Is it even coherent to imagine pain as anything but avoidance behavior?

This is a tricky topic, not least because "pain science" is not exactly well-established. Just a few examples of the factors playing a role:

Physiological factors

• there are several thousand "pain signals" (AP from nociceptive fibres) arriving in your brain every minute. A pain response in form of the experience of pain depends more on the central processing of the signal than the signal itself.
• the signal is modulated on its origin and its way through several stimuli and chemicals which can amplify or nullify the signal.
• The more often I get pain signals from a given spot, the more sensitive my system responds to the next stimulus from there, both in terms of relaying and centrally processing.
• Pain signals are incomplete informations, ie. like in all things perception, the amount of actual information our brain gets compared to what it makes of it, is surprisingly small: Transferred pain happens because nociceptive fibres converge, eg. I can feel pain on my left upper chest and shoulder when having a heart stroke because the fibres from shoulder skin and heart arrive in a single nerve and the brain cannot discriminate the origin, second-guessing it based on experience. Same thing with projected pain, like when you bump your elbow and your fingers/hand hurt.

Psychological factors

• Pain is highly dependent on perceived danger for the bodily safety. That means when you lack sleep, are depressive, or are stressed, even when seeing a lot of red colour around you, you feel more pain (and your threshold for pain sensation is lowered).
• It also means that when you had a life-threatening experience linked to a similar experience, e.g. brush of a twig vs. venomous snake bite, you may feel pain like in a life-threatening injury....being brushed by a twig.
• The amount of threatening also is important for whether it is a fight, flight, or freeze response in our behaviour, where freeze is usually reserved for danger perceived as overbewring and not surmountable.
• As if that wasn't enough, we got those people who feel pleasure when in pain. Masochism is real.

What does that tell us?

That is (a part of) what we know. There is a lot we do not know. And that's only about the production, relay, and processing of the signal on a neurochemical level, which already is veeeery complicated and poorly understood in the grand scheme of things. Now, adding the layer of qualia on top of that is obviously a point where it is hard to make any definite statement beyond "It's complicated".

For reference, there's "Pain Explained Supercharged" by Butler and Moseley

Fun fact: the reason you shy away from painful stimuli on your hands and feet isn't the pain. It's because your flexors are reflexively activated in the extremity. The signal for the "avoidance behaviour" doesn't even reach the brain. Thus, I challenge the premise that the qualia of sensed pain is the same as an avoidance behaviour. In this case, they are different already on a neurological level..

You are entangling several issues

Not all pain is avoidable.

Not all pain is a worse outcome than the available alternatives.

Pain is a signal of risk of tissue damage. The response to it is a separate thing.

Some medications act on pain response rather than pain. So can self-hypnosis; if I can reclassify the pain as pressure I'm less compelled to do something about it.

I should have thought that the ubiquity of pain-avoidance behaviour would lead to the conclusion that pain is real. It is because it is real that pain is unpleasant, and we tend to avoid pain. Why is it incoherent to think that pain leads to pain-avoidance behaviour?

It is a wonder how you (and others) reach the conclusion that pain is nothing but pain-avoidance behaviour. Does it not amount to saying that pain-avoidance behaviour is caused by pain-avoidance behaviour?

The only reason I can see for such arguments is the unwillingness to accept first-person reports as reliable. This is problem with the standards you adhere to like certain idea of 'objectivity'. Those standards and ideas were invented for building a science of nature, for clearing the ground for mathematical physics. You want to apply the same standards to know the 'knower' who invented physics.

Is it even coherent to imagine pain as anything but avoidance behavior?

Yes, it is coherent.

Pain is a signal. Obviously (from witnessing reality) people start out being pretty much controlled by this signal - i.e., if healthy babies suffer pain, they will cry, and as every parent knows it is incredibly hard to make that stop.

Funnily, the way to make it stop is often not to directly make the pain go away. Babies usually cannot tell us where the pain sits or what it is; but certain parental behaviour (making certain sounds; holding them closely etc.) often makes the crying stop.

So this shows you that pain is one signal, parental behaviours are different signals, and all of that comes together in the baby's brain to create or stop the crying behaviour. And obviously crying can also happen due to many other reasons.

Over time, many people learn to not cry when suffering pain as part of growing up. There are many techniques for that, from peer pressure to just "deciding" not to cry, to meditation. So this tells us that pain is also subject to our brains consciously stopping it from making us cry. Some people even can control further reactions; i.e. the spontaneous quick yell in the very moment when a sharp pain first occurs, or other normally unconscious reactions (heavy breathing etc.).

And as you noticed, people even actively seek out pain. For example, "bro" weightlifters will use the (old-fashioned, not based on modern sports science) "no pain, no gain" meme to push themselves to the limit. People will think (again, science has rebutted this but no matter...) that if they have DOMS, then yesterday's sport activity was effective. People doing mobility/flexibility training will assume (you guessed it, probably not correctly) that if a stretch really really hurts it is effective. People of a certain character and/or age will for sure actively seek out this kind of pain.

I'll leave other, maybe more pathological, behaviors related to pain out of this topic as it's not needed (i.e., self-inflicted damage, amputee phantom pain, masochism, "learned" pain, pain as tests of courage, etc.).

To make a very long story short: pain is not avoidance behavior, it is just a signal to our brain, like all the other signals. The brain then combines it with however million other inputs and may or may not create the avoidance behavior. This seems to be a very coherent image of reality to me.

Pain, what it is, is difficult to tell but it belongs to the same class of things as sexual arousal, anger, happiness etc.

I am a serious pursuant of Spirituality and "bearing" pain is a way to be able to "bear" this "World". That's why you'd see sages sitting near fire in summers or sitting on nails and what not. Once you learn to bear these extreme sensations then getting over world, or MAYA is not that difficult.

In 2022 I underwent liver transplant and post op I didn't take pain killers. I wanted to study pain and I thought no better place and opportunity to do that with world class medical assistance available immediately. So ya I studied pain that's why it is difficult to tell what it is but it is in the same class of things as pleasure.

There are reasons to abstain from pleasure as well. Very high level, if you get over sexual pleasure, you'll get over fear of death.

So yes there are people who consciously practice such things myself being one of them.

But of course normally ALL Life Forms prefer comfort and avoid pain. Qualia, I don't understand exactly what it means but it is a experience borne out of being it. Everything you experience, you experience by being it. Be it "redness", be it "taste", anger, happiness, YOU BECOME IT. YOU EXPERIENCE ANYTHING BY BECOMING IT because WE CAN EXPERIENCE ONLY OURSELVES AND ALL THE MEANINGS ARE MADE IN US AND MADE OF US...

Weirdly, this question leads me straight to a conversation I would normally have over on the Buddhism stack. I'm not sure how it will land here, where people may not understand those practices, but waddayagonnado…?

At any rate, pain is a signal that something physical needs attending to. We have certain built-in autonomic reactions – e.g., if we stick a finger in a flame we will jerk the finger back even before we consciously acknowledge that we feel pain — but those 'knee-jerk' autonomic responses are few and limited. For the most part, pain has the same valence as an alert from a smart phone: something's occurring, and maybe it calls for a response.

One of the first things people experience when they begin meditation practice is aches and pains: a crick in the neck, a sore back, a stiff knee, maybe some hunger pangs or more generalized angsts and anxieties that arise from unaccustomed inactivity, etc. And one of the first (and ongoing) things meditators have to learn is to distinguish between pains that need to be acted upon immediately and pains that don't. If a meditator has an itch, or a toe cramp, or a sudden and intense craving for a meatball sub, that's fine — that's what's happening in real time — but part of the practice is to set those aside as mere 'alerts' and get on with the meditation. It's not going to harm us if we don't attend to those pains right now.

Few people pursue pain as an end in itself; some (but still few) people actively avoid pleasure. These behaviors (when they occur) are generally perceived by everyone (including the person involved) to be dysfunctional. But almost everyone learns early on (and by early I mean before their 6th year) that it is useful and functional to ignore certain pains and ignore certain pleasures for broader, more long-term reasons and purposes. Adults who do not effectively learn to regulate their pleasures and pains collapse into a kind of animalism that risks institutionalization or incarceration, where society will regulate for them wha they cannot regulate for themselves.

In other words, it's not merely coherent to imagine someone being in pain but not avoiding it; that capacity is a necessary regulative aspect of human social existence. Unless you want to live in a society where people urinate or defecate the moment they feel any discomfort in their bowels, no matter where they happen to be sitting or standing, you might want to accede to this point.

Again, we have an ulterior motive here in nonsensical arguments for dualism. And - oh, wonder! - it's the Designer who is once again peeping out from behind the philosophical curtains and smokescreens: Cutter is trying to boost theism. After introducing a "normative harmony", noticing how "puzzling" it is that there is a "pyschophysical harmony":

Psychophysical harmony consists in the fact that experiences are correlated with physical states and with one another in strikingly fortunate ways. One kind of psychophysical harmony is what Pautz calls normative harmony, which occurs when the descriptive role of experience is harmoniously aligned with its normative role. The most straightforward examples involve affectively valenced experiences like pain and pleasure. The descriptive role of pain includes the fact that it is typically associated with withdrawal from the pain-causing stimulus, avoidance of similar stimuli in the future, etc. This behavior tends to lead to the elimination or reduction of pain when we have it and the avoidance of pain in the future. Pain also has a normative role: it is non-instrumentally bad; it is an experience we have reason to avoid and to eliminate/reduce when we have it. The two roles are nicely aligned.

After this, the screw turns out to turn on this:

Evolution can’t explain normative harmony. Evolution can explain why we have a brain state that selectively responds to bodily damage and causes withdrawal, avoidance behavior, and the like. (...)

Normative harmony seems very lucky. It seems to cry out for explanation. It doesn’t seem to admit of an evolutionary explanation, and in the paper we argue that other naturalism-friendly explanations fail.

The whole concept of "psychophysical harmony" makes about as much sense as my grandmother's sincere belief that the Good Lord had written the letters "M" and "W" in every human's hands to signify the command "Mens Werk!" (that's Dutch for: "Human (do your) Work!"). Isn't it puzzling that God decided to speak Dutch and write those letters in everyone's hands? I am indeed quite sure that there is no biological, evolutionary explanation for that. Ergo: God did it.

Is it worthwhile to spend any time trying to refute those kind of sophistries, trying to show how the mere framing of a question can obscure actual questions and can trigger bogus answers? Or are Cutter and Crummett perhaps merely trolling the academic community -- it definitely seems they have studied all the relevant literature, so perhaps they are merely trying to kick up some dust? Anyway, if so, it seems they partially succeeded since one person here referenced them, in apparent confusion about their "puzzling" observations.

Cutter and Crummett (whose names remind me of the law offices of "Dewey, Cheethem and Howe") seem to base most of their argument on the (initially trivial) distinction between experience (PAIN) and behavior (you withdraw your hand from the hot stove). They focus on the fact that the link between those two facts is not "necessary" but "contingent". That is, if the nexus between them is empirical, it cannot, apparently be "necessary", it cannot be a metaphysical necessity, so it must be contingent. And if so, then it would be "conceivable" to have a world in which creatures would experience pain but would not by (contingent empirical) psychophysiological laws be caused to avoid the pain.

This whole argument is a tangle of sophistries. It makes no sense to apply the distinction of "contingent" versus "necessary" to the link between experience and behavior in this case. If what-makes-something-count-as-PAIN already includes, by virtue of semantics, being-aversive, then we cannot identify two clearly separate relata (the pain on the one hand and the behavior on the other) that would be "contingently" linked. We cannot "conceive" of pain that is not aversive, not because pain is "necessarily" aversive, but simply because that would not count as pain. (Note also the simple fact: We do not need to learn to feel pain. And certain behaviors and physical reactions are built-in; we're not infinitely flexible or adaptive.)

The counter that some pains may be sought out, or that there is masochism does not refute this. Actual pain comes in all kinds of different forms, with different degrees and different layers. We're not talking here about various complex and ambiguous feelings; we're only talking about physical pain. It's possible to alleviate some pains by focusing hard on the pain itself - so the experiences may be psychologically paradoxical. Hypnosis or self-hypnosis can also change the experience. But none of this changes the basic, initial meaning.