Pain and Level-Jumping...

Submitted by admin on Sat, 10/04/2008 - 16:59.

What is a pain? If you read a philosophy of mind text from the 60's or the 00's, you are likely to run into a frighteningly similar treatment of the topic in both. Though I would be more inclined to ascribe this unfortunate state of affairs to the stubborn and dogmatic apologists, that unfortunate class which seems to infect most disciplines and who form some sort of homo-lipid barrier to progress; let's take a look at what might be happening here.

To explain is not always to explain away. If physiologists claim something on the order of "Pain is just the nervous system process characterized by nocioceptive activity and appropriate efferent reflexive bodily response characterized by avoidance or withdrawal." what are we to make of this? It seems clear to the Folk Philosopher that this is more accurate "Pain is an unpleasant sensation. It's my subjective experience of something that hurts." or something like that. Can "pain" be, at once, a physiological reaction and a subjective feeling of "something that hurts"? Well, it all depends on what you mean by subjective experience. If you define the experience of pain as "c-fiber firings", then it is analytically convincing that pain is indeed c-fiber firings. But we don't want something that is true by definition. Those of us who find it unconvincing for a Folk to say "Pain is what hurts", should not be satisfied by "Pain is c-fiber firings" either. Admittedly these are not equivalent positions, and the latter does have advantages in scientific precision, objective verifiability, that sort of thing. However, the former also has advantages, in behavioral prediction, ethical force, intersubjective linguistic information transfer, etc.

What if, insead, we concentrated on maintaining distinctions between our levels of description and claim that "Pain cannot be explained physiologically, because pain is a subjective experience and subjects do not exist on the physiological level of neuron firings."? Would this get us anywhere, at least in the direction of satisfaction? We could perhaps discover that there is a near-perfect correlation between nocioceptive activity and personal reports of, or behavioristic responses indicating, that a subject is in pain. Even if this were a 1 to 1 correspondence; would this mean that "Pain IS nocioception"?

To what extent does this analogy express similarity, "Beauty is Marlyn Monroe." Could it be that we have shifted both terms "up" a level? Whereas before we had a sub-personal physiological happening (nocioceptor firings) and a unified subject, whereas in this analogy we have moved up to a supra-personal concept (beauty) and a unified subject (Monroe). I am inclined to say that "beauty" doesn't exist on the level of persons in the same way that "pain" doesn't exist on the level of neurons. "Beauty" might be more usefully interpreted as the process of interpretation of the information conveyed by the physical form of Monroe, by a subject which then elicits an internal experience which could later be verbally expressed as "Marilyn Monroe is Beautiful". Pain is in the mind of the beholder?

What happens if we flip the terms in our original question, is it more accurate to say "C-fiber firings are pain"? Pain seems better defined as "The subjective interpretation of the information conveyed by the firing of c-fibers which then leads the subject to express (verbally or otherwise) an action which claims 'I am in pain'", rather than the simplistic, and somehow empty, "Pain is nocioception".