A range of philosophical questions arise from our experience of pain. Michael Tye explores some of these in conversation with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast.
Philosophy Bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy
I moved on to this chat after listening to Mr Dennett. Your listeners & Mr Tye might be interested in my free book referred to in my comments about Free Will, at www.thehumandesign.net Mr Tye quite rightly identifies pain as based in neurology, and that it is similar to a perceptual experience (indeed it may be one).
Neuroscience needs to show us how the event in the brain (firing of neurons) following the firing of neurons in my toe, represent the pain as occuring at the toe without sending that feeling back to the toe. We must wait 100 or so milliseconds before the signal from the toe reaches sufficiency in the brain, without the brain sending a signal back to the toe to tell it "now you can feel it".
The event in the brain is referred to the toe "as if" the toe felt it at the moment of sufficiency in the brain. A event in the brain is experienced as a feeling at the toe. This is fine, because the event causing pain did actually occur at the toe, and it did experience that bruising & bleeding. It nevertheless requires a feeling as if experienced by the toe, rather than experienced by the brain when it completes the signal from the toe after 100 milliseconds, an interesting phenomenon.
Posted by: Marcus Morgan | September 03, 2012 at 07:52 AM