dkornai

I would certainly agree with part of what you are saying. Especially the point that many important lessons are taught by pain [correct me if this is misinterpreting your comment]. Indeed, as a parent for example, if your goal is for your child to gain the capacity for self sufficiency, a certain amount of painful lessons that reflect the inherent properties of the world are necessary to achieve such a goal.

On the other hand, I do not agree with your framing of pain as being the main motivator [again, correct me if required]. In fact, a wide variety of systems in the brain are concerned with calculating and granting rewards. Perhaps pain... (read more)

Pain is the consequence of a perceived reduction in the probability that an agent will achieve its goals. 

In biological organisms, physical pain [say, in response to limb being removed] is an evolutionary consequence of the fact that organisms with the capacity to feel physical pain avoided situations where their long-term goals [e.g. locomotion to a favourable position with the limb] which required the subsystem generating pain were harmed.

This definition applies equally to mental pain [say, the pain felt when being expelled from a group of allies] which impedes long term goals.

This suggests that any system that possesses both a set of goals and the capacity to understand how events influence their probability... (read more)