[zyxley]

But that's assuming that unpleasantness per individual is a continuous function always distinguishable from normal human experience, rather than something like a line eventually rising from the discontinuous murky soup that contains all the constant minor annoyances of being human (itchy nose, wedgies, the feeling of the back of your tongue against the roof of your mouth, one shoe being a little tighter than the other, etc) that the brain is well-optimized to tune out and rapidly forget about after the fact.

[ikeboy]

Even if it's discontinuous, it still needs to grow incredibly slowly. The ratio of pain neurons that fire for a speck versus for torture over 50 years is nowhere near 3||3. You need a function that grows so slow that outweighs 3||3, which is damn near impossible for any plausible function.

[zyxley]

I care about impact on people, not neuronal activity, and the point I'm making is that there's a minimum below which the real impact on a given person, considered in aggregate with the impact of everything else that's a part of being human, is effectively nil.

[ikeboy]

So at some point you need to say that "person being hurt X" is fine, but "person being hurt X+ one speck" is not.