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What is pain? Yes, this is a problem that would occur only to a philosopher. The rest of you have stubbed your toes or bumped your heads or cut your fingers often enough to have an idea, but philosophers insist on examining things. Philosophers have no confidence in truth and wisdom being literally pounded into the head.
The average American philosopher knows what a baseball bat is when he or she sees one. It is, after all, a physical object. It can be seen, smelt, tasted, touched, analyzed, cut into pieces, whatever. Philosophers are fairly good at recognizing physical objects when struck with them. Now, if you ask three philosophers what a baseball bat is, without showing them one, I'd be surprised if you got only three different answers.
Consider one of those little souvenir bats you can buy at the stadium. Are they baseball bats? How about a bat-shaped pen? A flying mammalian insectivore living in a stadium? Is a Louisville Slugger a baseball bat when in the possession of somebody who knows nothing about baseball? If it's on a planet without baseballs? Does it make sense to say that one is circular if cut in one direction and very long if cut in another, since if you try both either you get a half-circular or a much shorter cross-section?
Given that philosophers can get into so much conceptual trouble with the idea of a physical object, it should come as no surprise that there can be violent disagreements about something not obviously physical.
Consider the positivists, who think that a statement has meaning only relating to sense-impressions, either spontaneous or generated by experiment. What meaning should they attach to your pain? They don't feel it themselves, nor can they see it, hear it, smell it, or taste it. Some of the earlier positivists, following their principles, claimed that any statement about pain is meaningless. The problem with this is that statements about pain can be used in productive ways. When I go to a doctor with some sort of complaint, one thing the doctor often asks is "Are you in pain anywhere?" or "Does it hurt when I do this?". Since this sort of questioning is a valuable diagnostic tool, the extreme positivists are wrong.
The so-called Australian school (since most of its proponents were Australian) claimed that things such as pain are their physiological meanings. They often claimed that pain was "stimulation of the D-fibers" (whatever a D-fiber is, presumably some specific sort of nerve). This has the advantage of being grounded in a physical meaning, but it has several problems. One problem is, how do we know that? We have observed that pain is connected with certain activity in the nervous system. This implies that "pain" is something we can detect without fancy instruments. If a man claims to be in pain, and we find his D-fibers are not stimulated, are we supposed to tell him "No, you're not in pain. Here, look at this dial, which tells us whether you are in pain or not." If we would not actually insist that pain does not exist just because the D-fibers are calm, then we must admit that "pain" means something different than "stimulation of the D-fibers", and that we do not agree with the Australian school.
This point is worth considering. Suppose I see a tree and say "I see a tree." What is actually happening is that various nuclear reactions in the Sun have created a very hot plasma, which emits very large numbers of photons in what is called the visible spectrum. Some of these photons have reflected off the tree and entered my eyes, being refracted by my glasses, cornea, lens, whatever, and have gone through my retina to strike my rod and/or cone cells. When a photon of the right frequency hits one of these, it changes its output, and other nerve cells in the retina change theirs to correspond, and the changes in nerve cell output go though certain brain structures. This is not what I mean, though. It is perfectly possible to see a tree, and know you are seeing a tree, without studying neurophysics and such. All of the other stuff has been discovered since people started seeing trees and commenting on it.
Let's recap. There is such a thing as pain, we know that. We can suffer pain, and while this pain may have active D-fibers as a physical expression, pain as a concept is independent of the details of neural anatomy.
To explain this, I'm going to propose a way of perceiving reality, and a way of dividing sense impressions into objective and subjective. The fact is that the physical aspects of pain and sight are both internal to the body, and therefore distinguishing between senses and feelings is purely arbitrary. I think the question is whether the sensations, whatever they are, are replicable or confirmable.
Under certain circumstances, such as a stubbed toe, I will feel pain. So will you, and every one of my readers with toes and a normal nervous system. We can use this as a benchmark: what you feel on stubbing a toe or cutting a finger or other injury is pain. What you feel when you have a certain ailment (diagnosable by other means) is pain. Add up all of these and we have a clear idea of what pain is.
We form something we might call "consensus reality", which is the set of things that can be checked in different ways. Many of these ways are by talking with other people (which is not simple philosophically). As long as we can agree that things should look like such-and-such, and they do, we're talking about real things.
All contents of these pages Copyright 1998 by David H. Thornley.