Why Do Bad Things Hurt?

Unveiling Life’s Biggest Mystery

Arguments in philosophy are often ranked like heavyweights. The best are known as S-Tier. The Cosmological Argument asks why there is something rather than nothing. The Fine-Tuning Argument points to the delicate balance of physical constants.

But there is a quieter contender rising in philosophical circles: psychophysical harmony.

It doesn’t begin with the Big Bang.

It begins with your hand on a hot stove.

The Question Hiding in Plain Sight

Why does touching a hot stove hurt?

The standard answer is simple: Pain is a survival mechanism.

It teaches you to avoid damage. End of story.

But once you look closely, the story isn’t so straightforward.

If you’re a naturalist, someone who believes nature is all there is, you probably also accept what philosophers call the causal closure of physics: every physical event has a sufficient physical cause. Your hand withdraws because neurons fire. Those neurons fire because other neurons fire. The physics is complete.

So what is the feeling doing?

The Reflex That Doesn’t Need You

When you touch a flame, your spinal cord triggers a withdrawal reflex before you consciously feel pain. The survival action happens first. The feeling comes later. In other words, the physical system already does the job.

You could build a robot that retracts its arm from heat instantly. It would preserve itself perfectly. Would it need to suffer? No. It would just execute code.

So why aren’t we biological robots, perfectly functional yet without inner experience?

The Expensive Option

Here is where the puzzle deepens. At the physical level, a neuron firing for pain is no different from a neuron firing for vision. It’s just electrochemical activity, electricity buzzing through organic tissue. Physics does not label one pattern “agony” and another “blue”.

But from an engineering standpoint, building a rich inner sensation like Agony is expensive.

It requires:

• Dedicated neural pathways.
• Integration across multiple brain regions.
• A distinct subjective quality that feels intrinsically bad.

That’s a lot of biological overhead.

Evolution often reuses existing systems when it can. It tinkers. It repurposes. So why not choose a cheaper solution?

Instead of constructing a complex “pain matrix”, why not simply wire your damage sensors to your visual cortex? When your muscle fibres approach tearing, you see a vivid flash of electric blue.

No suffering. Just a signal.

You might object:

“Blue isn’t scary. That wouldn’t stop me”.

But that assumes the blue flash is neutral. It’s neutral only because that’s how you’re wired.

Evolution also shapes emotional responses. It could easily wire your fear centre, the amygdala, so that whenever that specific shade of blue appears, you feel overwhelming panic.

In that world:

The flash of that shade of blue would be terrifying. You would stop instantly. Survival would be preserved. Functionally, nothing is lost.

So why do we have agony rather than blue-plus-panic or any of countless other possible mappings? Physics doesn’t demand it. Evolution doesn’t require it – quite the reverse. 

Yet we have a world in which damage doesn’t just produce information, it produces felt badness.

The Harmony

Now zoom out.

• Fire burns, and burning feels bad.
• Rotten food harms, and it tastes foul.
• Nourishment sustains, and it tastes good.
• Rest restores, and it feels pleasant.

The outer structure of the world aligns with the inner structure of experience.

Philosophers call this psychophysical harmony, the striking fit between physical reality and subjective life.

Under naturalism, that fit is ultimately a brute fact.

Out of countless possible mind-body pairings — zombies, inverted worlds, blue-flash systems, pleasure-burn creatures — we happened to land on one where:

What is bad for us feels bad.

What is good for us feels good.

Not perfectly. Not without exceptions. But overwhelmingly.

And that mapping was not logically inevitable, far from it. It was a priori vanishingly unlikely.

The Alternative

If reality is grounded in a rational Mind, if consciousness is not an accident but fundamental, then this harmony is not surprising.

You would expect:

• Minds designed to track truth.
• Feelings aligned with value.
• Experience structured to mirror reality.

On that view, pain is not an evolutionary extravagance. It is what we should expect.

A Quiet but Unsettling Question

The argument from psychophysical harmony presses on something fundamental – that while naturalism can explain the wiring, it can’t explain why the wiring comes with an inner life that fits the world so elegantly.

So the next time you recoil from a flame, pause. Why does that feel like agony rather than any of a myriad of other sensations, or no sensation at all? Why does sweetness feel nourishing rather than corrosive? Why does your inner world so neatly map onto the outer one?

These are questions that do not begin in cosmology. They begin in your own body and mind.

And once you see the puzzle, it is surprisingly difficult to unsee.