The Emotion Machine

§9-7. How do you know when you’re feeling a pain?

Common sense might answer that you can’t have a pain without knowing it. However, some thinkers disagree with that:

Gilbert Ryle: “A walker engaged in a heated dispute may be unconscious of the sensations in his blistered heel, and the reader of these words was, when he began this sentence, probably unconscious of the muscular and skin sensations in the back of his neck or his left knee. A person may also be unconscious or unaware that he is frowning, beating time to the music, or muttering.”[209]

Similarly, Joan might first notice a change in her gait, and only later notice that she’s been favoring her injured knee. Indeed, her friends may be more aware than she is, of how much that pain was affecting her. Thus, one’s first awareness of being in pain may come only after detecting other signs of its effects, such as discomfort or ineffectiveness—perhaps by using the kind of machinery that we described in §4-3.

If you think you feel pain, could you be mistaken? Some would insist that this cannot be because pain is the same as feeling pain—but again our philosopher disagrees:

Gilbert Ryle: “The fact that a person takes heed of his organic sensations does not entail that he is exempt from error about them. He can make mistakes about their causes and he can make mistakes about their locations. Furthermore, he can make mistakes about whether they are real or fancied, as hypochondriacs do.”

We can make such mistakes because what we ‘perceive’ does not come directly from physical sensors but from our higher-level processes. Thus, at first the source of your pain may seem vague because you have only noticed that something’s disrupting your train of thought; then the best that you can say might be, “I don’t feel quite right, but I don’t quite know why. It could be a headache just starting to hurt. Or maybe the start of a bellyache.” And while such feelings indeed might result from a pain, they could also result from other conditions that your mental critics misrepresent as caused by a pain.

Similarly when you are falling asleep, the first things you notice might be that you’ve started to yawn, or keep nodding your head, or making a lot of grammatical errors; indeed, your friends might notice these before you do. One might even see this as evidence that people have no special ways to recognize their own mental states, but do this with the same methods they use to recognize how other persons feel.

Charles: Surely that view is too extreme. Like anyone else, I can observe my behavior ‘objectively.’ However, I also have an ability—which philosophers call ‘privileged access’—with which I can inspect my own mind ‘subjectively’ in ways that no other person can.

We certainly each have some privileged access, but we should not overrate its significance. I suspect that our access to our own thoughts provides more quantity but does not seem to bring much more quality: our self-reflections reveal very little about the nature or causes of what we can see of our own mental activities. Indeed, our self-assessments are sometimes so inept that our friends may have better ideas about how we think. That’s one reason why I suggested that we mainly represent ourselves in the same ways that we use to describe our friends.

Joan: Still, one thing is sure: none of my friends can feel my pain. I surely have privileged access to that.

It is true that the nerves from your knee to your brain convey signals that none of your friends can receive. But it’s almost the same when you talk to a friend through a telephone. ‘Privileged access’ does not imply magic; it’s merely a matter of privacy. No matter how private those lines may be, there still must be some processes that try to assign some significance to the signals that get to your brain from your knee. That’s why Joan might find herself wondering, “Is this the same pain that I felt last winter, when my ski boot did not release quickly enough?”

Joan: I’m not even sure that it was the same knee. But isn’t something missing here? If sensations are nothing but signals on nerves, then why are there such distinctive differences between the tastes of sour and sweet, or between the colors of red and blue?

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Feelings are hard to describe because they are complex!

Our folk-psychology still maintains that our sensations have certain ‘basic’ or ‘irreducible’ qualities that, somehow, stand all by themselves and cannot be reduced to anything else. For example, each color like Green and each flavor like Sweet has its own ‘ineffable’ character, which is, therefore, unexplainable. For if such qualities do not have any smaller parts or properties, then there’s no possible way to describe them.

Philosophers call this the problem of ‘Qualia,” and some them argue that to understand the nature of those qualities is a fundamental problem of philosophy, because they have no physical properties. To be sure, it is not hard to see (or measure) how much more Red is one spot than another or, at least to some degree, how much sweeter is one peach than another; however (those philosophers claim) such comparisons tell you nothing whatever about the nature of the experience of seeing redness or tasting sweetness.

I want to discuss this briefly here, because some readers might object that if we cannot explain such ‘subjective’ things, that would undermine the whole idea that we can explain the human mind entirely in terms of physical things (such as our brain’s machinery). In other words, if the sensation of sweetness can never be measured or weighed, or detected in any physical way, then it must exist in a separate mental world, where it cannot possibly interact with any physical instruments.

Well, let’s first observe that this claim must be wrong, because it is self-contradictory. For, if you can tell me that you have experienced sweetness then, somehow, that sensation has caused your mouth to move! So clearly, there must be some ‘physical instrument’ in your brain that recognized the mental activity that embodies your experience. In other words, we are simply facing, again, the same kind of problem that we solved in the previous section: we simply need another one of those internal “condition-detecting” diagrams!

Of course, there is something missing here, because we do not yet quite know how to connect those condition detectors. However, so far as I can see, this is merely another instance of what I called the “Easy is Hard