker 1: And it would seem we're talking about the best ways

1166
01:06:23,960 --> 01:06:26,040
Speaker 1: to create the sort of damaged person who can thrive

1167
01:06:26,080 --> 01:06:30,040
Speaker 1: in these environments. Uh, some sort of you know, bicameral warrior,

1168
01:06:30,200 --> 01:06:33,480
Speaker 1: a new age mermaid in to assail the walls of Troy.

1169
01:06:34,200 --> 01:06:37,200
Speaker 1: But if human consciousness has evolved, or if it is

1170
01:06:37,240 --> 01:06:42,200
Speaker 1: still evolving, then isn't it backwards to attempt to create

1171
01:06:42,280 --> 01:06:44,400
Speaker 1: such a being, to kind of create a more primitive

1172
01:06:44,400 --> 01:06:49,080
Speaker 1: mode of consciousness to thrive in this more primitive human endeavor. Yeah,

1173
01:06:49,120 --> 01:06:51,320
Speaker 1: it might sound kind of trite to say, but I

1174
01:06:51,360 --> 01:06:52,960
Speaker 1: guess I have to say it. I mean, it feels

1175
01:06:52,960 --> 01:06:56,960
Speaker 1: like this irony or this tension highlights the underlying in

1176
01:06:57,120 --> 01:07:00,360
Speaker 1: humanity of our projects of war. Now course, as we

1177
01:07:00,440 --> 01:07:03,439
Speaker 1: mentioned the other stage of this episode, one individual's pain

1178
01:07:03,520 --> 01:07:07,080
Speaker 1: is not directly comparable to another's uh and uh and

1179
01:07:07,240 --> 01:07:10,480
Speaker 1: and we do not have a lot of direct experience

1180
01:07:10,560 --> 01:07:13,040
Speaker 1: with warfare, right, we're looking at this from the outside.

1181
01:07:13,040 --> 01:07:14,920
Speaker 1: I mean, neither of us have ever been in combat.

1182
01:07:15,000 --> 01:07:17,400
Speaker 1: We've never been in the military. Uh and so we

1183
01:07:17,400 --> 01:07:20,080
Speaker 1: would definitely like to hear from our listeners out there

1184
01:07:20,160 --> 01:07:22,720
Speaker 1: who have been in combat, or who have been around combat,

1185
01:07:22,760 --> 01:07:25,960
Speaker 1: who have been in the military. I wonder what your

1186
01:07:26,080 --> 01:07:30,000
Speaker 1: experience of this has been like, if if you've felt

1187
01:07:30,160 --> 01:07:34,240
Speaker 1: this urge from the from the command structure to try

1188
01:07:34,240 --> 01:07:38,440
Speaker 1: to become this more painless robot or this less human

1189
01:07:38,480 --> 01:07:42,280
Speaker 1: type of creature in order to better achieve your your

1190
01:07:42,440 --> 01:07:45,680
Speaker 1: combat aims, and what was that like, How did that

1191
01:07:45,800 --> 01:07:48,560
Speaker 1: change how you felt about yourself as a person, or

1192
01:07:48,600 --> 01:07:50,720
Speaker 1: maybe I would be interested to hear if you didn't

1193
01:07:50,760 --> 01:07:52,600
Speaker 1: feel that way, if you never felt a pressure of

1194
01:07:52,640 --> 01:07:55,280
Speaker 1: that kind. Yeah, by all means, get in touch with us,

1195
01:07:55,320 --> 01:07:58,280
Speaker 1: and you can do so via a number of various

1196
01:07:58,320 --> 01:08:02,680
Speaker 1: social media options. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,

1197
01:08:02,800 --> 01:08:05,040
Speaker 1: and then also there is the homepage stuff to Blow

1198
01:08:05,040 --> 01:08:06,920
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com. That's what we'll find links out

1199
01:08:06,920 --> 01:08:09,320
Speaker 1: to all those accounts, as well as all of the

1200
01:08:09,360 --> 01:08:12,760
Speaker 1: episodes in various blog posts and what have you. Big

1201
01:08:12,760 --> 01:08:16,799
Speaker 1: shout out as always to our excellent producers Alex Williams

1202
01:08:16,800 --> 01:08:18,760
Speaker 1: and Tory Harrison. If you would like to get in

1203
01:08:18,800 --> 01:08:21,320
Speaker 1: touch with us directly via email to let us know

1204
01:08:21,400 --> 01:08:23,760
Speaker 1: your feedback on this episode or any other, or do

1205
01:08:23,960 --> 01:08:25,479
Speaker 1: let us know a topic you might like us to

1206
01:08:25,479 --> 01:08:28,600
Speaker 1: cover in the future, our email address is blow the

1207
01:08:28,760 --> 01:08:41,760
Speaker 1: mind at how stuff works dot com for more on

1208
01:08:41,880 --> 01:08:44,360
Speaker 1: this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff

1209
01:08:44,360 --> 01:09:04,600
Speaker 1: works dot com? Three three n proper par