Consciousness Live! with Jennifer Corns (S3 E12)

0:00 joining me this morning a very very special guest Jennifer corns Jen for those who don't know you can you say something about who you are and what you do and I'm a philosopher at the University of Glasgow and it is philosophy that I do but I like to do it at the intersection of a lot of sciences and medicine as well for the sorts of things I'm interested in and lately I've been sort of thinking of those things as all sort of falling under the umbrella of threats to agency so at the moment

0:33 I'm sort of toying with that as a way to capture my interest but they are pain affect suffering and death is what I work on mostly very cool so what can you say a little bit more about this director agency idea well I just um yes it's a new it's just a new way of what I've been thinking about as far as how to put together the way I want to think about my research as a whole and the

1:04 kind of contribution I want to make I don't know you started getting older haha I knew I'm more interested in tying the threads together and thinking about how to you know put together something bigger and how to see my own work and how it might hang together so that's that's just a unifying principle that I've been thinking about lately maybe the way to think about what all the things that I'm interested in have in common is that there are threats to a person's agency in various ways so I've been thinking about agency more in different forms of agency and different threats it's a different ways we might understand ourselves as agents that's me work I can talk about it a little if you

1:36 want but I don't think it's the main reason okay no that's it very interesting that's an interesting way of putting all those different things together yeah so I've been reading your book a lot lately the complex reality of pain is this book out already or is it coming out or what's this hi my own sin came out at the end of January yeah Oh congratulations yeah very cool alright so I'll put a link to it after we're done here talking so that people can check it out it's an excellent book it must have been a lot of work it's it really ties together a lot of philosophical and scientific

2:09 strands and overall you argue for what it's kind of a surprising package of use that we should eliminate pain talk from science but not from ordinary everyday folk theory talk and then also there's some interesting stuff being about the medical profession being a kind of interface between the two which I found really really fascinating but so can you just give us a picture of the overview before we get into the details about how you got led to this way of thinking yeah my initial interest in pain happened

2:44 from thinking about dissociation cases like I think a lot of philosophers so dissociation cases are cases when you get some one feature or aspect or dimension setting on whose language you're using one part of pain if you like without some other parts so you get somebody reporting pain but saying they don't mind it or you have pain in a body part getting reported in a body part that you don't have or you have people seeking pain or so these are all kind of cases where pain is going weird in some way the other bit and that just got me interested in thinking about what it is

3:16 and when I started I thought like a lot of philosophers think anyway bedrock starting place is that whatever else it is it's a sort of quality of experience certainly something that it's like for me to experience when I'm conscious of experiencing it at least and and that's where I started and trying to figure out what kind of quality it is and how all of these different experiences that were so different could all have in common this one quality and what to say about that in those cases and then just turn out to be a lot more complex than that which is what led to the title of the book so and in the end what I started to think was we have this term so there's

3:51 the that's the beginning song and then the end thought is that we have this word in everyday life pain and I think we have a posit in every day theory so there is this thing that we say exists in everyday life using the term pain that is a thing that really exists right so I don't want to say that there's no pain that strikes me as a place that one should only go with there's no other option there seems to be pain seems to me to be pain it seems useful to talk about pain seems to be explanatory and predictive in various ways and everyday life to talk about pain so I think it has its home in everyday life and it

4:26 explained there predicts there but then when we go to do the science of it what we find sort of surprisingly is that there's no one thing that does a good job for us for any of our scientific purposes to pick out as pain not only is there nothing that's usefully picked out as pain I think for the scientific purposes that there's no type of pain that's usefully picked out either that was even more surprising to me at first I thought okay so pain is not a natural kind it's the sort of lingo for a term not useful for science so maybe pain is an unnatural kind but there are these types of pain there are natural kinds that are

4:59 usefully generally it's about for scientific inquiry and then as it turns out I think that's false as well and the reasons for that are that in short is that I think pain turns out to be this really complex idiosyncratic thing that we posit in everyday life both of those things are crucial it's not just that pain is complex and it's not just that pain is idiosyncratic it's that the complexity itself the way the things combine is idiosyncratic in a way that means it's always going to be more useful as it turns out for scientific purposes to talk about which mechanisms might be involved in your particular

5:32 token pain experience and generalize about those and target those for treatment than it is going to be to talk about this complex idiosyncratic thing that in everyday life is useful to pick out but for science isn't so that's the long overview yeah okay so so can I ask about the characterization of the folk theory at the beginning because one of the ways you start is by saying well we have the term pain it's real it's part of our folk theory we don't want to get rid of it and we characterize it in various ways but then I think you want to resist the idea that's one of the

6:04 ways that we characterize it as having a kind of quality that's in common between the various things that we call pain is that right alright so is the folk of you does not 'nearly not committed to there being a kind of phenomenal what it's like commonality between the pains it's tricky there and I think it's a good place to press so I think that the folk view is committed to there being a range of qualities that we consider to be pain and that's something I want to accept you but if you say something like is the folk committed to there being some

6:37 distinctive quality that all only pains have and must have then I think the answer is no yeah and partly because I think folks theory doesn't play that sort of game maybe occasionally it does but I don't think folks theory is in the business of weighing in on weather qualities are distinctive in some way or essential to an experience or necessary for an experience or that doesn't seem to me to be the folk game partly because it's often gonna undermine it folk purposes and we got to go case by case but certainly for pain I think that's right

7:09 I think we're willing to accept a whole bunch of qualitative qualities as being part of or a dimension of or an aspect of a pain experience and not any particular one I don't think we require some particular quality is there something you think like experimental philosophy could could help clarify or resolve or maybe yes oh I have some doubts about experimental philosophy and what it can do but I definitely think there's been some interesting work by Kevin Reuter and Justin six-month and I put with them a few times and yeah and that work supports what I'm saying so

7:44 that work they they take the experiments of philosophy on pain reports to try to show take it to turn show so they think they have a bodily conception of pain so they think pains are things in the body they're not experiences at all they're things in the body and to think that it's a kind of experience as a confusion and they think that the data from the folk back that up and having had many long chats with Kevin what I think he knows what I think that data shows it's interesting data what I think it shows is that you can push the folk not surprisingly to start talking about pain as a bodily thing and to start talking

8:18 about pain in the absence of any particular phenomenological quality I think that's right and I think the evidence is quite nice for showing something like that and that's the sort of thing that I think you know X I can be quite good at showing what can I get people to say I don't think it's great forgetting you just talk about the essences of things about but I think it's good for showing you you know what the limits are for what people are willing to buy and accept in their everyday language and you can get people to accept that their pains that don't have pick any quality like or anything so they so the basic idea then is that

8:52 you can you could force people to this conclusion or but it's not evocative of what they preach theoretically thought I mean Justin will say that it is what people pre theoretically think what I want to say and and the furthest I think that evidence can anyway take you is that it's within what the folks are willing to accept I don't think you have to force them though I think forces I think I think they're quite happy to go you tell them a good a good story and they're quite happy to go along with talk about pain that lacks that feature but on the other side which is you know

9:26 my beef with Kevin and Justin is you can tell mister well don't go along with it being a mental thing that has a certain quality as well so and that feeds into the way that I kind of see you know that's part of the reason I see the folk picture in the way I do I think we're really willing to accept a wide range of states and experiences both mental and extra mental sometimes as being pains and then what do we do with that does that mean that well there's there's no such thing as pain that's what some people say nothing could have such contradictory features I don't want say back no but we have to grapple with a complex anything you have to take it

9:58 seriously yeah I think that's one of the major lessons of the science and it's about time philosophers we're paying attention so I think work like yours is very important in this respect getting the word out but so before we get to that aspect of it I mean so one of the things this is kind of comes at the end though when you're considering like ordinary traditional limit abysm which you want to reject one of the kind of arguments that comes from like someone like Dennett is that the folk notion of pain is contradictory and it sounds sort of almost like you're willing to grant partially in the things that you're just

10:31 saying that there are these contradictory strands in our folk theorizing about it but not enough to reject the concept or is it not an outright contradiction on your view and or one I don't think it's not right contradiction yeah I think if it were contradictory that would be game over then we'd have some confusion that we'd need to regimen out of the series so I think if the folk were committed to saying pain is some one token pain is both of mental saying and a non mental saying then we'd have a problem but I think there's no contradiction in saying pain is the sort of thing that often has

11:04 both a mental component and a bodily component and sometimes it lacks one of those there doesn't seem to me to be a contradiction there so the only way that done it can get I mean he does it in a few places but the only way he he can get the contradiction is to take the focus being committed to the idea that pains are essentially something or necessarily something and I just don't think that's supported by the data when we actually start asking the folk but also I just don't think but a sort of more principled place you know I just don't think that's the kind of thing that Fokker up to I don't think they're interested in giving you necessary and

11:37 sufficient conditions or essences yes I agree yeah but but do you but do you think still know that there's a kind not a natural kind maybe but a folk kind that's picked out by the term pain yeah yeah it's just a very wide and splendored for miscue is kind so it's like um trips to the museum or boring meetings or you know of which this is not one yeah so I think there are all sorts of kinds that we might pick out

12:12 that are very promiscuous we allow a wide range of features which may or may not be present and pain is one of those and I think the only reason it seems contradictory when you first look at it to a philosophers ears cuz we're coming out of this tradition where we've tried to shoehorn it into one specific thing and then if you get a case where it doesn't have that thing well that looks really problematic as opposed to just accepting the complexity and trying to grapple with it yeah okay very interesting I mean in my own experience like when you are teaching undergraduates you talk about phantom limb pain or something they they seem

12:44 very puzzled by the idea like a lot of times they'll ask so if the pain is in the mind then is it not a real pain like so it does seem that they're you it's sort of easy to evoke out of them this idea that it's something extra mental that it's something bodily and that that's I mean it tend to support like Justin and and they're kind of view that the folk do you have at least part their conception of pain that it's a bodily thing and I don't know it seems harder to get them to accept that it's a mental

13:15 thing maybe you can get them to accept that yeah there are kinds of pains that are mental but like the pain in your arm being a mental thing seems seems like it's really hard to wedge that out yeah that's interesting you know um I feel like I've taught so much pain that I'm not sure I trust myself about um you know like what might be the best way to do it because I think I've been doing it so long now I know in a way that's dangerous right so but when I when I do it and they seem to get there you know

13:50 we talk about damage a lot because a lot of theories of pain that are dominant of representational theories and in those theories the pain is a mental thing and what's in the body is damaged and once you do the students this kind of vocabulary and you say look when you're in pain on these views right there's damage to the body and then you have an experience of that damage and all that experience really sucks it's got a suckiness it's also got some sensors right it makes you want to do stuff that experience has all this going on but it's an experience of the damage just like I could have an experience of a cup and once you give them that sort of

14:23 language in that distinction a lot of them are perfectly happy to run with it and never look back and some of them are not though some of them are like yeah but the pains in my arm what about the pain in my arms so and the fact that you get these kind of splits or at least I do you know when I'm teaching that stuff I think you know often if I take polls at the beginning which I used to do more than I do now because I feel more confident about what the sort of general just is but you know people are split 50-50 about all sorts of things that you might think if it would part of folk theory that something was essential they shouldn't be so split you know so if you ask them you are mental pains about mental pains or

14:57 so-called mental pains so you know I have some work on this suppose it's social pain stuff it was a big deal in psychology and then looks like experimentally they've sort of lost the game so it's kind of gone away I'm glad I kind of got in there quickly before it the thought was you know look when you have a heartbreak is that is that really pain is it pain or is that just a metaphor did we just call it and the students are split you know like right down the middle so same with the bodily stuff thank you you know you can push them you can push them any which way if you tell him a good story

15:29 yeah right so I mean part of me feels like this is kind of that the folk theory is kind of in bad shape because there's this split so there is who are the folk here which switch which side do we go with why don't we have to pick a side I mean why should there be why should there have to be tension then why does it have to be one or the other you suppose yeah well I guess if you're talking about you know one thing the pain in your arm and you get half the people saying it's got to be in the yarn and the other half of

16:03 people say it's got to be in the mind then it looks like there's no real thing that we're tracking here that's that's unified or coherent because it's talking about one and the same thing I'm not talking about two different kinds of things here so yeah fair enough but um I think the idea that it's got to be one place or the other is the thing that's the artifact of the philosophy room so if you if you take them out beside the philosophy room say I come to them outside of the classroom and I say God I have this terrible headache and I've had it take a student who says either seeing

16:36 in the philosophy room then you out out in the world you say I'll have this terrible headache and it's been there for weeks and they keep running all these tests and I can't find anything wrong with my heads and it's really frustrating it's really puzzling nobody is going to tell me in that case that I'm not in pain I've given them enough of the folk range of things that even though there's no damage there even the die hards damage person is gonna really struggle I think unless they're really committed to a theory in paper somewhere

17:08 they're getting you know no student is gonna say in that case oh it's okay you're not really in pain then no one's gonna no one's gonna do that and the same on the other side right so if you get a case where gosh I have this thing in my leg and every so often it flares up and it hurts me and now and they know that and then I'm sitting here with them right now and I say to them oh yeah they say how is that pain in your leg going and I say oh yeah no it's it's still there it's not bothering me right now but it's still there they're not gonna go oh you're confused it's not a sort of

17:41 thing that's in your leg right that they're gonna accept what I say perfectly fine unless they're really committed to the idea so I think it's only a few when you try to force someone in a choice then you do get something that looks like a contradiction because for different people for different reasons you might have picked up different cues as well are currently in different kinds of life experiences they're gonna be you know feel one way or the other at a time if you make them choose but in everyday life I think people are perfectly willing to let it be very very promiscuous the concepts and yeah that

18:16 has to be a bad thing there might be reasons for that that are actually quite useful you know that's a case I start to make at the end of the book right that's actually is part of the value of the concept of pain is that it applies swim-off so did for many different places yeah because it might be quite really important that I get help when I'm having an experience that could have one of these many things right any one of these many features might be you know important that I get attention for yeah so I mean I don't wanna let me just try one more time because with the headache case I find that so very I think that's a very good case I mean I I know I get

18:48 migraines and they're the bane of my existence but even a non migraine headaches it still seems like there's a location to the headache like for example when I have a migraine I can point to where it hurts like kinda here with icepick is stabbing me or generally in this area so I get you what you're saying that it's not associated with tissue damage and you don't have to say well there's something damaged there that's going on but it's but it seems to me that what the what I'm trying to press on is that the folks seem more committed to the idea that it's located somewhere bodily as opposed to being

19:22 just a mental item like you know like well even with experiences of red they tend to think it's out there so I kind of think they're mostly not realize but but it does that I think if you separate it from the damage and just focus on location in the body I don't think so so here you know it's quite controversial what I'm about to say but if we're talking about the folk notion the first thing anyone asks you when you say that you work on pain is they want to know what kind of pain and in particular they

19:55 want to know if you mean psychological pain or physical pain and so of course ethical pain by something like definition or sip you lations means having to do with the body and located somewhere and so on but but the folk most of the folk and certainly if you talk outside of the philosophy room are perfectly happy to accept all sorts of nasty experiences that aren't physically located as literally pain and we might resist against that there might be reasons to regiment in a way where we don't count that as pain anymore we call

20:27 it something else we call it some other kind of nasty state or weak or we just say physical pain is a totally different thing than emotional pain and then I'm gonna give you a serious physical pain that's what a lot of people who work in pain do but if we're being yes I think about the folk notion and once you start looking at the fact that you can push people to talk about pain in either a bodily or mental way I think that we ought to be serious about the folk notion and really taking this wide range of things into accounts you know if we can if it's useful which I think if we want to track how they're using it in actual life I think it you know it is yeah okay so let me ask you can ask you

21:02 about these disassociation cases because you talked all about you know the bottom you cases personal lobotomy cases pain a sim boliya and so these are cases that you want to present as not being settled by the folk theory so you want to say the folk theory doesn't really tell us how we should think about these sorts of cases and therefore we need to appeal to the science at some point is that a fair way of characterizing you're sort of looking skeptical I wondered what the we is when you say we need to appeal to the sciences so I think in everyday life

21:35 it's okay that we don't have an answer about these was why I was hesitating okay but for treatment of course we gotta do something so you don't think the folk need to look to the science to understand these cases no I don't think the folk no I don't think the folk need to understand the cases yeah okay so it's just that deal right the theorize errs who need to look beyond folks theory to understand what's going on that's right yeah I think folk there is pretty good for folk stuff and then the dissociation cases present problems for specialized kinds of inquiry and theory

22:10 where we need a settled answer you know which is and then I'll pipe down and let you ask the question but you know I think Dennett this is this is something I learned from Dennis so when Dennis I'm talking about pain when Janet says I mean I've learned a lot from it this is one thing when Dennis says look in everyday life the folk have this mess and we need what do we need we need a philosopher I can't mean you can't believe I'm saying this but we need a philosopher to come tell us when it's not and reading it I was like yeah we do need a philosopher to do that but what

22:46 if the philosopher says it's okay for you that you don't know and you over here oh call it this this is what you need and you over here like so if you think of you need a ruling for every purpose but you don't need one ruling for all purposes yeah I think about it so go on so when you say we need a to look to the science that's what that was my hesitation on my face okay yeah so I would just I was just wondering what I mean you talk about this in the book but I was wondering if I could get you to say a little bit more about what you're gonna say to someone who's gonna say like the pain a symbolic is not experiencing pain because they

23:20 they don't but it doesn't bother them they're not motivated so a lot of the core things that we think are associated with pain are missing there they sort of maybe have a sensory thing but but some people want to say well they're not rational in some sense there's something going on there that explains why they would be mistaken and in a way that ordinary persons wouldn't but you want to say that they are experiencing pain is that yeah I want to I do I do I think but I don't think you

23:58 I think the most useful thing to do for most purposes is to take them as being in pain and in particular I think that's the most useful thing to do for treatment which for me is the ultimate test case the main thing you should care most about and for treatment purposes I think to say that they're not really in pain is a major mistake and so so for that that that's the best core reason I want to say that they're in pain but if somebody comes to me and the reason I

24:31 took a long pause is if someone comes to me and says look Jen I'm doing a art project for the museum which just happens on painful experiences and I want to get some classic typical painful experiences a wide range of them I'm not gonna offer up to a symbolic as you know like a clear case of paint and if for that artist if that artist says that's not pain that's not what I mean if I try and they say that's not pain I'm not interested that I'm not gonna try to correct the artists and say no no look it really is pain and the reason you

25:03 should think so is because and I don't see that there's any need to do that so if somebody has some theoretical purpose some specialized purpose where that's not gonna count as pain then fine as a matter of fact it's of course missing some crucial features as you say and for that reason if those are the features of interest or whatever I might be up to it may be quite appropriate not to count that as pain yeah so we I know you put a big emphasis on treatment which I think it's pretty cool actually and an important focus so I that's crucible of theories treatment stuff I think is a

25:35 main focus of your of your book at least and sounds like your work in general and I think that's important that's often I mean you recount this one story in the book where you're talking about someone who's unmentioned whose name was I mentioned but they say like I don't care about you man you're like what seems like a kind of typical be someone I really respect by the way which is why I did not say who it was I think their work is very good if you're listening person cuz I they are and will read the book I know I did it wasn't offered as a slightly was just offered eyes like

26:10 here's a really different look outlook on what theorizing is and you want to refocus it towards thinking about treatment which i think is is worthwhile and beneficial but it seems a bit strange in the a-sun bullet case to focus on treatment there because if you have someone who's you know you poke them with a pin and they smile at you and say do it again in what sense does that need treatment to the devil when you say in one sense does that need treatment yeah the pain there

26:43 the thing which is occurring in them so there's there's no thing which needs to be treated it would seem may be the condition in general to get them to experience the awfulness but it's like they're smiling and say yeah you poked me again burn me I don't mind like it's doesn't bother me let me break my arm to get my keys from behind the couch over here what is it that's you're saying needs to be treated processing of a I mean as you say the condition itself requires all sorts of interventions it's a horrible condition to live with

27:17 but on any particular occasion I mean you don't need treatment if I just poke you with a pin either so I take it unless you're a hemophiliac oh that's quite a poke for the pin we're not hurting though we're not hurting the a symboliks enough in a way that would in general require treatment interventions I mean that even in the bad old days that was beyond the pale yeah but of course when they are in pain they need help just like you do that's and that's that's the point

27:48 so um and when they come to you and they say as they as they might do the a symbolic I mean they have to be trained to seek help when they're suffering and in various ways so a some bollocks Colin Klein has some nice stuff about this I mean the work on two things the work on a symbol looks is a bit of a mess so some people really disagree about it in general and but but the the second thing is the work that looks like the best work we have suggests that these people have other deficits as well having to do with their bodies in various ways so these people sort of

28:21 have to be taught to care more about their bodies and so on and it doesn't seem to me that it would be at all useful for the treatment context in fact quite the contrary if they come to you and say right if they actually you've taught them to care and that it's important well enough to look to the damage and when they have the pain to them seek treatment if they actually do that you then say to them all for you it's not really pain that's like a huge mistake right as far as actually helping them so they need help as much as anyone else when they're in pain I mean that that's kind of the point of course not yeah I guess I'm not seeing what the huge

28:55 mistake would be I mean I'm not saying you're wrong I'm just trying to understand what the mistake here is if they come to you and say you know there's a there's a burning pain but it doesn't bother me then it seems like though you could say to them well that's not really pain but and and I mean what what's the mistake there if they're experiencing pain in these guys cases I mean there's pain and when you have appendicitis the thing that gets you

29:32 going and gets you to the doctor is the pain and now in particular for you I take it if you're sort of neurotypical it's the nastiness of the pain that's playing a big role in how urgently you're wanting to get there and get the treatment and so on now for the a symbolic they brought the pain and they've got the pain I think that's mine actually I shouldn't okay they've got the pain but they don't have the nastiness bit but now they've been trained if we've done a good job which

30:04 is very tricky let's say we've actually done it and now they have the pain of appendicitis which is notice for a symbol it's still quite intense it's quite interesting their intensity ratings are very similar to ours so really and they come to the hospital and they say I've got really intense pain it seems to me that you ought to from a diagnostic perspective take both pain reports at least equally seriously as indicating that me as the equation need to intervene to help you with the damage now I assume you say something like it's not a mistake to correct them it's

30:37 because you're thinking of pain not as having anything to do with it's just an experience and the experience isn't so bad and so I don't have to worry about it but if that's how you're thinking of it then anyway you're begging the question on me and on the folk and on the patient who says they've got pain so when I'm thinking about treatment for pain I'm not just thinking about treatment for effect or or treatment for damage either I'm thinking about treatment of the whole shebang so people's motivational profile some people's motivation when it comes to pain is like problematically out of whack and pain clinicians have to deal

31:10 with that some people's sensitivity to pain is out of whack their emotion surrounding their pain experience that has to be dealt with and of course the damage itself and so on so from a treatment perspective I think we want to accept the wide range as being on a if you like a diagnostic sort of even playing field and the history of pain suggests that when we don't that's the big mistake so of course normally it's in the other way that we don't we say that are faking it they they're saying it's worse than it is where the Aysen bullet gives a case where it looks like it's not as bad as it is but in both cases I think the crucial thing is to

31:43 recognize that there is an experience happening and that there is a bodily thing happening that needs to be addressed from the clinicians perspective and the word is gonna get translated out anyway on my view so the for everybody the word pain should drop out it's just that it's not helpful for me to ever tell you that's a folk term don't you know really what's going on is this mechanism needs intervention I mean that's just not helpful you know things to be doing right but so I see what you're saying and I agree as far as what what you're saying but I mean when the a

32:16 Cibola comes and says I have this intense pain because I mean I had a pata sighs my appendix actually burst when I was in high school so I sort of know they from first-hand view this is terrible pain but it's not like you're gonna give them a fee no it's not like they should be motivated to be let's relieve that pain they should look into the what's going on with their body and treat the appendix but there they wouldn't do the same thing they did for me which was pain treatments to make sure that you know the pain I was experiencing with alleviated in some

32:49 sense so that's what I meant by not thinking that it's not that so I was used treatment more narrowly to me treat the pain anybody should be treated for pain I think that's a confusion okay oh yeah I'm often confused so good I think um that's a very controversial thing I'm saying obviously um that is maybe the most controversial claim of the book that I think pain is never an appropriate treatment target and the reasons are I mean we're circling

33:21 circling around what I think are the reasons for that so and it's because I think what what treatment interventions do when they do well is target particular mechanisms so take morphine case one one problem with morphine and opiates and generalize we're all learning to our Dutchman and to some people's fun I suppose at least for a while is that they knock out whole sways of activity so morphine isn't like a great little pain treatment target its knocking out a whole bunch of swathes of activity and it affects your effect full stop so if you have appendicitis and you

33:56 go to the doctor and you report your pain which is the thing that the doctor now takes as an invitation for treatment and what I on my view and that's what I think should happen for the a symbolic to they give this pain report that pain report should be received as an invitation to perform some kind of intervention some intervention is called for and then of course the intervention you need is different than the intervention the a symbolic needs the intervention you need might be different than the intervention I need to then on a symbolic may be I've got radically different pain tolerances and thresholds than you maybe I've got all sorts of

34:28 other injuries or respiratory problems that mean I need different interventions maybe I need to be able to go to work that day anyway for some crucial I don't know reasons pretty bad anyway you got the point we've got to figure out which which kind of dimensions to do and pain doesn't tell you that for anybody right so in no case I think is the appropriate response oh now I'm gonna treat the pain yeah I see what you're saying and that's the complex idiosyncratic in your syncretic nature of it so we want to looks target particular mechanisms is what it also be a confusion or a mistake

35:02 to say that we want to relieve discomfort no I'm okay with that so I think effect is is its own thing an effect may be a natural kind so that's the work I started doing after this it may turn out Pleasant and unpleasant qualities are natural kind that sometimes need targeted interventions but morphine doesn't just do that I mean right if there is such an intervention we don't we don't have it yet right but I mean so after I had my appendix appendicitis

35:35 surgery they gave me pain relievers I mean discomfort relievers I guess what we could more neutrally frame it but what doesn't seem like you'd have to do the same thing for the a symbolic you would just tell them to be careful when you say pain relief that's a marketing strategy it's a good one and there's a reason it works because most of us have many things in common when we have common common pain experiences most of us have the full shebang but different pain relievers have different things in them and it may well

36:09 be that the a symbolic because most of them are anti-inflammatories and a lot of them have to do with the signal the pro circulate and signaling that gets done it dims that down and so it may well be that the pain a symbolic needs to take a good range of pain relievers post surgically they certainly do and for different kinds of conditions they would do of course not to target the effect they don't affect is missing so that's not the thing I'm trying to get at with the intervention but so so I wouldn't I don't think as neutral to call those Pam sorry to say so call the pain relievers discomfort relievers but

36:43 even though for most of us in many cases most of them will also relieve our discomfort okay yeah I know that makes sense okay so I wonder if we could talk about your case against representational ism which I thought was very interesting I in some sense it's like the dominant view and philosophy that that you talking both kinds of representations them first is a representation of damage in the body and secondly that's kind of imperative a command to do something and you have interesting arguments against both of

37:16 those kinds of views so can you give us an idea about why why are you such a skeptic about these philosophical approaches they assume simplicity I guess is the basic point yeah I think so not just representational ism but I think sort of more old-school brute brute feeling views or raw feeling views or any sort of intrinsic non relation with you they all sort of assume what I call in the book the orthodoxy of simplicity that all pains

37:49 have some one quality that's distinctive to pain and then the job of the fluster of mine is to give an account of the quality so representational ism is one account of qualities in general and pain has been a test case for representational ism for a long time Armstrong was really exercised with it in a very beginning for good reason because I think it is a sort of problem for representational ism the argument against the simplicity view is a bigger arguments of course so I think anyone who thinks there's one simple quality has a problem but one way to show that is to give everyone what they want and

38:22 then show it doesn't work so that's one thing I want to do with the representation list so the representation was who thinks that the quality there is either explained by or constituted by some representation of damage I think the problem is you get the quality or anyway reports of pain and we're granting that it's a quality at the moment you get reports of pain without damage being represented and you get damage represented without reports of pain and the doubled associations are so broad and so rampant that I think that's a real problem and same for the

38:55 imperative is so you need a particular content there I think um you know imperative ISM only came on the scene and around 2007 2008 and Collins done a great job in making it sound really really plausible as Colin does and Conklin in his book what the body commands and you know his view has developed – so in the beginning the content of the command was a little different but at the moment the thought is the command is to protect the body so

39:28 when you have a pain what explains or constitutes depending on how strong the representation lest you want to be that quality is to protect the body and then pains might vary in the kind of protective action and the part of the body to protect and so on but the sort of rough grain content is to protect the body and then again I just argued that there's too many dissociation so tell me what the content is that's what it is I can give you all sorts of pains being reported where it doesn't seem like I have any experience of a commando

40:00 protective body or any behavioral or linguistic evidence to suggest I do and the other way around all sorts of imperatives that I seem to experience or be aware of to protect my body that don't seem to involve any pain so it's the glut of dissociations against boats that I think is the real trouble yeah it's okay I want to ask you I have a question I want to ask about this but can you give us an example of a case of a pain where there's no command to protect the body yeah I mean it's tricky it's tricky to do it without begging the

40:33 questions but I think there are quite a lot so go back to the headache I don't think I'm aware of any command to protect my head in that case you don't think like seeking aspirin or taking a martini as kind of evidence that you are not detecting it like defending it but you're protecting the integrity of the head by trying to get rid of the pain well I'm certainly not aware of myself as doing that so it's tricky um I think I have a standing when I talk about this

41:08 a bit in the book I have a standing desire of course to protect my body so if you threaten it in various ways I'm going to take protective action but remember that the content here has to be at least specific enough to be explaining or constituting pain in particular so it's got to be that these actions I'm being commanded to take protective or otherwise they have to be it looks like they can't just be any old thing or else then the dissociation on the other side is going to be even bigger right so if pouring myself a martini counts as a protective action

41:41 well then I'm got dissociation cases on the other side no unfortunately not that Risa I don't have martini stuffs in lockdown but last night that would do too I guess and that wasn't pain right yeah it's tricky I think just like for the other representations when you try to fix exactly what counts is damage you know you have to fix it in a way that it's a scope problem right you have to get in all the right things and keep out all the right things and it's the same for

42:13 presumably it's got to be the same for protective action so it's got to be that the actions I'm being commanded to take are distinctive enough that those contents only determine pain and not some other qualities all right Orion martinis are gonna get in the game it's got to be something like and Colin again you know as always does a quite nice job of giving you a bunch an example so I just don't think they work but things like rubbing and scratching and holding and cradling you sort of think of these typical things that we do to sort of protect the body those are the sorts of things he has in mind and so as I say

42:46 when I have a headache you know I don't I don't feel I'm certainly not aware of myself as being commanded to do those things you might think transparency fails so Manila Manolo is quite convinced by transparency in these cases he's aware of himself as being commanded to take I don't have that but forget about transparency at all I also don't actually take those actions all the time so it's not like I'm you know constantly compelled to you know even though the pain might be quite intense you know it would be quite weird I think yeah I don't know because I my own experience

43:21 of migraines I certainly do want to kind of rub the area a lot kind of press on it but so I granted there are headaches where you don't have one so it doesn't seem like a universal thing maybe but but I wonder so in this context what I was curious about when I was reading this what I was thinking was would it be would it be a mistake to say that people let you know like Michael Tighe like Ron Klain these guys who are trying to come up with some kind of representation list or imperative theory about the quality here would it be a mistake to say that what they're after is kind of trying to

43:54 give an account of the para debt paradigm cases of what the folks call pain and so maybe there's outlier cases and so sorry but there's a kind of narrow core set of cases for which this corresponds what a folk think I mean that's a cool project but I don't think that's what they're up to ya know maybe that's not what they're up to but I mean would it be a mistake that tried for that sort of project on your account would it be yeah I think I think it would be a mistake to think that one representational content

44:27 could do the work I don't think it would be at least I haven't given any argument to think it would be a mistake to think that for every mental component a representational story could be given indeed I I suspect something like that is true myself I'm quite partial to representational isn't I wouldn't I wouldn't die on that hill yet or anything but um I am and when I started you know what I wanted to work out was a quality space for pain so no I am quite like quality spaces for qualitative character you know shared history I

45:01 quite like that stuff it's the best stuff I know and when I started I wanted a pain quality space and then I think it just fails because as it turns out there's more to pain than the quality but I don't think that shows that representational isn't fails and maybe that representations representation was amiss and write stories so for contents you have full grown content and four qualities you have sensational character or something like this um I think that might will work but the thing I think is a mistake is to think someone content or someone quality is pain at least as we understand that in everyday life yeah so on the quality

45:37 space point so you do think you can have a quality space for paint qualities even if that doesn't exhaust pain itself I mean burning pains are more like you know less like stabbing pains and throbbing pages how do you think you can does that work for the sensory quality aspect of it I don't think so as it turns out so I tried to make it work and some other people every so often someone sends some a PhD student will send me a thing trying to make it work I'm sure that some people are still out there doing it I don't think it works and one reason I think it turns out not to work

46:10 is as it turns out I think and this comes now from looking at it from the other side from starting on the neuroscience side and what's happening I think in paradigm cases of pain typical cases of pain is you've got a sensory component you do and that's coming in a way just as you might imagine it through some out of sensory and through your tissues so in the paradigm case and you have quality spaces for those I think so you have a tactile space and you have a space for temperature I suspect although maybe it's just a uni-dimensional ones I think it's been and rosenthal been Young and

46:44 Rosen will have a nice paper about a uni dimensional space and how that could work I think maybe something like that is what you've got for temperature and maybe you've got something like that for a chemical reception and I haven't yet been able to figure out what I think about whether there is some sort of distinct chemical quality space and how that might work or whether that's just part of the tactile one I think we don't quite have enough to sort of work that out so like I'm think of chile's or something or those horrible brambles or when you get this sort of um

47:16 it's a chemically kind of feeling and there are certain receptors that are sensitive to certain chemicals and I don't know if that's a distinct space or not but I do think there are those spaces but those spaces notice the dimensions for them will let you take values for all the dimensions that give you something that's just nothing like pain right so all sorts of other kinds of touch and temperature sensations and so that's not the pain space right and I just don't think there's any place or role left for one so you need the effect you need the sensory bit I think you you

47:49 typically have the motivational stuff too so you have some sort of motivational state so I think that's the sort of Reason imperative ISM looks so plausible you normally are motivated to do something when you're in pain you know even if it's not constantly rub your head maybe sometimes you ever have it even when you're motivated the motivation goes beyond I think just the protective anything I gotta fix this I gotta do something um so that's part of it too so I think you do need all those things but I don't think you'll get one quality space such that your pain the quality of pain is some function of the

48:24 value of the dimensions at the space okay so I wonder if we could talk start talking about the case I talk for ages that is are you doing okay that's worse that's what's supposed to happen [Laughter] I want to get you to talk about the case for limited ism for scientific aluminum ISM as you call it so we've been it's come up a few times but I wonder if you could say in more detail I mean I think philosophers are most familiar with the

48:57 gate theory of pain or at least you know I think that's kind of a at least among scientifically informed philosophers that's what they think of when they think about the neuroscience of pain maybe but you criticize sorry the neural matrix is becoming quite popular yeah I learned a lot about the real matrix from reading your book actually so I thought that was pretty cool I didn't know a lot about it so I mean the basic argument that you have here is that these are these are cool things the gate theory the neural matrix very inflammatory

49:29 research all of this stuff that's cool stuff but but none of it is going to correspond to what we think of as the type pain yeah is that basically the argument so it's it's not that we want to get rid of these things it's just that they are not capturing what we mean by pain I think all of them identify briefly specifically I think all of them identify mechanisms which may but also may not be implicated and any particular token pain experience so they're important in their identification of these mechanisms and tracing them and thinking about how they work and how we

50:01 might intervene on them and the role that they have to play I think a lot of that work is beautiful work um but none of them identify the pain system or the pain mechanism and actually the scientists themselves are are usually quite careful about that and that's so if you if there are scientists who read your book you would hope that they would come to be convinced that oh I'll just stop talking about pain instead I'll talk about inflammatory and say there you know calcium uptake or sodium gating

50:36 channels or whatever so that's what you hope the upshot of this is it's just a the title of papers it depends on what they're trying to do so I think the upshot for me is not just the title change it's better treatment and I don't mean to be a dick but sort of like taking some moral high-ground about that but I really mean that so and for treatment of course I had a really interesting talk with Laura Moe

51:08 Mosley who's like a leader in pain management a few years ago in Australia and we talked about some of this unlimited business stuff and he was like are you saying that I don't treat pain like we had those like and I said yeah if you mean like when you actually act to intervene is it the pain that you're targeting and then I asked him like do you feel like you can just make someone target on pain and he was like well absolutely not of course pain is very different from person person I was like so which would play the same game here

51:40 but of course if you mean that that the reason to go looking for mechanisms is because we want to intervene to help people with their pain that's absolutely right so that's I think the points about the medicine being at the sort of interface on the mechanism on the mechanism side I think the pain drops out on the folk side not only do I think it shouldn't drop out it's it's crucial it's very important and and the reason the practitioner has such a tough job is because they have to and the reason pain treatment sucks so

52:13 bad I mean everybody admits it does I think it's because you know it's a very hard translation from this promiscuous folk notion into some specific mechanism that we can target so then when you say well what should the scientists be doing or well it depends on what they're doing so if what they're doing is look here's a range of cases that people report take chronic pain I'm not let's say I'm a scientist interested in chronic pain I want to figure out the neural mechanisms it's perfectly legit I think to use chronic pain as a construct to guide chronic pain as reported and needing treatment in the clinic to guide the

52:48 sort of mechanisms I then go look for I think that's a perfectly legit thing to do and to say that's what I'm doing right that's what you're doing I think problem would come if when you identify something you say AHA this is the chronic pain mechanism and as I say I think actually scientists are generally unless they're being pushed to publish you know certain things or journalism happens and the way it doesn't all that but when you talk to them in they're quite serious moments I think they're usually pretty good about that you know it's really philosophers I think you have oversimplified pain and scientists did too until gate control so

53:22 I think that really caused a revolution in the science for us thinking about pain as this multi-dimensional thing and I think and and as involving a range of different mechanisms in different cases and I think most most serious scientists are now actually pretty good about that so that you're not against you know a scientist writing a grant saying they want money to research pain I'm not against that no I think that's great I would be again saying something like we're gonna identify the pain system a pain mechanism and there are a couple scientists who do that and believe that

53:55 and I have had a few nasty interactions I mean I mean well some people think that you know that's what they've done and I and those and I do think that's wrong by the data they're not you know for some a priori reasons yeah so I mean this is the trickiest part I think of your work is this interface between the practitioner and the scientists because I mean like you're saying right now it's legitimate a person comes to the clinic because they're in pain and they say I have chronic pain or I have this pain

54:28 here the clinician then has to sort of go okay so I'm be a folk or something like that so I guess I know it what thing that you're talking about but then when I go and talk to the scientists they got a translate that basically into mechanism talk so then they the pain will drop out and they say okay so this person needs intervention in this particular mechanism not and the other mechanism so there is a usefulness to the pain talk and there is somebody who needs to be fluent in in thinking about what the ordinary person is talking

55:00 about but on your view it's not it's not the the scientist but when the scientist comes back and says here's the right intervention for that then it would be a mistake for the clinician person to say what I'm doing is treating the pain even though that's what you would tell the right or is this not what you tell the person there's a lot in there so two things I think I think what you tell the person depends and I know that's but that's a dick answer but that's really

55:33 the true answer so people people for instance who have who have chronic pain which is the pain that were most likely to think of as being a treatment target in itself are often taught to learn how to and actually Lorimer I think is the best for this is which is why I mentioned him before mostly the best very very good for thinking about how to get a chronic pain patient to sort of get underneath if you like this experience of and pain um and Panama

56:05 Panama Panama Panama theme and think about what else is going on with the body think about what to juices shift the focus and how that can help so you know what you tell a patient I think depends quite a lot on on the patient's you know if you are having a root canal it's probably perfectly good for the doctor to say something like although even most dentists don't usually do that they'll say something like can you feel this or does it hurt but it would be perfectly legit I think for a doctor – for a dentist you know just say something like do you feel any pain when I do this or to say let me know if you feel any pain that's gonna do for us what we need to

56:39 do and there's nothing you know there's nothing wrong with that um whereas you know for some people like some chronic pain patients you do want to get them to stop thinking of what's going on with them in terms of pain cuz it's no longer useful to think about it that way they want to get under that and pass up so I think it depends I don't think um the sort of the way you described it as being in these sort of like quite neatly distinguished silos yeah is this sort of I mean I know when we're just caricature in here but that's not of course an accurate picture of how this sort of science gets done right so

57:13 most of the people who are doing this research also have clinical practices they're entertaining like a lot of maladies usually takes a wide range of interdisciplinary investigators so people who are working on this stuff are generally aware of the clinical context and indeed historically that's what's driven the scientific research as the is the clinical context you know quite rightly I might be so so it's not like all the science has it completely vocabulary and the folk have this completely different vocabulary and then the clinician is the only one who's like

57:48 able to sort of talk back and forth I mean I know a little science a scientist has it you know has a nightlife too you know people have hats that they get to wear and so the clinician hood clinician I think though I mean forget about pain just in general I think a good clinician you know is a good person of the people you know they're able to sort of understand what people are like and what they're saying in their reports and take those reports and get something diagnostically useful out of it it's a real skill you know that that for any condition I think

58:19 involves being able to truck in the everyday ways of thinking and then also being able to truck in you know scientific language that is not you know often usefully communicated back to the folk but that's important for our intervention yeah okay I wanted to ask about the types of pain because of one of the surprising consequences you might I mean you might think laughingly yeah short short short a pain as a type itself is I'm happy with that not having any there not being any pain mechanism but but neuropathic pain chronic pain

58:55 inflammatory pain why aren't why can't we identify mechanisms for these and that was I think one of the most surprising parts of the book I thought besides that I don't want to be a ordinary limitedness was that it turns out that you can't find anything that way either in those places either yeah why what is it just the same it's the same argument is and it's just that when you start to look at the mechanisms it's just too varied and yep yep and his and his I mean as an autobiographical fact that was the direction of travel so you know I started thinking might be a quality space and I could work on the

59:29 neuroscience and try to figure out how the mechanism for it worked what what was how you got the space going basically you know the receptors and so on and then oh well it doesn't look like it's just a quality it's this big thing and then go low could pain research are multiple mechanisms and then go look at specific types of pain and on out I think same same story yeah that's kind of a bummer but I wonder if easy before you go before you move on from that to say I'm do you think that and this is a point you know that I take from chrome Quine I do think some kinds are more natural than others and that's

1:00:04 what we might expect if you have a kind of utility pragmatic approach to thinking about which kinds are natural as I obviously do so I do think it's more useful you're gonna get better generalizations for science by looking at types than pain in general and some types are gonna be more well behaved than others there there might be particular reasons for that some of those might actually be accidental as I've sort of been thinking about a sort of spandrel type features of the way that we've sort of picked out different

1:00:37 types of pain and culture and that kind of stuff so some of these types will be more well behaved than others and for some you know you might get more traction than others but the underlying argument there and the reason I think even those should be eliminated is it seems to me and looking at the data that you'll never lose and that's like sort of crucial point so if I'm wrong about this then I'm wrong I think is that you'll never lose explanatory or predictive power by replacing references or replacing the generalizations the focus of the generalizations to be about the implicated mechanisms as against the

1:01:11 pain types themselves so that's right that's the big move when it comes to the types and the broader kind too but it it really pushes when it comes to the types if that's right then I think then we should eliminate it from scientific discourse so we want to replace it with talk of the mechanism so we go we have a spoke type and we have these more specific spoke types that we start with and some of those are sort of half full CAF science right so we started looking at pain in general and we found oh inflammatory pain what's that and now I

1:01:44 go looking at inflammatory pain that's more restricted and we sort of fix the reference of the term by having discovered a particular mechanism so it's gonna be more well behaved but even as we class things we're that mechanism is associated with the way people report it and so on but you still get all these sort of messy cases and you still have complex idiosyncrasy so you could you know those will be more well behaved because they've been tethered to a particular mechanism but you'd get better generalizations if you just went for the mechanism past the point yeah I mean this is one of the ways in which I think that it's more

1:02:17 more of a thoroughgoing and limited ism than like take memory for example because I mean there's a there's a kind of interesting parallel between memory and those sorts of things that we're talking about here because you know you start off with this thing in memory and then you start investigating you're like oh there's like six different kinds of memory and then maybe even more but still it seems like you can get a kind of mechanistic account for like long-term memory working memory procedural memory it does seem like it wouldn't be a mistake to say that type of memory you know here's long-term potentiation that's what long-term

1:02:50 memory is I mean maybe that's another case or something but it still looks like there's a kind of mechanism there that can give you an account of it but you're saying you can't get that same kind of reductive view for pain types yeah that found there do you think the same thing about memory – ultimately no I think I think I mean I'm not an expert on memory I think we have – I think it's empirical question right so about what's useful for the generalizations there so as I see the memory stuff it looks like what you just said is is right my husband I am that that looks like the right story to me so that the type

1:03:25 memory is not usefully generalized about it doesn't project and the way one would like but that these subtypes do there's also another you might have gone chlorella so same autobiographical story I saw well we don't have types here well maybe we can go we don't have mechanism so maybe we can go pluralist so we say look it's still useful to generalize about the types despite these differences across the mechanisms they're similar enough to be usefully generalized about and I think as it turns out as I say even that is false it's more useful to talk directly about the mechanisms and and the pain types

1:03:58 don't pick one out of course we could introduce a term I mean it's just language so I could say I ain't 568 I just mean this particular mechanism here I just mean prostaglandins Elise that's all I mean well okay but that's not you've lost the folk I think when you yeah yeah so I mean I like the folk I guess but so I wonder what you would say about like so maybe these types that we're looking at are too scientifically oriented in a sense

1:04:32 so maybe inflammatory pain is too much already got too much of the non focus in there but you know what about burning pain stabbing pain the sorts of things that that people normally tell you buy and that show up in IASP and great that these diagnostic categories that is that throbbing is that pulsating is it is it burning is it is it aching you so you don't think that we can find a mechanism for burning pain or that they there isn't something in common between all these pains that's gonna sort of cash out in the neurological terms as it

1:05:04 turns out I think no so I think what you can find is the tape burning pain if you like or what we call burning pain or stabbing pain I think you can find a we're working on it I think it's coming I think you can find a pretty well behaved quality space for tactician I'm so Matt um has a great book about effective touch which is quite nice I mean we're learning a lot about tactician that's there's been an explosion of research so I think you can do that I think you can work on effect so that's where I sort of witness I want to figure out what the effective

1:05:36 qualities are and someone but um but those things are gonna come apart right so and then you have the Zdenek question when they do that pain or not well we need a philosopher right and I just want to say about that you know look yeah it's burning pain that's a thing burning pain is a thing and if I have burning pain I typically want to do something about it and I might need treatment if it lasts and but that doesn't mean there's some one mechanism there why should it I mean you know I don't need that for any of my everyday stuff so I didn't pick something out but as it

1:06:11 turned out was tracking someone mechanism you know and crucially then I also didn't pick out something that was usually generalize about that's I think you know the further so those are two steps yeah at least for me for some philosophers that's one step depending on your view about how mechanisms connect up to science you know that could be one step for me it's – so yeah I don't know how to phrase this but I mean so if we take the mechanistic point which I think is well well taken point so you're not gonna find one mechanism that's common to every burning pain I guess it's the basic idea when we look

1:06:44 we don't really find that but we find one phenomenological quality right I mean we find something there you don't think you don't think we find that I see I'm telling you what's the line and what a nice beetle it is too I mean maybe you introspection is tricky so when you say we don't find a quality i I don't find a quality I find the Bernie I find the nasty I find the motivation I find

1:07:19 various thoughts about the I mean if it's a pain I'm used to getting or no you know I pluck my eyebrows like a lot of people and when I first saw Kerr and when I first started plucking my eyebrows it hurt like a right and now I'm so used to that feeling I know when it's coming I know what it's gonna it's not um but you can identify the feeling though and it's the same as before isn't it don't try to trick me I mean there is someone I mean if by feeling you mean quality I can identify

1:07:53 the feelings some of which have changed some of which are the same right so what's changes like your motivational States and your emotional response to it you don't think it's as horrible or something but there's something there that's the same between the cases which lets you identify it over time I mean you could say this was there before I just don't care about it as much anymore I don't think I I'm not sure I would say it's pain for me at all anymore that was my point well I see oh the sensory but feels the same roughly I mean depending on what else is going on if I've had a martinis

1:08:25 but you know modulo some things that might affect the sensory awareness that part seems the same but the effect is totally different and the motivation is totally different and my thoughts about it are totally different so is that the same pain I mean what do we what are we talking about I mean you tell me and you know what's the purpose that word pick and pain out for it's the same sensory thing yeah yeah yeah so I see what you're saying I guess I would just so it sounds like I got the answer the question you don't agree that there is

1:08:58 one thing that we can identify even from the first person you're just kind of common between things like all of these stabbing pains have something in common all of my migraines seem to have something in common I guess I'd say when I have a really bad migraine I'm like oh there's that damn migraine again it's not Alan think it's numerically the same migraine but I'm like it's that same quality that same feeling I hate it I could tell when it's coming on at last for three or four days sometimes it's just like oh that's that thing again when I stubbed my toe the other day which I which happened to me I was like

1:09:31 oh there's that pain toll get that toe pain again it seemed like the same kind of pain that was there from the last time that I stopped it so it does seem maybe you know introspection is tricky and you know I have a nicer Beatle than you it's not a good game that I want to play but it does seem that the ordinary person is kind of inclined to say there's something there but we're latching on to which we could say was the same before in which we identify as kind of the painfulness but you just think that's a that's maybe bad theory that's leading me to think that I so I don't want to say something totally

1:10:07 outrageous that it might sound like I'm saying so let me just make sure I definitely think people are able to from the first person recognize that they are in pain and I even think that from the first person we are able to recognize that this pain is similar to in various ways when I had before and I even think we're able to do the sort of thing that you were saying which is to say so like I have a recurrent pain – I don't have migraines thank the Lord but I have this strange

1:10:41 nerve pain see how I even said nerve pain in my foot which I went to the doctor for when it first started all the sudden I would just sometimes get this like shooting pain in my foot it was horrible and every so often it goes I would say once every couple months I'm walking in out of nowhere I just gets like this like shooting pain through my foot it sucks the Dickens Tara it's almost as if studying pain right somehow I called upon myself this fate just to like have a little thing to introspect every so often and anyway Paul has some wound in his side he says

1:11:19 God gave him so he could theorize better about some way so and I and I like you I go oh there's that pain again that's actually what I'm conscious of thinking right we totally I think do that the thing I think we don't do when when we're doing that is what I think we're not aware of or what I think we're not recognizing again is someone quality so we're quite used to that combination of qualities it's a very similar combination of qualities that I get all the time in the same way that I might recognize a painting or some other sort of complex

1:11:51 experience and I say oh there's that painting again or they moved that painting I'm perfectly able to pick out complex you know combinations of quality both in the world and in my mind if you go in for the introspection Beatle II stuff and you want to see what it's like for you and there when you go looking I think we're perfectly able to pick these out what I think you don't get from introspection and maybe you couldn't get from introspection now we're leaving my area of expertise is whether or not what you're picking out is simple or complex qualitatively and I think there are these other independent reasons to think

1:12:24 that the pain is not simple yeah and this really puts pressure on views of people who say you know there's a there's a thesis which is going around lately people like Dilip Gough I'm not sure if you know about his work or not but he appeals to a premise that he calls revelation which is that when you have an experience you kind of introspect it and you're acquainted with like its experience or nature you know everything there is to know about it and it sounds like really this is an argument against that kind of you especially for paints is that we don't have a kind of revelation with respect to pains were

1:12:59 really mistaken about their natures it seems like you know that's interesting we should I don't um I have some familiar that stuff but not much but um I don't really give an argument against that directly I suppose in a way you so as far as the book goes I think that I sort of start out almost assuming something like that as false but but one reason the sort of sideways reason that you might get from the discussion there or our discussion to think that it's false is look how come you think it's

1:13:34 Campos idli when I go introspective it's revealed to me in all its glory first of all we're assuming pains equality so that it's the sort of thing that's a candidate for the Gulf sort of move so which I don't think but let's just start the same even if it was when you go looking and when I go looking it doesn't seem simple to me it seems simple to you you what's what's the deal I mean I that sort of stuff is kind of why if the history of introspection ism wasn't enough you know I'm not particularly excited about that as a project for making real progress but yeah I mean I suppose it's a

1:14:07 counterexample insofar as the pain stuff is counterexample insofar as we assume it's equality and we assume that people are being honest about their introspection what is your general view about theory lateness of introspection do you think introspection this theory Laden in a way that some people think observation is theory laid in order do you think yeah I think it today yeah I mean I could say more but I I don't even kind of know this I'm sure is my own family but the idea that somehow I don't know the revelation stuff that well I

1:14:41 know the older lumen it's kind of stuff better so lame since kind of my experience is luminous to me in this kind of way seems like the historical sort of more recent historical anissina besides a sort of really old school history stuff and that stuff always seems to me to be you know just very strange I don't know what it would mean to just know something like more so I don't when it comes to observation I don't know what it would mean to just

1:15:13 sort of I mean I could have like a stimulation and maybe something similar goes on an introspection although we need a theory about how we introspect in which mechanism we use to do it and I suppose I think it's pretty cognitive myself which gonna be you know richly have rich Khan which means it's gonna have something like you know something like a theory driving it seems to me so and I don't I don't quite understand what the alternative is supposed to be that's not kind of magical and I don't mean that in a dis I just I really mean I find it very puzzling you know it's a kind of

1:15:45 posit that's meant to solve some problems in that sense you know I don't find it puzzling but um how exactly it's really supposed to work I'm very strange yeah I think that's fair point I agree but it's what I'm kind of asking was always like if you sort of start off thinking that pain is a simple quality yeah then you're gonna expect something like that if you start off kind of thing and pain into complex quality you're gonna find something complex there so do you think that sort of theory lateness is involved with introspection so that you sort of when you're introspecting you're kind of

1:16:17 antecedent your background to theoretical views about pain or whatever thing your introspecting you're gonna influence what you think you find there yes I do I do I definitely do but I think I mean happily for the simple complex point I think it's not just introspection so you know I try to do this in the book too we have we have other kinds of evidence that we get to look to Anna I mean behavioral evidence not just neural evidence so the way I talk where I report my state's the way you know the reporting um even the reporting if I'm sort of not being careful I might get people to say various things but certainly the expressing of my pain I

1:16:49 think reveals you know that that that it's complex in a way that we just sort of assume in philosophy when we start it isn't you know I mean I really think everybody sort of has this except me maybe things will change but has the starting point well it's a quality it's a simple quality and then we need a theory of that quality that is sort of respectable and whatever that means you know that's the kripke move what you just like what could be more obvious like what are you talking about yeah that's a that's a bad ad it's a bad way of thinking about pain but it's

1:17:20 interesting that people find that kind of intuitive which is kind of what that point out why I was wondering like why would so many people find that I mean obviously flusters love to oversimplify but it just seems like so many people have ended up with that sort of you even in the science like you said that was their kind of starting points until they got you know more sophisticated neural scientifically some actually that's not true so so in the science um so it's interesting actually about that I could talk a little bit about it maybe if you want the history about it yeah so so there's sorry now I'm distracted by thinking

1:17:55 about children and how we get this simple idea but just put that aside for a minute so in the scientist um you have to teach them it's not just their body how does it feel and that's actually quite tricky like really ya know how you find it but my little daughter is just learning about like how to emotionally regulate and what's actually you know an ally and what actually is an infant yeah exactly he's just need to convince I'm really easy like my son what swirling around the grass the other day he like fell face-first and like plowed his face on

1:18:27 the ground and he started crying I was like that doesn't hurt just get up he's like okay mister get ready so Anna my daughter she's been walking for like three weeks now and that's it and so she I mean she's just she fought she she it's terrifying that she falls into everything and if I look at all nervous you know it's game over whereas she's totally fine so so we I think we do have to Bennett helm is really good about us learning about pain and correcting children about it and so so the sort of theory building that at least if you're remain a folk that you'll then go on to

1:19:02 use for introspect in your pain I think you know we're teaching that in these early years it's one of the first kind of things we start teaching them and and it's actually quite a complex thing I think so so I was thinking about that but the science history is also actually complex so there's a nice paper by Dallenbach who does really in general I shout out to Dallenbach who gives these nice histories of different aspects of sort of psycho physical properties and in the philosophy of science side of things that are really lovely and he has a really nice one about pain and he says a controversy about pain is the most intense the history of science has ever seen which i think is overblown however

1:19:37 it was actually there was quite a fight about whether it was an emotion or whether it was a feeling like a quality or whether it was a perception where that was a more complex thing and that debate raged you know as soon as sort of you got modern scientific thinking going at all from then until this sort of turn of the century really when the intensity theory started winning which is also the time he started getting this idea you know philosophy really gaining so much traction I think and that theory started winning where it started looking

1:20:08 like look it was the intensity theory was winning any stimulation of any kind that was really intense would be pain and then the perceptive theory started winning and you sort of it looked like we had these receptors nociceptors in a particular part of the brain and it looked like game over that that was what was going to win when we discovered these receptors and then came you know the revolution with mel second world just blew all that stuff out of the water so that's the gate very good yeah so I don't think it was so much you know I don't think I'm a science side once we actually started doing some science about pain um I don't think it was like from the get-go and was like okay so as

1:20:43 we know with the quality and we're I don't think I don't think that's the history at all okay even though in class feedback that seems to be there the picture yeah because what are the things like we're done it it's the way I know you criticize him rightly so I would say for for oversimplifying our folk intuitions but one of the one of the things that I think then it tried to do is yes his famous line where he says folk theory is like yesteryears science like it's the science of yesteryear that's been sort of calcified into the folk and so it does sort of seem like he's thinking at

1:21:15 least that this idea that penis equality was dominating the sciences and that has sort of percolated down into the level of the folk and it sounds like what you're saying is know the history of the science is more complex than that so even if you take this this idea that the folk theory is yesterday science or whatever it's still a mistake to characterize our folk theory in those terms as bit as equality yeah I think that's right yeah is being sort of committed to that having once been the scientific theory and being able to sort of check history that way that's

1:21:47 interesting about that but yeah no I think that's right I don't think the science was that simple nor do I think the folk theory has ever been that simple yeah so I want to talk about ordinary and conditional images I know we're running I don't know how much longer I can keep you but I have to go tend to the daughter yeah no I exactly so I wonder about traditional limited ism because one of the very interesting moves you make is like yeah we want to eliminate from scientific practice it doesn't generalize is not a natural kind if not natural in essence but we don't want to eliminate it from

1:22:21 folk theory it does a lot of work it's quite useful and you resist this kind of move which I guess I would be inclined to resist less so I want to know more about that you resist this move that sense because the scientific limit ISM is true but that's what encroach on our folk theory yeah and so one way of thinking about this I think is like suppose you know where's time my children suppose you raised your child but didn't mention the folk theory but just the neurological theory like all you did ever talk about was the brain ok so that they fall and you say oh you

1:22:53 know see fibers and alpha fibers and a fibers and so forth and you never mention pain at all to them but you just mentioned the mechanisms so something's in it so that kids going to grow up not using the word pain let's hypothetically they'd be missing something in your view there's there's a there there's something that's valuable that would be left out of their way of talking and thinking about what's going on with them yeah I mean I yes in short I don't actually even know how I would do if I'm right about the situation one couldn't really do what

1:23:25 you're suggesting so when Ana bashes her face on the wall when I go back out there which I'm sure she'll do I have no idea whether in to what extent which particular mechanisms might be going on to explain her then looking at me and going it could be one of a range of things and that's part of why the pain construct is useful you know I I do I can sort of tell whether she's in pain now in fact maybe that's not bad is that because unless she takes a really nasty hit it won't be pain so that's what bad let's say she does it

1:23:59 may not be the see fibers you know that are the trouble having various things having to do with the gate being open or closed to pick one mechanism may mean that she does or doesn't have certain sorts of uptake to various other areas in her brain which is part of why I can then look at her and make her feel better quite quickly so I mean it's just I don't even know how we would do do the gay in this case that's part of the point right pain is doing something for us that the mechanisms don't pain is doing oh look one of this wide range of things might have happened that needs attention um like that's what I'm teaching her

1:24:32 right you right you damaged yourself and oh you have this nasty feeling and oh like you have a sense that something's wrong oh you're worried about your body in various ways and if we want to let in the psychological stuff or the emotional stuff which you know I've been thinking that I haven't thinking about how I want to teach her about pain language and that why do I want to teach her that those emotions really are pain I'm not totally sure I don't know what I think about what's more useful there you know from the folk side of things so some people really want in everyday life to think of those things as pain in the same kind of way I'm not sure what's

1:25:03 more useful yeah you know but but that's when I'm teacher and it's not gonna get taught I think by talking about see fibers you know so even if we had a soul I mean obviously we're an impoverished stain we know a little bit but not great stuff but if we knew it more like you know so I imagine any kind of like the Churchland style argument who I noticed you don't really talk about in the limited business after but you know matter I'm not not not trying to take a dig at it but I just noticed this way of thinking about a limited ism wasn't factoring in but you know Paul is famous for saying things like Paul Tracy links

1:25:35 payments for second things like you know once you learn enough theory then you readjust the way you experience things and he says like I can actually experience the tilt of the earth and I look up at the sky and I feel like yeah I'm experiencing the rotation I don't see the Sun going over here I feel myself going around the Sun and these sorts of various things so you don't think that we can train ourselves to reorient to the mechanisms like oh oh wait let me close the gate rebby so you're no longer you're starting to think about the mechanisms from the

1:26:08 first point first important view and some people think that's a more useful reorientation even for the folk but you want to resist that okay so three things thing the first is I mentioned attrition is a bit and the footnote and in the limit it wasn't paper and sometimes it this is base but I didn't want to go down the rabbit hole dealing with aluminum ISM in general outside of the pain context cuz there was so much to do just with the

1:26:41 pain unlimitedness and stuff and also because I actually which a second thing want to take quite a lot of that on board so I do think that you know in the same sort of all my little nods to sellers throughout right so I think I do think that what we're doing is learning how to build some one overall picture of the world some one theory I think that's right but I think the thing that went wrong and that I think goes wrong in the churches as well is the thought that the only vocabulary you need ultimately for any purpose is science and that just

1:27:17 seems to me to be false and also something that nobody really argues for so there was a lot of and that's the third thing dark nights of the soul once I realized where I ended it was a naturalist like does this mean that I and you can see that sort of at the end of the book I guess when I'm not like does this mean that I think that science isn't the ultimate authority about what exists that's a big question that I really grappled with a lot and I think the answer is well it depends on what you count as a science so there's a sort of tradition here and I think the church lends are part of it

1:27:50 coin as well and Dennett to some extent to all those tenets kg of course in various ways about the realism Keiji sophisticated well what's going on is um you know where they think that look science just is the business of explanation and prediction and you know P tonight Mandy can I've had lots of chats about this back when I first started working on this right so if you he's got that view right so if you think that yeah

1:28:22 if you think that that's what science is then then science is I do think is the ultimate and only authority about what exists we want one big theory it's the scientific theory that's what we're doing fine but that just doesn't seem to me to be a way of understanding what science is that lets us do the sorts of things that I want to do the sanctions I want to make it would just be more laborious but we could do them so I could say something like this you could if you have that picture science you could revise the way I put all the claims to say something like Pena's should be eliminated from now my list all the sciences right biology

1:28:56 chemistry neuroscience blah blah blah blah but we should retain it because it's usefully explanatory and predictive for folk for everyday life and art criticism and like throwing the other things that we do and care about it might actually involve explanation and prediction there's a real question about which things do and you might think that that's the really interesting demarcation problem I'm not so interested in those labels I think the thing that's important is that when I'm trying to explain and predict behavior in everyday life it's really useful I

1:29:28 want to keep it and then because I also want to be a good naturalist I think to myself that makes me think that in order to for that to be legit I mean I think a folder and all those like knots right like okay in order to rescue the folk I gotta find something in the science matches up in a way that at least justifies this practice even if it breaks down into many things or right but I need at least something that can explain the determination of this thing and right and I really thought that too so and I guess I just think as it turns out that's just not how it is am I good

1:30:04 so I think the reason for that at least in this case it's not for some spooky reasons so I think each token pain each time I have a pain there's some story about that pain that's purely physical istic and involves that's my view I don't argue for that but that involves that involves some activity of perfectly scientifically inquire above it's of me that I could generalize about usefully that I totally want to there's nothing in the book that goes against that and I think that's and then there's the

1:30:36 question of whether or not all the different ways I can type stuff are going to be amenable to scientific inquiry and the reason I think pain isn't and maybe other things from everyday life may turn out not to be is because for everyday life I really care about the things that make you you and when it comes to pain it's really important as it turns out that power I think everyday concept works it's really important that I attend to these IDEO in Christie's of you when I'm helping you with your pain and so you're gonna lose that if you move to the generalizations and on a level that will

1:31:09 apply to all humans you're gonna lose those features of Richard so we could do a science of Richard and then we could keep paying I think probably that's the okay round thought maybe we could maybe maybe your pains are similar enough that we could I'm not sure about that that's another sort of step in a way but that's I think consistent with everything I say how it is Richard sounds really important to me until we do there's no science I think where you want to keep the pain yeah how long it'll I mean part of my reason for bringing up the church

1:31:41 lens was because being the way I read them this is personally an empirical question or whether we want to eliminate these terms or not I mean there are areas and they're in their work where they say maybe these folks psychological terms are gonna survive because they're useful but maybe once we understand the neuroscience better we'll just see that the folk are better off talking in this way as well and there's partial transitions already people say this philosophy is hurting my brain you know I saw sticking the other day I said h2o polo okay so we we know what

1:32:16 there that's already an encroachment where the scientific terms is becoming useful in a way but so it sounds like I mean if there's one sense in which what you're saying right now makes me think that you think that's not going to happen that there's no that it's almost like not even within the realm of empirical testability or something like that that we would eliminate folk talk about pain in favor of these more mechanistic oh I just said golly I didn't mean to suggest okay I'm fully on board with the church things about that

1:32:47 that was my totally I think it's an empirical question how and when we take vocabulary from one specialized purpose and repurpose it when that's going to be useful that's totally an empirical question and I think I think it's also for the record like I don't think our folk terms or sockos anything that way like some of that might need cleaning up maybe some of those should go maybe some of those should be replaced or better things we get from so I'm totally on board with that yeah totally when it comes to pain I feel like the book was an attempt to

1:33:20 grapple with that empirical question so I don't and I don't think you know half the book gives the sciency stuff and I don't think that um as it turns out that we can replace it for everyday use and keep the same explanatory imperative or and I also don't think that it's usefully generalized about for what I'm calling science which you might call particular sciences and then list them like so but you'd be open to idea maybe five hundred years from now people know like the average person knows enough neuroscience where they would be able to

1:33:55 introspect their gates being closed or open or introspect a certain sodium channel being more active or something like that and then go to the doctor and say doctor and I there's something wrong with my gating mechanism as opposed to saying I'm feeling pain what I think we know from the science is but what I think we know from the science is that each token pain is complex and idiosyncratic with this convergence of mechanisms we have identified and then we look at enough pain reports and we've learned gosh you get these very

1:34:28 similar pain reports with this very different mechanistic activity that we as the folks still count as pain that's what I think we've learned from the science and then you might say and for that reason at the moment I say get rid of it from the science but look we still have all this use in everyday life now it may be that everyday life could change such that we all become much more you know fluent in talking about all these different mechanisms but I do think at that point our interest will also have needed to have changed in various ways our taught the amount of

1:35:01 time we have and in various contexts will need to change the reason pain is quite helpful I think it's because it's as I say that it gets her this towards the ends it isn't developed but but if you think about what happens when you're in pain a needing help right if the science is right that every time that's happening there's many many almost your whole brain is involves right in many of these cases and there's a whole bunch of different mechanisms that are contributing to that experience it just doesn't strike me as plausible but in most of those cases when the pain

1:35:35 report is useful in everyday life it's going to be as useful to say something like okay and I'd have had to learn how to do quite a lot of introspecting I currently can't do but let's say I do okay there's this chemical signaling happening over here and there's this sort of firing over here and the neural connections between these two are very strong today in this way such that this kind of a thing and all this happened yesterday because memory feeds in seriously to pain in a way that's crucial but I just don't see it being plausible that in the moment where it matters for cane if that's gonna be particularly useful of course it may be

1:36:08 for other bits of our folk life it may be for some pains and others I mean it may turn out that but at the moment it's very hard to see given the data about what's going on in the wide range of cases that we embrace with our everyday term it's hard to see how that's gonna be as good at replacing it you know yeah it's an empirical question okay we're running out of time here but I want to ask a couple speculate I mean more speculative sorts of things so one is this thing that kind of occurred to me while you're talking at the very

1:36:41 beginning of our discussion about threats to agency so I wonder if excuse me I wonder if you can't try to build a kind of content for the representation all the counterpane out of something like that so maybe what pains have in common is this threat to agency thing or do you think that's too broad of a category because there are other non-painful threats or so yeah yeah yeah I think you brought so so at the moment I'm working on a theory of suffering that says that so fingers crossed that paper will finally go out sometime soon

1:37:15 but yeah suffering as significant disruption to agency that's the kind of view I want about suffering and I just think there are lots of kinds of of that that aren't pain if you think about intense boredom or hunger or fear or I could list horrible things so we've all got enough horrible things right now maybe I shouldn't do that yeah you know what is interesting I mean we describe hunger pains yeah sometimes hunger is pain I think that's okay but not always and sometimes it's still a significant disruption to my

1:37:48 agency in a way that I want to say I'm suffering from hunger but I'm not in pain I think yeah yeah okay so it's the same the same arguments can apply but not in the case of suffering it sounds like for suffering you're gonna get a kind of unified account well I'm working on it we'll see so I think at the moment um how I think I mean there are reasons for that I don't know that suffering is as as widely the way we use it in everyday life it's quite I think rife for being tightened up in helps it's almost like a dangler it sort of hangs

1:38:20 on to talk about pain in a way that I'm not sure is usually doing much additional work I mean I think it's interesting the way we think about it and do that but the thought is that it would be useful just sort of put it in a basket that children family Hannah yeah no I'm getting the timer yeah yes laughs on this I think the new thought or the new way to try to think about it is that we might have different forms of agency so you have like well you might think of this biological agency social agency psychological agency and you can get

1:38:55 these different kinds of suffering so in a way you're getting still this sort of hopefully the kind of nuanced picture that I think we actually have of the ways that we might suffer but that all of them can be understood as the significant disruptions to agency that's the that's the new song coming from thinking about the pain stuff you know interesting yeah I'm looking forward to see that project and then finally I wonder as this is really speculate but I mean it sounds like I maybe know the answer to that you're gonna get from what we've been discussing but I wonder about what your views are generally about pain and non biological systems so can we have can we build a robot that

1:39:29 experiences pain if we gave the same sorts of mechanisms would it come up with the same folk theory that we have is it ethical for us to do that sort of thing so just curious about your views on that I mean I I definitely think that you could for all I can tell you could build a robot that could have everything that we have so you could build a robot such that it was useful to referred to it as being in pain you could give it all the mechanisms we have and it how idiotic it would be I think depends in a way on how we make the

1:40:02 robot right and so that's that's I think sort of tricky bit about how different it might be from us or how different they might be from each other that's a sort of programming question and I you know that we would want to work out whether of course um the pain of such a creature would be creature will be created it create such a thing would have the same ethical standing as us as a separate question you know um that that's a deep one but I don't see why not uh-huh so I I mean what makes pain bad I think is a real on my on my view is not

1:40:38 that it's paying as such because any of the components might be different so I think you can have some pains that maybe are are not bad for you you can have some pains that are not bad too cause you can I mean you got to think about but most pains are bad for you and they're bad too cause and they're bad for your body and right just kinda have to break it up so the phenomenologically you think the robot would be similar to less I mean I don't see why not yeah yeah and it would even maybe describe itself as feeling pain be able to talk to us in that way and we would

1:41:09 be able to say well we did intervene and the same sort of ways looking for the mechanism and so forth if you gave it the right theory it would yeah yeah so you'd have to teach it like you teach you can yeah yeah I don't know how you depends on the robot right weather and what kind of training you give it but so long as it worked itself into the right theory it would give you the right introspective data I think yeah that's just part of that is the coolest picture right my that's that's why the token claim about pain I think is really

1:41:41 important for me every token pain is still explained and determined by the activity of the system that's that's right yeah I mean for myself personally I'm funny more in lead for the biological account so I guess I would I'm more skeptical that you can have even if a function the same I'd be more skeptical that it felt pain what's missing but somebody biologic anyway who knows what I don't know maybe it's calcium who knows but yeah I'm kind of anti function at my core but that's just you know that's but I do feel like

1:42:16 maybe when you talk to neuroscientist and you really get down to it a lot of them are functionalist but not all of them some people really think there's something if you I mean the one of the thoughts is that if you build the mechanism eventually it be so complex that we would call it biological in some sense it's amazing to me that they decayed away from it but that's not really what I was trying to press out what I was trying to get out was so if we could design the Citiz let's entertain that we can do this I think it's at least conceivable so we could

1:42:50 build it to have a pain mechanism so there's nothing about pain itself I mean another way put the point is that it's kind of accidental feature of us that these mechanisms are so disparate but there's a conceivable creature which did have a pain mechanism in the way that maybe the Flusser thought we would have had or now you look very skeptical so here's how I was thinking about it and then tell me how how we got the pain mechanism out of it so I was thinking you could make a robot that has all the mechanisms I have whatever those are and

1:43:26 whether we understand them functionally or biologically I mean Turtles all the way down or whatever you give me your biological thing and I'll functionalize it but okay so it's got the stuffing and then it's got all the stuff I've got and then it's mechanistically and then I take it cuz I am a little physicalist perspective I don't have any meds for this but I then take it that it's going to be subject to the same sort of theory that I am so it's gonna be useful to explain its behavior in the same ways and it's also going to be true of it as

1:43:58 its true of me though then I take it that it doesn't have the pain mechanism it's got a bunch of mechanisms that sometimes converge in a way that it's useful for everyday purposes to refer to as pain just like okay so we could build a system like that but couldn't we also build a system that had one canonical mechanism that reduce these these things called pains and what you have these little describe in that way not a page or something so is there something about pain itself which prohibits that I guess is what I'm asking yeah well when you say pain itself is there something about the wide and

1:44:34 varied group of things that we use the term pain to refer to in daily life that resists that yes I think so okay because because once you stop talking once you fix it with some one mechanism you no longer have this promiscuous thing but I think you have I mean I suppose you could build a robot you could build a robot to have one and only one kind of experience it ends up getting to do all the things that some paradigmatic pain does you could do that I suppose that creature of course but that robot wouldn't be like us but you

1:45:07 could like make a little thing that has a paradigmatic pain because you you programmed it that way maybe you could do something like that I haven't thought about that if you see what I mean it wouldn't have you its pain would be you know it wouldn't have the full range of pains that you and I have but you could maybe build something where it's got this bit and this bit and this bit in this bit and this bits got all the paradigmatic features of the thing and every time I turn it on you know you could you could do yeah so that's interesting because it's not I mean I what the way I was thinking was that it's kind of accidental feature of us that it turns out to be so so different

1:45:40 but all the things that we call pains and all their different variety and glory could have turned out to have one mechanism which was the explanation that's what that's what motivated your beginning research and idea just sort of empirically turns out that's false but couldn't they have also empirically turned out to be true yeah I mean there's a sense of code in which so it's gotta be right I mean I yeah totally if it's if it's a yeah yeah there's a sense of code of much like credit or not which is merely an epistemic sense hopefully I'm not sure Richard my hesitation is

1:46:17 that it depends on how we're doing the reference fixing is my hesitation so if I think about in everyday life the term pain picks out something that is extremely promiscuous so what's going on in my mind is thinking could you have a mechanism a mechanism whose activities were this promiscuous I guess you could but but so yeah there's some sense of could there would that be the kind of mechanisms we find in creatures like us I start certain having a bit of a problem about exactly what would have to

1:46:51 be involved to give mechanistic activity the same sort of promiscuity that we have because when I think about a mechanism I think about a thing with I mean I tried to be very liberal about it there's a thing with hole a hole with parts that does something that determines the thing I'm interested in that's a mechanism for something mechanisms are mechanisms and if I think about a mechanism for pain it's got to be well-behaved enough that I can pick it out as that mechanism and then I wonder if something so well behaved is gonna be able to play the role in everyday life that pain as a matter of

1:47:25 fact plays I'm maybe you'd have to have quite a promiscuous kind of mechanism that I think is not like ours yeah interesting yeah tonight makes all right yeah it does make sense I want to I want to ask a lot of other stuff but everyone you have time and I mean this could go on for thousands of years but we got a and this at some point I do want to ask at the end final question if there's anything which you were hoping would come up in this discussion that hasn't come up and the answer can be no but I like to check uh oh I don't think so yeah I'm gonna say this quickly because

1:48:02 of the consciousness blog I should say I was surprised there was no consciousness chat about the pain let me just say I think because people interested in consciousness might be interested so now I think everybody working in pain thinks there are non conscious pains so here's oh it's a little plug for people working on consciousness to maybe not do as they sometimes do and take pain as the experience it's like oh and this is early every pain person is like what are you talking about yeah absolutely no I'm glad that you brought that up I was

1:48:36 gonna ask about unconscious pains but then I figured you never mentioned in your book so you know maybe that's good thank you but on that note though the folks seem really resistant to that idea that's not part of the platitudes on the folk do you think or I think I think that the folk think panes are typically conscious but as in some of Kevin and Justin's work but they'll go along with panes that were there all day that you want to wear off and for me that's not yeah they'll totally buy those I mean no just

1:49:11 real quickly do you think so do you think there's room for a bifurcation view here where the word pane is ambiguous between the mental conscious experience and then the bodily thing itself so in the way that you know like I you know I think the word right is ambiguous in this way sometimes we mean red we need red objects sometimes we mean red experience of bread and both are equally good uses of the word red it's kind of pointless to argue about which one is really red flower and my experience of the flower they're both you know red in a sense do you think the same could be said of pain as well that

1:49:45 so maybe what you're doing with the focus pushing just disambiguating the notion in a sense I mean this is Chris Hills view for the record so that's his view and he has a nice little accessible piece on it in that volume and it's putting together he's on pain and it's an it's a great book i I think it's a nice move um I mean I can see why it's tempting I just I mean I think it's I don't think it works I don't think does what it's supposed to do not least because I think the folks think of pain as involving both of those things I don't think you get the kind of if you could start getting serious about

1:50:18 the semantics I don't think that these things behave in the way that they're supposed to that's the short answer I don't think it works out plus to make the utility point again because that we've gone into quite detail now um you know it's not useful I think just separate the moan in that way so when you tell me I'm in pain do I say what do you mean there's something wrong with your body or do you mean there's something wrong in your mind or do you I mean all right well I'm at notes thank you for mentioning the unconscious painting I I think it's good to know that most

1:50:50 scientists think that there is unconscious pain because most philosophers find it really absurd I mean maybe that's changing a little bit but a lot of people you talk they're like pains are necessarily conscious like what do you mean by pain if it's not consciousness as an experience – which doesn't help I mean you know even though they say that but then in actual practice I think everyone accepts that there are these paints that you sometimes not aware of and that they still have all the qualities of pain like they're all the stuff there but just with it you know you being without it being conscious well when you say all

1:51:22 the qualities and all the stuffs were back in the weeds and we gotta go I think that depends on who you ask yeah so that's not common so it's like you can't have the paradigm case of a pain but not have it be conscious that's right that's not common yeah yeah so when you say that there are unconscious pains what you mean is something like there's a bodily disturbance I wasn't aware of or or something like that well that's not what I mean I I think you can have all the full shebang-a-bang and just not be aware of it but that

1:51:56 that and I think most people working in pain in philosophy also think that I think there are very few people but anyway the people who sort of focus on pain and as such and not focus on qualities or consciousness I think all those people think that's a common and David and moranto everybody working on pain accepts that you can have all of it and just not have it consciously however so far as I know I think that's right maybe my rock sometimes flirts with the other idea but if you ask him you asked him he thinks you can have an unconscious cream um let you go but we gotta have a whole separate session now

1:52:29 unconscious alright thanks again Jennifer I have to say your book is wonderful I hope people read it I think it's really quite an achievement I think that it deserves wide attention I learned a tremendous amount from it and from talking with you today so thanks a lot for joining me thanks okay and just hang out for a second I'll say bye all fair alright let's end this I never know officially oh there we go okay so we're officially off the air now