Why does it seem implausible to us (or at least some of us) that the quality of pain is located in a part of our body (or in our nervous system), just as the red quality might be totally out there in the world (in the red object out there), and not in our subjective experience? In fact, when we compare intuitions in the two cases, the latter seems more implausible than the former; indeed most people are inclined to take pains as lying in our subjective experiences or as a quality of our experience rather than a quality of a part of body, though they might find it plausible to take red qualia as existing out there in the red objects (though some philosophers fight this). The objectivity of pains -that is, the claim that pains are qualities of parts of bodies; qualities just out there, which are represented translucently by the mirrors of our experiences- might not be that implausible. If we establish that any type of our experiences is to represent a particular type of content to us, which is merely detectable through the channel of that experience, it could be plausible to take pains as objective qualities out there, and not subjective qualities of our experiences.
However, the fact that pains intuitively seem to many people as qualities of experiences, and not of external objects (in this case, body parts) is due to the way our phenomenology makes things appear objective to us. On some accounts, our phenomenology makes things appear objective to us, when we perceive those things deep in the space. According to this account, since pains are not perceived deep in the space, they don't appear objective to us. On another account, if the expectation that X doesn't move with the movement of body is satisfied, then X would be experienced or appear as objective. Such an expectation is not satisfied in the case of pains. However, this is all compatible with the fact that pains are really objective, but because of the way they appear in our experiences, they look non-objective to us, and this is the basis of our intuitions that pains are non-objective. But such intuitions should not be taken seriously!
What are your thoughts?
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
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2 comments:
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You nicely summed up the issue. I would add that this doesn’t exactly concenplate often. xD Anyway, good post…
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