I'm finding this particular example of the "conceivability argument" failing at the first hurdle: I'm struggling to actually conceive of the circumstance.
"So, gently pinch yourself, perhaps the inside of your leg or the underside of your arm."
Fine - but when I do, that pain is localised. It isn't some kind of generic or 'non-localised' pain - it is a pain in my arm, or my leg. Those I can both conceive of, and remember. I can remember some quite severe pain: broken bones, toothache, root-canal (without anaesthetic, BTW, but that's a long story) etc. Such pain (and pains) I find it all too easy to conceive of, as being local to my wrist, my tooth and jaw, or wherever. Generic, abstract (if you like), non-localised pain - not so much.
Perhaps that's a personal limitation of mine. I don't know. I certainly wouldn't insist on "argument from personal incredulity" as being in any way compelling.
I can easily imagine the opposite, though: I've read of people who have suffered serious injury experiencing 'localised' pain from limbs they've had amputated, so the 'locality' of the pain does not, in fact, exist - though the pain is experienced as if it did. I can not only conceive of that (I'm lucky I've not experienced it) - I can imagine plausible mechanisms which would explain such experiences. But that counts against, not for, the 'conceivability' of this thought experiment. At least for me.
The closest I can get is the old Monty Python line "Doctor, my brain hurts!" ("It'll have to come out, then.") But that's a joke, not something I can genuinely conceive of or properly imagine.
> We might say that we can imagine water without H₂O. But, of course, water without H₂O is impossible — water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, so it cannot be without it.
Pain is a signal that is created and transmitted by the nervous system. Pain cannot exist without the nervous system any more than water can exist without H₂O. It's inconceivable.
And the nervous system can’t exist a body, a body without a planet, and a planet without a universe. So the only world we can imagine is the one that actually exists.
So many of these theories related to mind stuff seem to presuppose that there is a separate, immaterial mind. If you assume physicalism (physical brain plus CNS), many of those theories — even just the description of them — don't make sense.
I am stuck at P2. Probably I don’t have a precise enough definition of “conceive”. In my understanding I can conceive of something but then find out it is not possible. For instance when learning about the axiom of choice C and some other formulation F that is equivalent to it and before knowing about their equivalence I could totally conceive of a set theory where C held and F did not. But that was later revealed impossible since F=C. So the fact that something is conceivable per se does not prove much about its possibility. Maybe we should go for some stricter requirement than mere (psychological?) conceivability?
Now I wonder if in my example the axiom of choice has “hidden essences”. What does that even mean? Also we know that something has hidden essences only after we find out. Before knowing (and how reliable is that knowledge, by the way?) that water has the hidden essence of being H2O one might as well have thought that the sight of water or the feeling of wetness are elementary building blocks of experience, pretty much like pain. Which they still are in a way, unless someone is doing chemistry.
The argument given is that pain (and other subjective experiences) don't have a hidden essence. The argument goes, the only way we know pain is by experiencing it -- no amount of empirical evidence is going to tell us what pain 'feels' like, so therefore the feeling of pain has no hidden essence.
On your first comment, yes, it is P2 that is most controversial. Whether or not conceivability implies possibility is highly contentious. I'm with you -- I don't see how conceivability alone can say much about possibility. But some very smart people believe otherwise.
I had your same concern. A comment on Suzi’s initial conceivability article, possibly by Terry, made the distinction between conceiving and imagining. We can imagine the impossible but can’t conceive the impossible, at least if we want conceivability to do any philosophical work.
Excellent job as disambiguating "is"! I'll have to remember it next time someone says A is B. Ambiguous language is the bane of philosophical discussions!
My take on conceivability is it only legitimately implies conceivability. So if X is conceivable, and X implies Y, then Y is conceivable, but nothing more.
Overall, I think Gertler is just assuming there's nothing new to learn about pain, or at least nothing relevant. To your points, I don't see how we can ever be confident in that assumption, particularly when it leads to major conclusions about reality. So even if I bought her arguments about the efficacy of conceivability, I'd be skeptical of this particular one.
That said, for disembodied pain, there are medical cases that impinge on this. There is phantom limb pain, which implies that if the brain has a schema of a body part, that's enough to feel pain for it. That's probably not the conception Gertler is trying to invoke, but it does get at the intuition that pain can only be felt through a body part. I also know someone who once had phantom pain related to an opioid addiction. Of course, in both cases, there was a history of feeling from a body part, so someone could argue that the body is still necessary. But it seems like what's really necessary for pain in the moment is that the brain have a schema of the body.
I like that -- conceivability only legitimately implies conceivability.
Some of the strange body phenomena such as phantom limb pain show how complex pain really is. That's interesting about your friend with phantom pain and opioid addiction. There's some interesting work currently being done on the relationship between phantom limb pain and chronic pain -- I wonder whether there's a similar mechanism that underlies all three -- phantom limb pain, chronic pain, and drug induced pain. The article on phantom limb pain is in the works!
Amateur take: I wonder if it's recurrent connections between brain regions. If a region is initially excited by a nociceptive signal, it excites other regions, leading to pain and other emotional states. But if those emotional states are triggered from some other source (such as addiction withdrawal), maybe they can in turn excite the region originally excited by the nociceptive signal, but this time without that signal. To the person, the experiences are indistinguishable and equally awful.
Of course, I'm being pretty hand wavy. I fully realize the hard part is figuring out which regions, which may vary with every different type of pain, and how to test the activity.
I like your theory! I think you're onto something with the recurrent connections between areas. Emotional states can mess with pain signals, even without an actual physical trigger. The brain is crazy complicated, though. There are almost certainly mechanisms involved that we haven't discovered yet. We've learned a lot, but we still don't have a complete answer about pain yet -- let alone phantom pain. It seems that the idea that pain involves regions interacting with each other is almost certainly true, but, as you point out, figuring out exactly which brain bits are involved and how to study all of it, is complex.
I don’t have to imagine pain. Because of spinal stenosis involving the right nerve root of my sciatic nerve. So I have had non-stop plantar fasciitis in both feet for the past several years. Other lower leg pains come and go according to the whims of my embodied brain. I can conceive of boxing up all these nerve signals and shipping them off to Siberia. It’s not going to happen. I wish I could define it away or compose it differently. It’s real, it’s in my lower legs and feet, and it could not happen without the stenosis. That’s hidden stuff like H2O.
I'm so sorry to hear about your struggle, Terry. Living with chronic pain must be incredibly challenging. One thing that struck me about your comment was when you said, 'It's real'. This just breaks my heart. For too long, chronic pain like yours has been dismissed or minimised. People have been told 'it's all in your head', as if that somehow makes it invalid or insignificant. In the words of Dumbledore: "Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"
It’s not so bad, Suzi. I’m lucky because I shouldn’t get worse. In fact, it’s gotten a little better over time. It’s critical that I keep my back strong so the column is well protected in the event of a fall or misstep. The right sciatic nerve root has been squeezed to a thin filament and could be broken. When I saw the MRI I was shocked, but at least I understood what was happening. My physical therapists have been invaluable. Thank you for your concern.
I'm happy to hear that it's gotten better over time -- that must be a relief. Your optimism is inspiring.
It makes sense that the MRI results would have been helpful with understanding the pain. For a few months after my bike accident I had sciatic nerve pain from a fractured disk. It was nothing like being squeezed to a thin filament -- I can't even imagine what that would feel like -- but I do remember the relief that came with knowing what caused the pain.
But her argument references many concepts besides pain: embodiment, identity, conceivability, experience, particularity, etc. What are the odds that they’re all sufficiently comprehensive?
That said, I think that if you peel back a few layers there’s a simple argument in the offing that doesn’t just collapse under scrutiny:
Would this work if you were to substitute “pain” with “sound”? I believe it would, perhaps proving that sound as the object of perception is at least as non-physical as pain. On the other hand sound-the-object-of-perception has a physical correlate, that is sound-as-pressure-wave. Is pain special here?
Possibly. It depends on whether sound has a hidden essence or whether, like pain, it wears its essence on its sleeve.
But the truly funny part is that, if you take this argument to its logical conclusion, you end up with the idea that all physical things must have a non-physical essence. So there's nothing special about pain or sound.
I am afraid the concept of hidden essence is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the conceivability argument. It’s not unlikely that you could sketch a proof of the existence of God with the conceivability argument and a vague enough notion of hidden essences. And maybe one of the non-existence too.
Ah, but the conceivability argument starts from the assumption that it's possible to 'conceive' anything while in an disembodied state. But won't there always be a certain physical substrate for consciousness, which (conceivably ;)) at certain levels of complexity, comes with a damage warning system (subjectively, perhaps pain)?
Thank you for introducing me to Gertler. I grabbed her paper for reading later.
My answer to your last question is "very little". Our conceptual reach far exceeds our physical grasp. Language allows us to make fantastical statements with no connection to reality as we experience it. A funny old song begins, "It rained all night the day I left, the weather it was fine..." It continues with delightful logical nonsense. I have enough constructionist leanings to distrust conceivability arguments.
A question I have: Could the visible properties of water, that it's a liquid, that it can freeze or boil, that it makes things wet, comprise a sufficient concept, at least for arguments that don't depend on its chemical nature?
In the Disembodied Pain logic, P3 confuses me. Is it suggesting feeling the pain without the nervous system signal into the brain? Or just without the pinch itself? In the latter case, those who feel phantom pain because of some twitch in their CNS would seem an example, so I guess Gertler means the former? How would remembering or imagining pain fit into this?
How any discussion of pain without body could fail to include phantom limb syndrome is a mystery to me, and I'll also point out that technology has both discovered and created artificial nociceptors that create pain (as a danger signal, apart from other sensations, to the central nervous system) in robots. But secondly, the conceivability argument seems so specious as to necessitate a question of ulterior motives. Who makes money or gains prestige if people keep paying it respectful attention? To me that's the real question emerging here.
A clue to resolving the mystery might be found in the last sentence of Suzi’s article. Waiting for the next instalment in a series is always a special kind of pain.
I’m guessing you’re aware of nociceptors natural and artificial. My hearing about nociceptors surprised me because it differentiates between pain and other sensations, and of course in the case of robots puts the question of what pain is front and center. I think an evaluation of whether robot pain is in any way equivalent to human or animal pain is going to prove unknowable.
Robot pain versus biological pain is interesting. Sounds like you've been keeping up on the latest in this field.
I think the question is whether nociceptors alone are responsible for the feeling of pain, or whether there's more to the story than certain types of receptor neurons.
The people who believe that they may one day be able to upload their mind to a computer and live for an indefinite amount of time had better hope that there is no such thing as disembodied pain. For how do you move away from pain if you have no body?
Suzi another great article and deep dive into multiple concepts simultaneously. First off—thank you again for your work and vehicle for ‘thoughtful’ (thought filled) discussion.
A few comments—these last three articles all seem to come from a physicalist perspective (even bias perhaps). Going into the details might be too long for a comment. Let’s just say we could consider conceivability has substance with or without possibility—the conceivability being substantial on its own. Possibility being a physicalist test and standard to judge—even limit (?)—instances of conceivability. Conceivability does not require possibility to be substantial—the concept is the substance.
Your discussion on ‘is’—uses and meanings—appears conventional and my intuition tells me there is something missing (but I can’t quite get my thoughts around this yet—I’ll come back if I do). It recalled for me the first time many of us had considered different meanings of ‘is’. This was in the late ‘90’s during our U.S. president’s testimony to congress: august 17, 1998 to be exact when our president tried to justify his lying under oath to congress by saying (when asked if the correction to his false testimony which pointed out his deception—“is that correct?”) “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”. Common sense usage having existed in the USA without challenge before this moment—i.e. all minds in this culture were assumed to be aligned on the understanding of ‘is’ before this moment. Like an understanding of water and its properties before the knowledge of H2O. Water is conceivable without an understanding of the components—the conceivability having substance based on the tangibility of the material. So can the intangible have substance based on conceivability? For most of us water as H2O is intangible—I’ve (like most people probably) never taken two scoops of hydrogen and mixed it with a scoop of oxygen but I take this concept of water as H2O to be factual—to have a tangible basis even though the concept is intangible. The structure of the concept (intangible) just makes sense on its own.
This brings us to the concept of ‘pain’. You start with a physicalist exploration into pain sensations. Is this the total definition of pain? When a doctor points to the chart on the wall and asks, “1 to 10 how do you rate your level of pain?” I always laugh—compared to what? Unfortunately I’ve encountered so much pain that I have a personal definition of pain—yes it’s very idiosyncratic.
Level one is pain as frustration and discomfort—it’s what we typically mean when asked to rate pain and it’s temporary (feeling and emotion combined). Medication can eliminate this issue and is a panacea—a cure all.
Level two is pain as sensation and anguish/distress—it is what we experience from sharp pain to completely debilitating pain and it is typically sustained (sensation/feeling which overwhelms us and our other senses/abilities. I recall experiencing this when having kidney stones, post surgery from an emergency appendectomy, or when I slipped a disc in my back. It was impossible to walk and getting hard to breathe at the peak of pain—though it had nothing to do with gross motor function these were disrupted by my neurology being overwhelmed by a single event which radiated out to other physiologies. Here medication helps to minimize the sensation and radiating so only the location is affected. This pain is temporary to persistent as the source is durable, or not.
Level three pain is rarely experienced—most people live their entire lives without ever experiencing this (and I wish this on no one). This is difficult to describe but I will call it pain as torment (by this I mean not just sustained pain but depth, breadth, and intensity), pain as decomposing and digesting physical and dislodging (dislocating) your being from your body. I recall experiencing this when I had a virus which was demyelinating my nervous system. I could feel being digested from the inside while the structure of my feeling system was being destroyed—this was way beyond ‘pain’ and the most potent medicine had little effect but lubricated the dislodging of my being from my body. Here the pain / the torture became a wicked companion pushing me out of my own body and mind—my own physicality. On this scale kidney stones and a herniated disc became a 1 (or less) out of 10–just simple physical anguish/distress. If fact it became clear there was no upper limit to this level three and was quickly leading to separation of me (my being ) and my body which would end in physical death. The strongest pain medication seemed to be facilitating this separation and I became acutely aware of the threshold where my body/mind and its torment existed and where I was—disconnected and no longer in the midst of my own body/mind. The tangible and intangible colliding and severing simultaneously. So here meditation is incompetent and the pain is a permanent companion—even when the sensation is minimized, dissipating, or gone the impact is never undone—the margin between the tangible and intangible becomes defined and broader. (As a side note, it’s clear to me that mind and memory does not just exist in our heads. Eventually I was able to move my arms, walk and talk again by recovering/reconnecting the mind in my limbs with the mind in my head as the viral disease and demyelination very slowly subsided over many years. Then I was able to rebuild the connection between me and my body/brain to gain motor control/skills—skills which we normally develop simultaneously as our brain/neurology develops so we think they are synonymous with our being. This recovery process was itself very painful on many levels—sometimes/always L1: frustrating with great discomfort; sometimes/typically L2: anguishing and debilitating; and often (almost always) L3: decomposing and dislocating (one step very tentatively forward, six steps overwhelmingly backward)). I suspect there may even be a threshold of pain beyond this level 3—a level 4—but I suspect this is beyond physical existence because level 3 presses towards a permanent separation of being and body/mind (intangible and tangible) so this level 4 state would be beyond physical death, beyond tangible existence. It’s a horrific idea.
My point—if we limit pain to physical sensation we have already created a physicalist definition of pain which is very limited and doesn’t encompass the totally of ‘pain’. Though lacking experience in level 3 (and again I wish this reality, this experience on no one) would lead someone to consider this is correct just as much as believing water is just H2O. Both are conceptually correct but are also incomplete.
I'm so sorry to hear this Dean. Your description of the third level is harrowing, but also eye-opening. Your point about the incompleteness of our understanding is well taken. As you say, most of us are fortunate never to encounter such experiences.
You describe this pain mostly in the past tense, so I do hope this is something you no longer suffer from. But it's clear that the impact of what you've been through doesn't ever go away.
Thank you. And yes, for the moment this is past tense—to look at me today I don’t think it’s noticeable.
I’ve had people with metastatic cancer (or people near to them as they saw their loved one come to the end of their lives) describe something similar as their bodies were overwhelmed and they became ‘out of their mind’ with pain. So the experience is rare (hopefully) but not unique.
Point is—Your continued work Suzi is very valuable.
In short, philosophizing is thinking that must not only explore cause-and-effect relationships but also involve contemplation, so the details can be grasped intuitively.
It is like someone contemplating the sweetness of honey or the sensation of pain, rather than merely thinking about the sweetness of honey or the experience of pain.
Although both "thinking & contemplating" provide an understanding of a cause-and-effect relationship, thinking brings our perception to something to be contemplated. It's like the vehicle of thought tracing a map to ensure the truth of the relationship between one point (word) and another point (the next word), which is further followed by contemplating the "something" that lies in the meaning of the final point.
It’s like someone who seeks to confirm the truth of a statement by verifying the causal relationships between its components (the meaning of the words). Whereas contemplating is the attempt to observe each point along the journey to ensure its details, whether there is a pharmacy, its shape, or other characteristics of each point (the meaning of the object) of the cause-and-effect that is passed until the final point. Through contemplation, one gains a more detailed experience of the nuances of a statement.
The consequence of contemplation throughout the path of tracing cause-and-effect via the vehicle of thought will provide broader knowledge so that the map of the thought journey may shift toward something more relevant.
Thus, contemplation must accompany the process of thinking to broaden insight and avoid misdirection that was previously considered true, allowing the truth or falsity of something to be understood long before it is acknowledged.
This process of contemplation signifies an effort to understand the map of cause-and-effect relationships more realistically.
Therefore, contemplation is necessary to ensure the process of thinking represents reality more accurately (in more detail – more realistically).
Before arriving at a more profound understanding of "armchair philosophy," the concept of "thinking" and the need for "contemplation" has been sufficiently clarified as synergizing to form a more realistic philosophical approach.
However, the realistic dimension still needs further understanding.
Rationality & Realism
Tracing cause-and-effect relationships through mere thought is only rational (which is not necessarily realistic). For example, "a straight line is the shortest distance between two points," but it is not realistic because the shortest distance between two valleys might have a non-straight contour.
Contemplation brings our observations closer to reality, revealing a more accurate state (more realistic).
However, contemplation is not a guarantee of fully uncovering reality. Why? Because contemplation merely stimulates our memory of forgotten details.
The Forgotten Reality
The foundation of contemplation to obtain details closer to realism also requires empirical evidence. Without empirical evidence, contemplation cannot reveal the forgotten realistic aspects.
METAPHYSICS - Intuition
Yet, contemplation not only reveals forgotten or unnoticed details but, through focused contemplation, can "download" (inspire) internal knowledge relevant to the object being contemplated.
However, the results of contemplation must be empirically tested. At the very least, the concept should be a logical consequence that does not contradict the thought process.
Testing the inspiration from contemplation empirically does not necessarily mean involving concrete objects, but rather by seeing the logical consequence's connection to empirical evidence.
Absolute Truth
Armchair philosophy should lead to absolute truth. Why?
"The number of a whole is equal to the sum of its parts." This is an absolute universal truth.
So how can we, who experience life in a limited way, understand the farthest corners of the universe to comprehend universal truth? This is because our limited perception (like a CCTV) serves as the initial data to connect with broader internal intuitive data, which is relevant to the initial data, thus expanding the initial limited data to something more vast or even universal.
Something cannot surpass itself unless it receives something from outside itself | From one cup of tea, you cannot pour a gallon of tea unless it gets more tea from outside the cup.
The essence is that it is impossible for our limited experience to comprehend universal truth unless there is an addition (completion) through another truth beyond sensory perception (i.e., receiving additional information from within – intuitively).
I'm finding this particular example of the "conceivability argument" failing at the first hurdle: I'm struggling to actually conceive of the circumstance.
"So, gently pinch yourself, perhaps the inside of your leg or the underside of your arm."
Fine - but when I do, that pain is localised. It isn't some kind of generic or 'non-localised' pain - it is a pain in my arm, or my leg. Those I can both conceive of, and remember. I can remember some quite severe pain: broken bones, toothache, root-canal (without anaesthetic, BTW, but that's a long story) etc. Such pain (and pains) I find it all too easy to conceive of, as being local to my wrist, my tooth and jaw, or wherever. Generic, abstract (if you like), non-localised pain - not so much.
Perhaps that's a personal limitation of mine. I don't know. I certainly wouldn't insist on "argument from personal incredulity" as being in any way compelling.
I can easily imagine the opposite, though: I've read of people who have suffered serious injury experiencing 'localised' pain from limbs they've had amputated, so the 'locality' of the pain does not, in fact, exist - though the pain is experienced as if it did. I can not only conceive of that (I'm lucky I've not experienced it) - I can imagine plausible mechanisms which would explain such experiences. But that counts against, not for, the 'conceivability' of this thought experiment. At least for me.
The closest I can get is the old Monty Python line "Doctor, my brain hurts!" ("It'll have to come out, then.") But that's a joke, not something I can genuinely conceive of or properly imagine.
Me too. I find it difficult to conceive of pain without a body.
But people say they can. I think this just highlights the problems with such arguments. We don't all agree about what is and isn't conceivable.
> We might say that we can imagine water without H₂O. But, of course, water without H₂O is impossible — water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, so it cannot be without it.
Pain is a signal that is created and transmitted by the nervous system. Pain cannot exist without the nervous system any more than water can exist without H₂O. It's inconceivable.
And the nervous system can’t exist a body, a body without a planet, and a planet without a universe. So the only world we can imagine is the one that actually exists.
So many of these theories related to mind stuff seem to presuppose that there is a separate, immaterial mind. If you assume physicalism (physical brain plus CNS), many of those theories — even just the description of them — don't make sense.
I am stuck at P2. Probably I don’t have a precise enough definition of “conceive”. In my understanding I can conceive of something but then find out it is not possible. For instance when learning about the axiom of choice C and some other formulation F that is equivalent to it and before knowing about their equivalence I could totally conceive of a set theory where C held and F did not. But that was later revealed impossible since F=C. So the fact that something is conceivable per se does not prove much about its possibility. Maybe we should go for some stricter requirement than mere (psychological?) conceivability?
Now I wonder if in my example the axiom of choice has “hidden essences”. What does that even mean? Also we know that something has hidden essences only after we find out. Before knowing (and how reliable is that knowledge, by the way?) that water has the hidden essence of being H2O one might as well have thought that the sight of water or the feeling of wetness are elementary building blocks of experience, pretty much like pain. Which they still are in a way, unless someone is doing chemistry.
Yes, exactly! This is the concern.
The argument given is that pain (and other subjective experiences) don't have a hidden essence. The argument goes, the only way we know pain is by experiencing it -- no amount of empirical evidence is going to tell us what pain 'feels' like, so therefore the feeling of pain has no hidden essence.
On your first comment, yes, it is P2 that is most controversial. Whether or not conceivability implies possibility is highly contentious. I'm with you -- I don't see how conceivability alone can say much about possibility. But some very smart people believe otherwise.
I had your same concern. A comment on Suzi’s initial conceivability article, possibly by Terry, made the distinction between conceiving and imagining. We can imagine the impossible but can’t conceive the impossible, at least if we want conceivability to do any philosophical work.
Ok, thanks. I will take a look.
Thanks Geoff!
Excellent job as disambiguating "is"! I'll have to remember it next time someone says A is B. Ambiguous language is the bane of philosophical discussions!
My take on conceivability is it only legitimately implies conceivability. So if X is conceivable, and X implies Y, then Y is conceivable, but nothing more.
Overall, I think Gertler is just assuming there's nothing new to learn about pain, or at least nothing relevant. To your points, I don't see how we can ever be confident in that assumption, particularly when it leads to major conclusions about reality. So even if I bought her arguments about the efficacy of conceivability, I'd be skeptical of this particular one.
That said, for disembodied pain, there are medical cases that impinge on this. There is phantom limb pain, which implies that if the brain has a schema of a body part, that's enough to feel pain for it. That's probably not the conception Gertler is trying to invoke, but it does get at the intuition that pain can only be felt through a body part. I also know someone who once had phantom pain related to an opioid addiction. Of course, in both cases, there was a history of feeling from a body part, so someone could argue that the body is still necessary. But it seems like what's really necessary for pain in the moment is that the brain have a schema of the body.
I like that -- conceivability only legitimately implies conceivability.
Some of the strange body phenomena such as phantom limb pain show how complex pain really is. That's interesting about your friend with phantom pain and opioid addiction. There's some interesting work currently being done on the relationship between phantom limb pain and chronic pain -- I wonder whether there's a similar mechanism that underlies all three -- phantom limb pain, chronic pain, and drug induced pain. The article on phantom limb pain is in the works!
Looking forward to that article!
Amateur take: I wonder if it's recurrent connections between brain regions. If a region is initially excited by a nociceptive signal, it excites other regions, leading to pain and other emotional states. But if those emotional states are triggered from some other source (such as addiction withdrawal), maybe they can in turn excite the region originally excited by the nociceptive signal, but this time without that signal. To the person, the experiences are indistinguishable and equally awful.
Of course, I'm being pretty hand wavy. I fully realize the hard part is figuring out which regions, which may vary with every different type of pain, and how to test the activity.
I like your theory! I think you're onto something with the recurrent connections between areas. Emotional states can mess with pain signals, even without an actual physical trigger. The brain is crazy complicated, though. There are almost certainly mechanisms involved that we haven't discovered yet. We've learned a lot, but we still don't have a complete answer about pain yet -- let alone phantom pain. It seems that the idea that pain involves regions interacting with each other is almost certainly true, but, as you point out, figuring out exactly which brain bits are involved and how to study all of it, is complex.
I don’t have to imagine pain. Because of spinal stenosis involving the right nerve root of my sciatic nerve. So I have had non-stop plantar fasciitis in both feet for the past several years. Other lower leg pains come and go according to the whims of my embodied brain. I can conceive of boxing up all these nerve signals and shipping them off to Siberia. It’s not going to happen. I wish I could define it away or compose it differently. It’s real, it’s in my lower legs and feet, and it could not happen without the stenosis. That’s hidden stuff like H2O.
I'm so sorry to hear about your struggle, Terry. Living with chronic pain must be incredibly challenging. One thing that struck me about your comment was when you said, 'It's real'. This just breaks my heart. For too long, chronic pain like yours has been dismissed or minimised. People have been told 'it's all in your head', as if that somehow makes it invalid or insignificant. In the words of Dumbledore: "Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"
It’s not so bad, Suzi. I’m lucky because I shouldn’t get worse. In fact, it’s gotten a little better over time. It’s critical that I keep my back strong so the column is well protected in the event of a fall or misstep. The right sciatic nerve root has been squeezed to a thin filament and could be broken. When I saw the MRI I was shocked, but at least I understood what was happening. My physical therapists have been invaluable. Thank you for your concern.
I'm happy to hear that it's gotten better over time -- that must be a relief. Your optimism is inspiring.
It makes sense that the MRI results would have been helpful with understanding the pain. For a few months after my bike accident I had sciatic nerve pain from a fractured disk. It was nothing like being squeezed to a thin filament -- I can't even imagine what that would feel like -- but I do remember the relief that came with knowing what caused the pain.
But her argument references many concepts besides pain: embodiment, identity, conceivability, experience, particularity, etc. What are the odds that they’re all sufficiently comprehensive?
That said, I think that if you peel back a few layers there’s a simple argument in the offing that doesn’t just collapse under scrutiny:
(1) All physical things have hidden essences.
(2) Pain has no hidden essence.
(3) Therefore, pain isn’t physical.
Would this work if you were to substitute “pain” with “sound”? I believe it would, perhaps proving that sound as the object of perception is at least as non-physical as pain. On the other hand sound-the-object-of-perception has a physical correlate, that is sound-as-pressure-wave. Is pain special here?
Possibly. It depends on whether sound has a hidden essence or whether, like pain, it wears its essence on its sleeve.
But the truly funny part is that, if you take this argument to its logical conclusion, you end up with the idea that all physical things must have a non-physical essence. So there's nothing special about pain or sound.
I am afraid the concept of hidden essence is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the conceivability argument. It’s not unlikely that you could sketch a proof of the existence of God with the conceivability argument and a vague enough notion of hidden essences. And maybe one of the non-existence too.
Doesn’t “Pain has no hidden essence” look like an “is” of composition?
Ah, but the conceivability argument starts from the assumption that it's possible to 'conceive' anything while in an disembodied state. But won't there always be a certain physical substrate for consciousness, which (conceivably ;)) at certain levels of complexity, comes with a damage warning system (subjectively, perhaps pain)?
Thank you for introducing me to Gertler. I grabbed her paper for reading later.
My answer to your last question is "very little". Our conceptual reach far exceeds our physical grasp. Language allows us to make fantastical statements with no connection to reality as we experience it. A funny old song begins, "It rained all night the day I left, the weather it was fine..." It continues with delightful logical nonsense. I have enough constructionist leanings to distrust conceivability arguments.
A question I have: Could the visible properties of water, that it's a liquid, that it can freeze or boil, that it makes things wet, comprise a sufficient concept, at least for arguments that don't depend on its chemical nature?
In the Disembodied Pain logic, P3 confuses me. Is it suggesting feeling the pain without the nervous system signal into the brain? Or just without the pinch itself? In the latter case, those who feel phantom pain because of some twitch in their CNS would seem an example, so I guess Gertler means the former? How would remembering or imagining pain fit into this?
>> "Go on… pinch yourself."
Ouch! Okay, I'm clearly not dreaming...
How any discussion of pain without body could fail to include phantom limb syndrome is a mystery to me, and I'll also point out that technology has both discovered and created artificial nociceptors that create pain (as a danger signal, apart from other sensations, to the central nervous system) in robots. But secondly, the conceivability argument seems so specious as to necessitate a question of ulterior motives. Who makes money or gains prestige if people keep paying it respectful attention? To me that's the real question emerging here.
A clue to resolving the mystery might be found in the last sentence of Suzi’s article. Waiting for the next instalment in a series is always a special kind of pain.
Always two steps ahead! The phantom limb pain article is in the works.
I’m guessing you’re aware of nociceptors natural and artificial. My hearing about nociceptors surprised me because it differentiates between pain and other sensations, and of course in the case of robots puts the question of what pain is front and center. I think an evaluation of whether robot pain is in any way equivalent to human or animal pain is going to prove unknowable.
Yes, I am aware.
Robot pain versus biological pain is interesting. Sounds like you've been keeping up on the latest in this field.
I think the question is whether nociceptors alone are responsible for the feeling of pain, or whether there's more to the story than certain types of receptor neurons.
Foreshadowing? I don’t always remember to mention it, but you do such great work. I always look forward to the next thing.
Thanks so much Jack! I always look forward to reading your comments.
The people who believe that they may one day be able to upload their mind to a computer and live for an indefinite amount of time had better hope that there is no such thing as disembodied pain. For how do you move away from pain if you have no body?
Suzi another great article and deep dive into multiple concepts simultaneously. First off—thank you again for your work and vehicle for ‘thoughtful’ (thought filled) discussion.
A few comments—these last three articles all seem to come from a physicalist perspective (even bias perhaps). Going into the details might be too long for a comment. Let’s just say we could consider conceivability has substance with or without possibility—the conceivability being substantial on its own. Possibility being a physicalist test and standard to judge—even limit (?)—instances of conceivability. Conceivability does not require possibility to be substantial—the concept is the substance.
Your discussion on ‘is’—uses and meanings—appears conventional and my intuition tells me there is something missing (but I can’t quite get my thoughts around this yet—I’ll come back if I do). It recalled for me the first time many of us had considered different meanings of ‘is’. This was in the late ‘90’s during our U.S. president’s testimony to congress: august 17, 1998 to be exact when our president tried to justify his lying under oath to congress by saying (when asked if the correction to his false testimony which pointed out his deception—“is that correct?”) “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”. Common sense usage having existed in the USA without challenge before this moment—i.e. all minds in this culture were assumed to be aligned on the understanding of ‘is’ before this moment. Like an understanding of water and its properties before the knowledge of H2O. Water is conceivable without an understanding of the components—the conceivability having substance based on the tangibility of the material. So can the intangible have substance based on conceivability? For most of us water as H2O is intangible—I’ve (like most people probably) never taken two scoops of hydrogen and mixed it with a scoop of oxygen but I take this concept of water as H2O to be factual—to have a tangible basis even though the concept is intangible. The structure of the concept (intangible) just makes sense on its own.
This brings us to the concept of ‘pain’. You start with a physicalist exploration into pain sensations. Is this the total definition of pain? When a doctor points to the chart on the wall and asks, “1 to 10 how do you rate your level of pain?” I always laugh—compared to what? Unfortunately I’ve encountered so much pain that I have a personal definition of pain—yes it’s very idiosyncratic.
Level one is pain as frustration and discomfort—it’s what we typically mean when asked to rate pain and it’s temporary (feeling and emotion combined). Medication can eliminate this issue and is a panacea—a cure all.
Level two is pain as sensation and anguish/distress—it is what we experience from sharp pain to completely debilitating pain and it is typically sustained (sensation/feeling which overwhelms us and our other senses/abilities. I recall experiencing this when having kidney stones, post surgery from an emergency appendectomy, or when I slipped a disc in my back. It was impossible to walk and getting hard to breathe at the peak of pain—though it had nothing to do with gross motor function these were disrupted by my neurology being overwhelmed by a single event which radiated out to other physiologies. Here medication helps to minimize the sensation and radiating so only the location is affected. This pain is temporary to persistent as the source is durable, or not.
Level three pain is rarely experienced—most people live their entire lives without ever experiencing this (and I wish this on no one). This is difficult to describe but I will call it pain as torment (by this I mean not just sustained pain but depth, breadth, and intensity), pain as decomposing and digesting physical and dislodging (dislocating) your being from your body. I recall experiencing this when I had a virus which was demyelinating my nervous system. I could feel being digested from the inside while the structure of my feeling system was being destroyed—this was way beyond ‘pain’ and the most potent medicine had little effect but lubricated the dislodging of my being from my body. Here the pain / the torture became a wicked companion pushing me out of my own body and mind—my own physicality. On this scale kidney stones and a herniated disc became a 1 (or less) out of 10–just simple physical anguish/distress. If fact it became clear there was no upper limit to this level three and was quickly leading to separation of me (my being ) and my body which would end in physical death. The strongest pain medication seemed to be facilitating this separation and I became acutely aware of the threshold where my body/mind and its torment existed and where I was—disconnected and no longer in the midst of my own body/mind. The tangible and intangible colliding and severing simultaneously. So here meditation is incompetent and the pain is a permanent companion—even when the sensation is minimized, dissipating, or gone the impact is never undone—the margin between the tangible and intangible becomes defined and broader. (As a side note, it’s clear to me that mind and memory does not just exist in our heads. Eventually I was able to move my arms, walk and talk again by recovering/reconnecting the mind in my limbs with the mind in my head as the viral disease and demyelination very slowly subsided over many years. Then I was able to rebuild the connection between me and my body/brain to gain motor control/skills—skills which we normally develop simultaneously as our brain/neurology develops so we think they are synonymous with our being. This recovery process was itself very painful on many levels—sometimes/always L1: frustrating with great discomfort; sometimes/typically L2: anguishing and debilitating; and often (almost always) L3: decomposing and dislocating (one step very tentatively forward, six steps overwhelmingly backward)). I suspect there may even be a threshold of pain beyond this level 3—a level 4—but I suspect this is beyond physical existence because level 3 presses towards a permanent separation of being and body/mind (intangible and tangible) so this level 4 state would be beyond physical death, beyond tangible existence. It’s a horrific idea.
My point—if we limit pain to physical sensation we have already created a physicalist definition of pain which is very limited and doesn’t encompass the totally of ‘pain’. Though lacking experience in level 3 (and again I wish this reality, this experience on no one) would lead someone to consider this is correct just as much as believing water is just H2O. Both are conceptually correct but are also incomplete.
I'm so sorry to hear this Dean. Your description of the third level is harrowing, but also eye-opening. Your point about the incompleteness of our understanding is well taken. As you say, most of us are fortunate never to encounter such experiences.
You describe this pain mostly in the past tense, so I do hope this is something you no longer suffer from. But it's clear that the impact of what you've been through doesn't ever go away.
Thank you. And yes, for the moment this is past tense—to look at me today I don’t think it’s noticeable.
I’ve had people with metastatic cancer (or people near to them as they saw their loved one come to the end of their lives) describe something similar as their bodies were overwhelmed and they became ‘out of their mind’ with pain. So the experience is rare (hopefully) but not unique.
Point is—Your continued work Suzi is very valuable.
Correction: I meant ‘So here ‘medication’ (not meditation) is incompetent and the pain is a permanent companion’.
Bill Clinton was right? It all depends on what the meaning of “is” is.
Ever read any Scarry? https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-body-in-pain-9780195049961
No, but this looks like an interesting book. Thanks for the link.
Oh, it is beyond interesting. Best book on pain in the business.
Thanks, Nick!
The True Armchair Philosophy
In short, philosophizing is thinking that must not only explore cause-and-effect relationships but also involve contemplation, so the details can be grasped intuitively.
It is like someone contemplating the sweetness of honey or the sensation of pain, rather than merely thinking about the sweetness of honey or the experience of pain.
Although both "thinking & contemplating" provide an understanding of a cause-and-effect relationship, thinking brings our perception to something to be contemplated. It's like the vehicle of thought tracing a map to ensure the truth of the relationship between one point (word) and another point (the next word), which is further followed by contemplating the "something" that lies in the meaning of the final point.
It’s like someone who seeks to confirm the truth of a statement by verifying the causal relationships between its components (the meaning of the words). Whereas contemplating is the attempt to observe each point along the journey to ensure its details, whether there is a pharmacy, its shape, or other characteristics of each point (the meaning of the object) of the cause-and-effect that is passed until the final point. Through contemplation, one gains a more detailed experience of the nuances of a statement.
The consequence of contemplation throughout the path of tracing cause-and-effect via the vehicle of thought will provide broader knowledge so that the map of the thought journey may shift toward something more relevant.
Thus, contemplation must accompany the process of thinking to broaden insight and avoid misdirection that was previously considered true, allowing the truth or falsity of something to be understood long before it is acknowledged.
This process of contemplation signifies an effort to understand the map of cause-and-effect relationships more realistically.
Therefore, contemplation is necessary to ensure the process of thinking represents reality more accurately (in more detail – more realistically).
Before arriving at a more profound understanding of "armchair philosophy," the concept of "thinking" and the need for "contemplation" has been sufficiently clarified as synergizing to form a more realistic philosophical approach.
However, the realistic dimension still needs further understanding.
Rationality & Realism
Tracing cause-and-effect relationships through mere thought is only rational (which is not necessarily realistic). For example, "a straight line is the shortest distance between two points," but it is not realistic because the shortest distance between two valleys might have a non-straight contour.
Contemplation brings our observations closer to reality, revealing a more accurate state (more realistic).
However, contemplation is not a guarantee of fully uncovering reality. Why? Because contemplation merely stimulates our memory of forgotten details.
The Forgotten Reality
The foundation of contemplation to obtain details closer to realism also requires empirical evidence. Without empirical evidence, contemplation cannot reveal the forgotten realistic aspects.
METAPHYSICS - Intuition
Yet, contemplation not only reveals forgotten or unnoticed details but, through focused contemplation, can "download" (inspire) internal knowledge relevant to the object being contemplated.
However, the results of contemplation must be empirically tested. At the very least, the concept should be a logical consequence that does not contradict the thought process.
Testing the inspiration from contemplation empirically does not necessarily mean involving concrete objects, but rather by seeing the logical consequence's connection to empirical evidence.
Absolute Truth
Armchair philosophy should lead to absolute truth. Why?
"The number of a whole is equal to the sum of its parts." This is an absolute universal truth.
So how can we, who experience life in a limited way, understand the farthest corners of the universe to comprehend universal truth? This is because our limited perception (like a CCTV) serves as the initial data to connect with broader internal intuitive data, which is relevant to the initial data, thus expanding the initial limited data to something more vast or even universal.
Something cannot surpass itself unless it receives something from outside itself | From one cup of tea, you cannot pour a gallon of tea unless it gets more tea from outside the cup.
The essence is that it is impossible for our limited experience to comprehend universal truth unless there is an addition (completion) through another truth beyond sensory perception (i.e., receiving additional information from within – intuitively).