What if you take something more concrete than "redness", like pain ? Let's say you stub your toe or burn your finger. In that moment is there any room for doubt that pain exists ?
If you didn't know you were in pain, you weren't in pain. If you didn't know your hair was on fire, your hair wasn't on fire. I suppose if you squint hard enough you can make any of these support the authors contention.
I've always been curious if we'd interpret pain differently if we knew with certainty that any injuries it could represent would not be fatal, nor permanent.
Hah. There's definitely pain out there that can't be studied to oblivion. Anyone so pompous hasn't experienced, for example, a cluster headache.
Or passed a kidney stone, or had a thrombosed hemorrhoid, or been tortured. I think there’s a difference between breathing through lower back pain, and trying to contextualize someone threading a live wire up your urethra to make you talk. Even if you’re exceptionally good with pain, most people are going to have trouble with damage too. If you start cutting off someone’s fingers, they’re going to lose their zen in a hurry.
But hey, maybe we’re wrong, but to people who think I’d say... go to a burn unit and see if you can make a difference where nothing short of a medically induced coma can. There’s a Nobel prize with your name on it if you succeed.
Exactly. You should really stop and do a re-think if you ever find yourself saying, "no, that didn't relieve your pain, it just produced a state observationally indistinguishable from lacking pain!"
Kinda like the people who say "shaving hair doesn't make it come back darker. That's a misconception. It just looks like it does ... when what you care about is looks."
> Pain is a signal of impending damage/injury, or existing damage/injury that may well worse if not dealt with immediately.
Pain is not necessarily associated with injury.
>All signals within a human nervous system can be mistaken in principle. Why would this one be different? Phantom pains that indicate no injury seem plausible.
What would phantom pain feel like? Would it hurt? Then it is incidental that it phantom and is nevertheless pain. If you believe you are in pain even if there is no stimulus associated with it, then you are in pain. You can not mistake pain regardless of whether it is "real" or not. What makes pain so special? It hurts, it is painful.
Good point. It is all deduction, and I guess that is what science is about: deduction, not proof.
Regardless of whether or not an entity X experiences pain, we can still objectively state that entity X responds negatively towards stimuli associated with the feeling of pain in ourselves.
One problem I see with such discussion is the lack of distinction between 'there is a cause for pain in the hand' and 'the brain senses pain in the hand'.
One can see this nicely if you simply think of pain as light, the pain sensors as light sensors and the brain as a microprocessor, connected to the sensors. Certainly, if light is there, then the sensors will sense light, and thus, the two statements are equal in this case.
However, if the sensor only senses light, one strictly does not know if there is light or not, as the sensor might malfunction.
If one realizes this distinction between the existance of a state and the recognition of a state, things grow much clearer and one does realize that whatever is going on, one must consider a malfunction of the brain and nerves.
The point being, that when you are on fire, you feel pain as a consequence of your pain receptors in your body firing in response to tissue damage. Depending on circumstances, You can also feel pain without these receptors firing, and you can also feel no or little pain when these receptors are firing a lot. You can say that the pain originates either from the receptors or from something internally in the brain. Naively you might describe the first type as 'real' and the second as 'imaginary', which is of scant use to downright dismissive of the person actually experiencing said pain.
Perhaps, but "feelings" are more complicated than that. Pain isn't just a little flag that gets set to TRUE. At the very least, it's rewiring your neurons to avoid that experience, initiating instincts, and affecting your entire brain.
'No doubt' is a figure of speech. But in species where there aren't any pain signals at all, my case is strengthened. I've skimmed the page you link: doesn't it just assume that 'pain experience' implies suffering? But this is contradicted by the testimony of cancer patients on opiates or Hindu saints undergoing surgery without anaesthesia. They feel the pain but it doesn't bother them.
If it said yes, how would you prove it wrong? How convincing must the on-screen suffering become for us to start wondering whether there is something there that actually feels pain?
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