Stoics on pain

Brennan describes the Stoic conception of pain as one of the four basic kinds of emotion:

Pain is an opinion that some present thing is a bad of such a sort that we should be downcast about it.
[Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, p.270]

Preferring more pain to less

In his recent Why feeling more pain may be better for you, Tom Stafford reminds us of the classic Kahneman study which yielded both the Peak End rule and succor to sadistic proctologists.

If that description didn't tempt you to go read the column, here's the super short version: Kahneman found that when asked how bad a painful experience was, people recall (roughly) the average of how bad it was at it's worst --the 'peak'-- and how bad it was at the end --the, uh, 'end'. This, Kahneman claims, raises a real ethical dilemma:

Imagine a physician conducting a colonoscopy; the patient is in intense pain. The examination is complete and the physician could terminate the procedure now, providing instant relief --and a permanently negative evaluation of the whole episode. Should the physician seek the patient's consent to extend the pain for a while in order to form and retain an improved opinion of the procedure….a patient who has had two otherwise identical procedures that differ in the abruptnees of relief will prefer [the one with] more total pain but provides a better end….When the experiencing self and the remembering self disagree, whom are we to believe? (1994, p.21)

Stafford doesn't answer this question. Rather he turns to the Peak-End Rule as a broader phenomena (as other research shows) to make a different point

"But I think the most important lesson of the Peak-End experiments is something else. Rather than saying that the duration isn't important, the rule tells me that it is just as important to control how we mentally package our time. What defines an “experience” is somewhat arbitrary. If a weekend break where you forget everything can be as refreshing as a two-week holiday then maybe a secret to a happy life is to organise your time so it is broken up into as many distinct (and enjoyable) experiences as possible, rather than being just an unbroken succession of events which bleed into one another in memory."

I have to politely demur on what's the most interesting lesson. I've spent the last 10 years ---my entire professional career thus far--- thinking about some of the deep philosophical issues Kahneman's question raises.

Presumably, as Kahneman notes, none of us as patients would agree (while in pain) to the physician prolonging our pain. But we would then look jealously upon our friend whose doctor didn't ask her permission and whose colonoscopy was (as she recalls it) easier than our own. From our deathbed perspectives, my life contained more suffering. It was in that respect worse than hers.

Of course, we're both mistaken about how our total suffering compares. Arguably, in some cases, our lives can be better or worse than we believe them to be. If your loved ones' affection had been a cruel facade behind which they constantly ridiculed you, even though you never found out, your life was still worse than you thought it was. But are mistakes about how much we suffered like this?

Look at what's going on here. We need to decide what makes pain bad. We need to figure out how to aggregate goods (e.g., do we simply add up the good and bad?). We need to understand what constitutes human well-being ---to decide what makes a life as a whole good. We need to deal with organic unities (i.e., whether the arrangement of a good and a bad may yield an overall value that's different from the simple sum --schadenfreude is a common example). We need to deal with the asymmetries of past and future pains. Indeed, this road takes us straight to fundamental questions about the nature of intrinsic value. (That's the road I followed to my dissertation)

John Broome took this issue up in his 1996 'More pain or less?' with the straightforward claim that the person's mistaken evaluations are irrelevant. Pains are intrinsically bad. There should be less of it.

Stephanie Beardman who was finishing up at Rutgers just as I entered, came up with a more sophisticated response in her The choice between current and retrospective evaluations of pain (here's a pdf). In it she sets out several alternative interpretations of Kahneman's results and articulates some ways in which our preferences about past experiences may be more sophisticated than they at first seem.

Since she does a lot of what philosophers do best ---laying out the conceptual territory--- some of you empirically-minded folks may find it a useful source for developing uninvestigated hypotheses. It's also just a very nice gateway to some of the deep philosophical issues lurking just beneath the surface of seemingly easy questions. (Though be forewarned, it's a gateway drug too. A few early conversations with Stephanie definitely played a role in my getting hooked). In any event, you should read it.

Foolproof method for succeeding in modern neurochemistry

Neurochemistry Post-Docs! Looking to publish interesting and important papers on the neurochemistry of reward but don't know what to study? Then Dr. Swenson's Revolutionary Topic Selection Method is for you!

For centuries, western philosophers have thought carefully about the nature and kinds of pleasure.* You too can benefit from their efforts!

Here's the key to Dr. Swenson's Revolutionary Topic Selection Method: These philosophers have been studying mental phenomena. You study neural phenomena. And mental phenomena are ultimately neural phenomena!

Other inferior neuropsychological research programs have tried using philosophical claims to select topics. But they would have you try to prove or disprove philosophical claims with neuroscience. That may win you friends amongst philosophers. But you don't want philosopher friends!** You want prestigious publications and lucrative grants!

That's where Dr. Swenson's Revolutionary Topic Selection Method can help! You needn't worry about proving or disproving philosophical claims. With Dr. Swenson's Revolutionary Topic Selection Method, you will use writers ranging from the ancient Greeks to the modern utilitarians to help you design experimental paradigms that are the key to scientific fame.

Here's just one taste of what the system has to offer. Philosophers have, in various guises, debated whether some pleasures are better than others by virtue of being more refined and intellectually infused.

Now a lesser program might have you consider whether opera or pop music produces greater activity in dopaminergic pathways in subjects with past exposure to both. But that will impress only philosophers.

With Dr. Swenson's Revolutionary Topic Selection Method you will instead find in these disputes some promising leads for experimentation. You may, for example, design your experiments to investigate connections between the reward pathway activity, memories, and higher order processes. You don't care whether the refined music elicits more apparent reward. You care about whether pop music and opera elicit systematically different connections throughout the brain.***

Now, it is true that Dr. Swenson's Revolutionary Topic Selection Method can't promise experimental results that will woo philosophers.**** But Dr. Swenson's Revolutionary Topic Selection Method can help you select topics which will uncover processes which underlie our complex mental lives. And that's what you want.

And lucrative grants!

Act now and Dr. Swenson's Revolutionary Topic Selection Method can be yours for a pathetically small amount of money. First 10 callers get a free T-shirt and Shamwow.


*Yes, this comes dangerously close to 'since the dawn of time'. I cringe too.

**I'm serious.

***I know, music isn't the best example. But it's easy to set out. Thanks a lotOliver Sacks.

****Philosophers will nonetheless distort your results and woo themselves.

--------

This post was inspired by

Heterogenerity of Reward Mechanisms

SpringerLink - Neurochemical Research, Volume 35, Number 6: "The finding that many drugs that have abuse potential and other natural stimuli such as food or sexual activity cause similar chemical changes in the brain, an increase in extracellular dopamine (DA) in the shell of the nucleus accumbens (NAccS), indicated some time ago that the reward mechanism is at least very similar for all stimuli and that the mechanism is relatively simple. The presently available information shows that the mechanisms involved are more complex and have multiple elements. Multiple brain regions, multiple receptors, multiple distinct neurons, multiple transmitters, multiple transporters, circuits, peptides, proteins, metabolism of transmitters, and phosphorylation, all participate in reward mechanisms. The system is variable, is changed during development, is sex-dependent, and is influenced by genetic differences. Not all of the elements participate in the reward of all stimuli. Different set of mechanisms are involved in the reward of different drugs of abuse, yet different mechanisms in the reward of natural stimuli such as food or sexual activity; thus there are different systems that distinguish different stimuli. Separate functions of the reward system such as anticipation, evaluation, consummation and identification; all contain function-specific elements. The level of the stimulus also influences the participation of the elements of the reward system, there are possible reactions to even below threshold stimuli, and excessive stimuli can change reward to aversion involving parts of the system. Learning and memory of past reward is an important integral element of reward and addictive behavior. Many of the reward elements are altered by repeated or chronic stimuli, and chronic exposure to one drug is likely to alter the response to another stimulus. To evaluate and identify the reward stimulus thus requires heterogeneity of the reward components in the brain. "

(Via http://mindhacks.com/.)

Review of David Biro's The Language of Pain

Short story: David Biro's The Language of Pain: Finding Words, Compassion and Relief is very good.
Go buy it.

Longer story: The publisher sent me an advance copy of Biro's The Language of Pain a few months ago. I've read it several times and been working on a review to share with y'all. But the review is getting too long and though I think I agree with most of his conclusions, I'm still not entirely sure what I think about about several of his arguments. Nonetheless, I've certainly profited from engaging with them.

Thus in the interest of posting something while the book is still (somewhat) fresh, I've pasted some of the early parts of the review below. I may post the rest later, or I may work it into something for a more formal venue. I'm omitting the philosophical discussion of the arguments. Though I will list a couple of the topics that concern me. I'm sure the list won't make sense until you've read the book. But perhaps they'll serve as discussion-starters

----
Those interested in learning about pain can profit from David Biro’s The Language of Pain: Finding Words, Compassion and Relief. It will probably be the most useful to people with chronic pain and those close to them. At the very least, the vast array of nuanced metaphors and literary sources he canvases can serve as raw material for their attempts to communicate and understand the experience of pain. But I expect that his lucid exploration of the structure of these metaphors will provide important conceptual tools for crafting more systematic and effective narratives. Though the applicability of some of his particular insights may be limited by culture and language.

Clinicians and scientists should be impressed by the conceptual structure that Biro uncovers in the language many sufferer's use to describe their pains. He succeeds in showing that this metaphorical talk, while necessarily imprecise and often obscure, must be taken seriously. In his wake, the same cannot be said for those who dismiss or deride these ways of talking about pain.

At a minimum, researchers interested in developing pain measurement tools and many philosophers will find in it a rich repository of examples and ideas to use in their work.

Philosophers should also find much to be intrigued by in Biro’s arguments. Here are a few of points that I think are worth engaging with:

• Chapter 2 is occupied with a theoretical response to the charge that pain is completely resistant to language. This is unnecessary. The main thrust of the book is an empirical argument that, in several important ways, pain is in fact amenable to language.
• The Wittgensteinian argument of chapter 2 can at best show that we must be able to communicate that we are in pain. But his project is to show that we can communicate what it is like to be in pain. He's not confusing the two in chapter 2. He wants to use the former as a wedge to open the door for the latter. But later on they sometimes seem to get run together in significant ways.
• His discussion of the language/metaphors of agency does a lot to support and build on Elaine Scarry's articulation of the concept (I profited a great deal from this part since the pain-agency connection is important in my own work). The discussions of the x-ray and mirror metaphors/language are much weaker. Indeed, I'm not convinced that these can't be folded into the agency metaphor. [Unlike the others, this concern has significant philosophical consequences for our understanding of pain]
• I'm probably being overly picky --but, hey, that's what analytic philosophers are for-- but his project is about language (hence the title and the claim to be constructing a 'rhetoric'). I usually think of language as propositional. His discussions using art to express pain thus seem incongruous. This is probably innocuous. At most it's a concern about whether the thesis should be framed in terms of language or more broadly in terms of our ability to meaningfully communicate. Though I sometimes think that there may be something lurking here that's related to the more substantive questions about whether the x-ray and mirror metaphors are really separate from the agency metaphors.
• I'm betting that analytic philosophers of language who work on metaphor will find a great deal to disagree with in some of his arguments. Though I myself don't know enough about these issues to have more than hazy suspicions at various points.
  

Like I said, I'm not entirely sure what I think about these and other points. But I've certainly profited from thinking about them. And in any event, none of them undermine the practical import of the book or the philosophical suggestiveness of the overall picture. Indeed, his subtle discussions of pain language’s structure do not require the conceptually strong thesis that the experience of pain is necessarily expressible. By weaving together art, literature, personal experience, and patient testimony, he has demonstrated that many aspects of many pain experiences can, to a practically useful degree, be meaningfully shared.

What's bad about masochistic pain?

Here's the video from the talk I gave back in April about whether masochistic pain is good:

http://www.adamswenson.net/HSG/HSG1.html

But since it's just me reading the paper aloud, you'll probably want to skip ahead and just watch the discussion:

Part 1 http://www.adamswenson.net/HSG/HSG2.html
Part 2 http://www.adamswenson.net/HSG/HSG3.html

The paper and powerpoint slides are available on the website.

Warning: This is totally unsafe for work, and most definitely not for the squeamish. The talk proper may cause mild reactions in those allergic to analytic philosophy. Such reactions are less common with the discussion alone.

Hurts so good Q&A: Masochism and chronic pain

Hurts so good Q&A: Self inflicted pain and masochism

Another new paper by me: Privation Theories of Pain

Yep. More from me. This time in a philosophy of religion journal --guess I'm branching out.

Privation Theories of Pain

Most modern writers accept that a privation theory of evil should explicitly account for the evil of pain. But pains are quintessentially real. The evil of pain does not seem to lie in an absence of good. Though many directly take on the challenges this raises, the metaphysics and axiology of their answers is often obscure. In this paper I try to straighten things out. By clarifying and categorizing the possible types of privation views, I explore the ways in which privationists about evil are—or should or could be—privationists about pain’s evil.

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion (2009)
DOI: 10.1007/s11153-009-9202-4
http://www.springerlink.com/content/644751l635n21r71/

Super awesome paper: Pain's Evils

Okay. I'm lying. It isn't really super awesome. But it is a new paper by me in the latest issue of the journal Utilitas:

Pain's Evils

The traditional accounts of pain’s intrinsic badness assume a false view of what pains are. Insofar as they are normatively significant, pains are not just painful sensations. A pain is a composite of a painful sensation and a set of beliefs, desires, emotions, and other mental states. A pain’s intrinsic properties can include inter alia depression, anxiety, fear, desires, feelings of helplessness, and the pain’s meaning. This undermines the traditional accounts of pain’s intrinsic badness. Pain is intrinsically bad in two distinct and historically unnoticed ways. First, most writers hold that pain’s intrinsic badness lies either in its unpleasantness or in its being disliked. Given my wider conception of pain, I believe it is both. Pain’s first intrinsic evil lies in a conjunction of all the traditional candidates for its source. Pain’s second intrinsic evil lies in the way it necessarily undermines the self-control necessary for intrinsic goods like autonomy.

Utilitas Vol. 21 No. 2 June 2009
doi:10.1017/S0953820809003550

Pain and self control

As some of you know, one of my abiding research interests is the relationship between pain and self-control. Thus I bring you this:

A scientist developing a prosthetic pain detection system to help lepers who had lost sensation in their limbs avoid damage describes its failure:

In the end we had to abandon the entire scheme. Most important, we found no way around the fundamental weakness in our system: it remained under the patient's control. If the patient did not want to heed the warnings from our sensors, he could always find a way to bypass the whole system. Why must pain be unpleasant? Why must pain persist? Our system failed for the precise reason that we could not effective duplicate those two qualities of pain. They mysterious power of the human brain can force a person to STOP! --something I could never accomplish with my substitute system. And 'natural' pain will persist as long as danger threatens, whether we want it to or not, unlike my substitute system, it cannot be switched off."

Brand, P. and P. Yancey. 1993. Pain: The Gift Nobody Wants. New York: Harper Collins. Pp.195-186

The subjective experience of punishment

Friend of PFP has an intriguing article on sensitivity to punishment and punitive practices here.

Abstract:
Suppose two people commit the same crime and are sentenced to equal terms in the same prison facility. I argue that they have identical punishments in name only. One may experience incarceration as challenging but tolerable while the other is thoroughly tormented by it. Our sentencing policies seek to equalize the duration of their incarceration, yet largely ignore the differences in their experiences of isolation, stigma, and confinement. In this article, I argue that, according to our prevailing theories of punishment, the subjective experience of punishment matters. There is, therefore, a disconnect between our punishment practices and our best attempts to justify those practices.

There are three possible responses. First, we could try to modify or expand our theories to avoid the obligation to calibrate punishment. I show why this approach is unlikely to succeed. Second, we could conclude that, even though we ought to calibrate our punishments, doing so would be too costly or difficult to administer. This response is too hasty. In civil litigation, we do make subjective assessments of damages. Advances in neuroscience may someday make these assessments more accurate and less expensive. Even if we cannot individually calibrate punishments, we can surely enact sentencing policies that are more subjectively-sensitive than the policies we have now. We are left, then, with only the third response: to recognize that subjective experience matters in assessments of punishment severity and to take at least modest steps toward calibrating punishment, either through individual measurement or, more feasibly, by enacting punishment policies that are subjectively sensitive.

Compulsions in Tourette's Syndrome

In An Anthropologist On Mars Oliver Sacks describes the compulsions of Tourette's Syndrome:

it is often difficult for Touretters, to see their Tourette's as something external to themselves, because many of the tics and urges may be felt as intentional, as an integral part of the self, the personality, the will. It is quite different, by contrast, with something like Parkinsonism or chorea: these have no quality of selfness or intentionality and are always felt as diseases, as outside the self. Compulsions and tics occupy an intermediate position, seeming sometimes to be an expression of one's personal will, sometimes a coercion of it by another, alien will. These ambiguities are often expressed in the terms people use. Thus the separateness of 'it' and 'I' is sometimes expressed by jocular personifications of the Tourette's: one Touretter I know calls his Tourette's 'Toby,' another 'Mr. T.' By contrast, a Tourettic possession of the self was vividly expressed by one young man in Utah, who wrote to me that he had a Tourettized soul.' [102]

In which Adam experiences a privation of calm

Ugh.

Some time ago my little girl, then three years old, dislocated her shoulder. I was alone in the house at the time. The pain was so intense that she became faint. I treated her the best I knew how, but kept holding the thought that just as soon as some one came I would run for help. She seemed to grow worse and cried very much. I undressed her and tried to twist the arm into place, but it caused such suffering that I began to get afraid. Then like a flash came the thought, What would you do if you were out of the reach of a practitioner? Now is your time to prove God's power and presence. With these thoughts came such a sense of calm and trustfulness that I lost all fear. I then asked the child if I should read to her; she said "Yes, mamma, read the truth-book." I began reading aloud to her from Science and Health. In about half an hour I noticed she tried to lift the arm but screamed and became very pale. I continued to read aloud and again she made an effort to put some candy into her mouth. This time I noticed with joy that she almost reached her mouth before she felt the pain. I kept reading aloud to her until my sister and two boys came in, when she jumped off her bed, so delighted to see her brothers that she forgot her arm. She then began to tell her aunt that she had broken her arm and mamma treated it with the truth-book. When this happened, it was about 10.30 A.M. and by 3 P.M. she was playing out doors as though nothing had ever happened.--Mrs. M. G., Winnipeg, Man Link

Someone please read to me from the truth-book and pour me a stiff drink. Heal me of the burning rage I feel.

Why pains can't be privations

I've looked all over for someone making the most obvious and powerful objection to privation theories. Thank you Stanley Kane:

The difficulty is that pain seems clearly to be more than merely the absence of its contrary opposite. There is a marked difference between a limb which merely lacks feeling is numb or paralyzed or anesthetized and one that is racked with pain. In the former case it is quite plausible to say that is merely a privation of something, namely normal feeling, that under usual circumstances would belong to the limb. But it is clearly inadequate to describe a limb aching with pain as suffering merely a privation of good health or normal feeling. When pain occurs in the body, there is something new and different in a person’s experience which is not present when the body has simply lost feeling.

G.Stanley Kane, "Evil and Privation" Int J Phil Rel 11 (1980) 43-58

Agony

From the OED definition of 'agony'. 1b is rather surprising, no?

The development of the senses in Gr. was:{em}1. A struggle for victory in the games; 2. Any struggle; 3. Mental struggle, anguish, e.g. Christ's anguish in Gethsemane. But the historical appearance of the meanings in Eng. was as follows:

1. a. Anguish of mind, sore trouble or distress, a paroxysm of grief. agony column, (a) the column of a newspaper that contains special advertisements, particularly those for missing relatives or friends, and thus often gives evidence of great distress; (b) a regular newspaper or magazine feature containing readers' questions about personal difficulties, with replies from the columnist; cf. problem page s.v. PROBLEM 7(b); agony aunt(ie), a familiar name for the (female) editor of an agony column (sense b); in extended use, an adviser on personal, psychological, etc., problems.

b. Hence, Intensity or paroxysm of pleasure.
a1725 POPE Odyssey x. 492 With cries and agonies of wild delight. 1877 MRS. OLIPHANT Mak. Flor. v. 138 He struck the marble in an agony of pleasure and content, bidding it ‘Speak’!

2. spec. The mental struggle or anguish of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane.

3. The convulsive throes, or pangs of death; the death struggle. (med.L. agon mortis.) Seldom now used in this sense without qualification, as agony of death, mortal agony.

4. a. Extreme bodily suffering, such as to produce writhing or throes of the body.
b. transf. and fig.
1835-40 etc. [see PILE v.2 2b]. 1863 GEO. ELIOT Let. 23 Oct. (1956) IV. 111 We shall soon be in the agonies of moving. 1924 R. CAMPBELL Flaming Terrapin ii. 25 The mountains frown, Locked in their tetanous agonies of stone. 1932 W. B. YEATS Words for Music 2 Dying into a dance, An agony of trance, An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

5. A struggle or contest. (Rarely without some shade of the preceding senses.)
16

Link (requires subscription)

Thanks to the most awesome PDT for the reference.

In which Adam experiences a privation of sanity

In an amazing display of how a mistaken theodicy can lead to idiocy, Anglin and Goetz write:

one must distinguish between pain as an evil (a privation of normal consciousness, an inability to enjoy the weather) and pain as an experienced quality (a strong stimulus, an overwhelming sensation). A pain is only an evil insofar as it is privative.

Sounds a bit weird. But let's hear some more...

The privationist must agree that the experienced quality of a pain is not a mere absence of something but this does not commit him to saying that it is a good. Instead he can maintain that it is neither good nor evil but a sort of neutral thing. Of course, the experienced quality of pain always entails a privation of our normal state of consciousness and it often signals a privation of our normal state of bodily well-being. It can result in fear or resentment which are tied up with yet other privations.

Wait for it...........

However, just insofar as it is an experienced quality, pain is not an evil. Indeed, in some cases, the absence of this experienced quality would be an evil. If you cut your finger it would be worse if you did not than if you did feel pain.

OWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW! IT BURNS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Someone please douse me with the distinction between intrinsic and instrumental value to put the fire in my brain out........

OWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


*Anglin and Goetz, "Evil is Privation" Int J Phil Rel 13: 3-12 (1982), p.5

Hobbes on pain

Hobbes on pain:

Of pleasure, or delights, some arise from the sense of an object present; and those may be called pleasures of sense....Of this kind are onerations and exonerations of the body; as also all that is pleasant, in the sight, hearing, smell, taste, or touch; others arise from the expectation, that proceeds from foresight of the end, or consequence of things; whether those things in the sense please or displease: and these are pleasures of the mind of him that draweth those consequences and are generally called JOY. In the like manner, displeasures, are some in the sense, and called PAIN; others, in the expectation of consequences, and are called GRIEF. [Leviathan I, VI, 12]

also

This endeavour, when it is toward something which causes it is called APPETITE, or DESIRE; the latter, being the general name; and the other oftentimes restrained to signify the desire of food....And when the endeavour is fromward something it is generally called AVERSION. [Leviathan, I, VI, 2]

Augustine on privation

From the Enchiridion:

For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? in the bodies of animals, diseases and wounds mean nothing but the absence of health; for when a cure is effected, that does not mean that the evils which were present --namely, the diseases and wounds-- go away from the body and dwell elsewhere: they altogether cease to exist; for the wound or disease is not a substance, but a defect in the fleshy substance --the flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils --that is, privations of the good which we call health-- are accidents. Just in the same way, what are called vices are nothing but privations of natural good. And when they are cured, they are not transferred elsewhere: when they cease to exist in the healthy soul, they cannot exist anywhere else.

Enchiridion XI

Homework assignment: Pains seem to be evil in and of themselves. Yet pains are real and definite things. How can Augustine account for the badness of pain? Is Augustine committed to the view that insofar as they are real, pains are themselves good? If pains were to be bad as privations, what would they be privations of? Discuss.

Brain imaging for pain in the courtroom

Law Professor Adam Kolber has an interesting paper on attempts to use brain imaging as evidence that a person is in fact in pain. The abstract:

Pain is a fundamentally subjective experience. We have uniquely direct access to our own pain but can only make rough inferences about the pain of others. Nevertheless, such inferences are made all the time by doctors, insurers, judges, juries, and administrative agencies. Advances in brain imaging may someday improve our pain assessments by bolstering the claims of those genuinely experiencing pain while impugning the claims of those who are faking or exaggerating symptoms. These possibilities raise concerns about the privacy of our pain. I suggest that while the use of neuroimaging to detect pain implicates significant privacy concerns, our interests in keeping pain private are likely to be weaker than our interests in keeping private certain other subjective experiences that permit more intrusive inferences about our thoughts and character

I expect to have a bit to say about this later when I've had the chance to digest the paper. And, yes, I'll share.

Dissertation coda

A friend liked this bit of my dissertation. So I'm sharing it with you. It's the very last section of the whole thing. It says what I've done and why I think my view isn't crazy.

§6.3

Coda

I admit that many of my conclusions in this dissertation are radical and counterintuitive. I have claimed, inter alia, that pains are not what we think, that all existing accounts of their intrinsic badness are wrong, that they have two distinct intrinsic values, that a privation theory of their intrinsic badness is correct, that this privation is found in their phenomenology, and that intrinsic value can have properties no one has thought to combine. Radical and counterintuitive are usually okay in small doses, but in this dissertation the dosage may seem lethal.

I suspect that much of what is worrisome here is due to the shadow of the kernel view. All of these conclusions flow from the rejection of the kernel view. If pain kernels [the raw sensation of pain] are not what we care about from the normative standpoint, then we can take a much more capacious view of what pains are and what we are referring to when we say that a pain ‘hurts’. That opens the door to progress and the conclusions of this dissertation.

Several years ago, in the middle of a judo match, I broke my collarbone. As is often the case with severe trauma, the immediate pain was surprisingly mild. In many parts of this dissertation I have been painting a picture of what I felt for just a few moments when I later attempted to get out of the car in the hospital parking lot. It’s true that my memories may be tainted by theory; and it has been several years since the accident. But it was not me whose body twisted and crumpled or me who shrieked.

As philosophers we must follow our arguments where they take us. But we must also be conscious of when they’ve taken us over a cliff. I, of course, believe my arguments. But it is my reflections on countless stubbed toes, headaches, and memories of pains past, as well as my research into pain science and the depictions of pain in literature, which convince me that we are still on the right side of the precipice.

Finally, even if some of my arguments have taken us astray, I hope that this dissertation’s approach has been suggestive. Working on pain, and just pain, can, I think, keep us close to the foundations of normative theory and illuminate many of their joints and fissures. Pain is both a window into and a microcosm of much of value theory. After all, if anything is intrinsically bad, pain is.