Physicalism and "pain"

Assuming physicalism, plausibly there are a number of fairly natural physical properties that occur when and only when I am having a phenomenal experience of pain, all of which stand in the same causal relations to other relevant properties of me. For instance:

1. having a brain in neural state N

2. having a human brain in neural state N

3. having a primate brain in neural state N

4. having a mammalian brain in neural state N

5. having a brain in functional state F

6. having a human brain in functional state F

7. having a primate brain in functional state F

8. having a mammalian brain in functional state F

9. having a central control system in functional state F.

Suppose that one of these is in fact identical with the phenomenal experience of pain. But which one? The question is substantive and ethically important. If, for instance, the answer is (c), then cats and computers in principle couldn’t feel pain but chimpanzees could. If the answer is (i), then cats and computers and chimpanzees could all feel pain.

It is plausible on physicalism (e.g., Loar’s version) that my concept of pain refers to a physical property by ostension—I am ostending to the state that occurs in me in all and only the cases where I am in pain, and which has the right kind of causal connection to my pain behaviors. But there are many such states, as we saw above.

We might try to break the tie by saying that by reference magnetism I am ostending to the simplest physical state that has the above role, and the simplest one is probably (i). I don’t think this is plausible. Assuming naturalism, when multiple properties of a comparable degree of naturalness play a given role, ostension via the role is likely to be ambiguous, with ambiguity needing to be broken by a speaker or community decision. At some point in the history of biology, we had to decide whether to use “fish” at a coarse-grained functional level and include dolphins and whales as fish, or at a finer-grained level and get the current biological concept. One option might be a little more natural than the other, but neither is decisively more natural (any fish concept that has a close connection to ordinary language is going to have to be paraphyletic), and so a decision was needed. And even if (i) is somewhat simpler than (a)–(h), it is not decisively more natural.

This yields an interesting variant of the knowledge argument against physicalism.

1. If “pain” refers to a physical property, it is a “merely semantic” question, one settled by linguistic decision, whether “pain” could apply to an appropriately programmed computer.

2. It is not a “merely semantic” question, one settled by languistic decision, whether “pain” could apply to an appropriately programmed computer.

3. Thus, “pain” does not refer to a physical property.

If materialism is true, we can't die in constant pain

Here is an unfortunate fact:

1. The last minute of your life can consist of constant conscious pain.

Of course, I think all pain is conscious, but I might as well spell it out. The modality of the “can” in this post will be something fairly ordinary, like some sort of nomic possibility.

Now say that a reference frame is “ordinary for you” provided that it is a reference frame corresponding to something moving no more than 100 miles per hour relative to your center of mass.

Next, note that switching between reference frames should not turn pain into non-pain: consciousness is not reference-frame relative. Thus:

2. If the last minute of your life consists of constant conscious pain, then in every reference frame that is ordinary for you, in the last half-minute of your life you are in constant conscious pain.

Relativistic time-dilation effects of differences between “ordinary” frames will very slightly affect how long your final pre-death segment of pain is, but will not shorten that segment by even one second, and certainly not by 30 seconds.

Next add:

3. If materialism is true, then you cannot have a conscious state when you are the size of a handful of atoms.

Such a small piece of the human body is not enough for consciousness.

But now (1)–(3) yield an argument against materialism. I have shown here that, given the simplifying assumption of special relativity, in almost every reference frame, and in particular in some ordinary frames, your life will end with you being the size of a handful of atoms. If materialism is true, in those frames towards the very end of your life you will have to exist without consciousness by (3), and in particular you won’t be able to have constant conscious pain (or any other conscious state) for your last half-minute.

Pain as a category

I’m getting convinced that pain, or even physical pain, is a category that does not cut nature at the joints. Consider that the taste of mouldy bread is more unpleasant than a typical vaccination jab, but the jab is physically painful while the taste is not. So neither are all physical unpleasantnesses pains, nor is it even the case that pains are distingushed from other unpleasantnesses by intensity. (That said, it is likely true that among physical sensations, the very most unpleasant ones are all pains.)

So, pains seem to be a subtype of displeasures. Is it a subtype that cuts nature at the joints? If we could say that pain just is tactile displeasure, then that would help. But not all tactile displeasure is pain. If I have a calloused hand and I move it against a fuzzy cloth and feel the callouses catching on the cloth, that’s definitely unpleasant—but not the least painful. So only some tactile unpleasantnesses are pain.

What unifies the tactile unpleasantnesses that are pains? Is there a common feel that all the pains have and that the other unpleasantnesses don’t? I doubt it. A burning pain and a dull ache feel quite different, and what they have in common appear to be (a) their tactile nature and (b) their unpleasantness. But (a) and (b) do not distinguish pains from other tactile unpleasantnesses.

I suspect that pains are like fish, which are a paraphyletic group. (Coelacanths and lungfish are more closely related to humans than to tuna.) They do not mark a natural kind of sensation. There are many kinds of unpleasant tactile sensations, such as itch, excessive cold, unpleasant roughness, burning pain, stabbing pain, dull achy pain, etc., and the ones that we call “pain” have nothing special in common.

This point is even clearer if we do not limit ourselves to physical pain. For the pain of embarrassment is, if anything, closer to disgusting taste than to stabbing pain.

All this suggests to me that pain is not a useful philosophical category. Unpleasantness or displeasure is a useful category. Specific types of unpleasantness, some of which are pains, are also useful categories. But pain as such is not.

An asymmetry between physical and emotional pain

Here is a puzzling asymmetry. It seems that:

• Typically, we should seek to remove serious physical pains, even when these pains are normal and we are unable to alleviate the underlying problem.

• Typically, when emotional pains are serious but normal, we should not seek to remove them, except by alleviating the underlying problem.

Thus, if one has lost a leg in an accident, it seems one should be given pain killers, whether or not the leg can be reattached, and even if one’s degree of pain is proper to the loss. But if one has lost a friend, the grief should not be removed, unless it can be done by restoring the friend (there is, after all, more than one sense of “lost a friend”).

Structurally, it seems that leg and friend cases are parallel: In both cases, there is a harm, which it is normal to perceive painfully.

Solution 1: The difference is due to instrumental factors. In the case of the loss of a friend, the pain helps one to restructure oneself mentally in the tragic new circumstances. In the case of the loss of a leg, however, assuming one is already seeking medical attention, the pain is unlikely to lead to any further goods.

Solution 2: Due to the Fall, typically our physical pains are excessive. We feel more pain for a physical loss than we should given that our primary ends are not physical in nature. The appearance of asymmetry is due to an equivocation on “normal”: the kind of pain we feel at physical damage is statistically normal for fallen human beings, but is not really normal. On the other hand, when we talk of normal emotional pains, there the pains are either really normal, correctly grasping the tragedy of the situation, or else they are actually deficient. (A standard theological intuition is that Jesus suffered mentally more at evils than any of us, because his virtue made him more acutely aware of the badness of these evils.)

Functionalism and pain-likeness

Say that a functional property F is pain-like provided that a human is in pain if and only if the human has F.

Assuming functionalism, there is a functional property F₀ which is pain. Property F₀ will be pain-like, but it won’t be the only pain-like property. For there will be infinitely many ways of tweaking F₀ to generate functional properties F₁, F₂, ... that in humans are instantiated precisely when F₀ is, but that differ in instantiation among aliens. For instance, F₁ could be F₀ conjoined with the property of not currently thinking a thought that has seventeen levels of embedding (I take it that humans can’t think a thought with more than about three levels of embedding), while F₂ could be F₀ conjoined with the property of not consciously exercising magnetic sense, and so on.

There will thus be infinitely many pain-like properties that differ in when different aliens instantiate them. One of these pain-like properties, F₀, is pain. And now we have a difficult question for functionalism: What grounds the fact that this particular pain-like property is pain? Why is it that having F₀ is necessary and sufficient for hurting but having F₁ isn’t? What’s so special about F₀? Why is it that F₀ picks out a phenomenally unified type, but the other properties need not?

Unfelt pains

Here is something everybody should agree on: there are no unfelt pains.

The obviousness and clarity of this strongly suggests:

1. Pain is the very same concept as awareness of pain.

But if (1) is true, then we should be able to put “awareness of pain” wherever we have “pain”. Thus:

2. Awareness of pain is the very same concept as awareness of awareness of pain.

And we can repeat the substitution:

3. Awareness of awareness of pain is the very same concept as awareness of awareness of awareness of pain.

This leads to an endless regress. I won’t worry about that. Instead, I will worry about the fact that from 1–3, the following follows:

4. Anyone who is in pain is aware of awareness of awareness of awareness of pain.

But 4 is empirically false. It is especially false in the case of intense pains that are so overwhelming as to make the multiple levels of awareness in 4 impossible.

So, we should reject 1. How, then, do we explain why there are no unfelt pains?

I think the answer is to say that “x feels a pain” or “x is aware of a pain” can be understood in two ways:

5. x is aware of their state of paining

6. x is paining.

I think that in ordinary usage of “feels a pain”, 6 is the right understanding even if 5 is a more literalistic translation. Given that to be aware of a pain just is to pain, it’s trivial that there are no unfelt pains, since anyone who is in pain is paining just as anybody who is engaged in a dance is dancing.

(If instead we opted for the unordinary sense of 5, then it would be false that everyone who is in pain feels a pain, since one might have the first-order pain without the second-order awareness of that pain.)

So far this sounds like the familiar adverbial theory of perception. But I don’t like the adverbial theory of perception. After all, to feel is to be aware, and to be aware is to be aware of something. What is one aware of when one is feeling pain? The natural answer is that one is aware of pain. But that gets us back to 1–4.

So if it’s not pain we are aware of, and yet we don’t want pure adverbialism for pain, what are we aware of? Thomas Reid noticed that we have a word for the hardness of a physical object, namely “hardness”, but not one for the corresponding phenomenal state. In the case of pain, it seems to me we have the opposite predicament: we have a word for the mental act of sensing, namely “pain”, but no word for the property that the act of sensing represents. (Reid's account here is that pain is a mere sensation, without anything represented, but I don't like that.)

But we have a word that comes pretty close. Anyone who feels pain feels unwell. And to feel unwell is to sense (one’s) unwellness (in a non-factive sense of “to sense”). So to feel pain is to sense a particular kind of unwellness (there are other kinds of unwellness, like the ones sensed in nausea or itching). We don’t have a word for that particular kind of unwellness, though we can describe it as the kind of unwellness that is properly sensed in pain. (By the way, the word for the genus of sensations of unwellness seems to be “discomfort”. Every pain is a discomfort, but nausea and itching are discomforts that aren’t pains.)

A simpler formulation of the paradox of short pains

On reflection, my paradox of short pains can be simplified. Start with:

1. Whether I have had a pain does not depend on the future.

2. It is impossible for me to have a pain that lasts less than a picosecond.

3. I once started to be in pain for the first time in my life.

Now imagine that the first pain in my life just started half a picosecond ago. Then anybody who has the power to annihilate me in the next quarter (say) picosecond has the power to make it be the case that I had not yet had a pain, since if they so annihilate me, then I won’t have had a pain by (2). But whether someone will annihilate me in the next quarter second is a fact about the future, so whether I have had a pain depends on the future.

To put this in Ockhamist terminology, if we accept (2), then we have to accept that facts about whether one has had a pain can be soft facts.

I like the idea of denying (1), though I think this may make presentists (and others) uncomfortable.

I also like the idea of saying that the argument equivocates between phenomenal and physical time. The duration of pain is a phenomenal duration that does not correspond in a precise way to a physical duration.

More on the problem of short pains

Consider these two very plausible theses:

1. Whether I have pain at time t does not depend on any future facts.

2. There is a length of time δt such that you cannot have a pain lasting no more than δt, but you can have a pain lasting 4δt.

Now imagine that I feel a pain that lasts from t₀ to t₂ = t₀ + 4δt. Let t₁ = t₀ + (1/2)δt. Suppose it is now t₁. Then I am in pain. But now I claim that this counterfactual is true:

3. Were it to be the case that I was to be annihilated at t₀ + (3/4)δt, I wouldn’t have felt any pain now.

Why? For if I were so annihilated, my pain could only have lasted (3/4)δt, which is too short for a pain by (2).

But by (3), whether I feel pain now depends on whether I will shortly be annihilated, contrary to (1).

Hence, we need to reject one of (1) and (2).

It is hard to reject (2). After all, imagine the sequence of times: a second, a quarter second, a sixteenth of a second, …, 2⁻⁴⁰ seconds. Clearly I can feel a pain that lasts a second. The last of these is less than a picosecond, and clearly I can’t feel a pain that short. So somewhere in that sequence I must reach a δt which is too short for a pain, but where 4δt isn’t too short for a pain.

I think denying (1) isn’t as bad as it may seem.

But perhaps a less counterintuitive move is to deny that phenomenal times and physical times are as closely correlated as they intuitively seem. Here is a possible story. Phenomenal times are discrete points while physical times are continuous (or discrete on a much finer timescale). You can feel a pain that is located at exactly one phenomenal time. The spacing between the phenomenal times corresponds to a fairly large (and non-uniform) spacing between physical times, say of the order of magnitude of a millisecond. So, you can feel a pain that is there one millisecond and gone the next, but you may feel it at exactly one point of phenomenal time.

As far as I can tell, it is not possible to run the annihilation argument while keeping careful track of the continuous physical and discrete phenomenal timelines. I guess this is a way of rejecting (2) by making it not make sense.

Here is a third way out of the argument. Imagine that what it is to have a pain at t is to have had some constitutive physical or spiritual process P have lasted some threshold period of time δt. On this view, before P lasted over a period of δt, there was no pain: pain only starts once P has lasted δt. We might now suppose that δt is something like a millisecond. Then it is possible to have a pain that lasts only a picosecond: for that, all we need is the underlying process P to have lasted δt plus a picosecond—and only the last picosecond of that process would have constituted a pain. But we no longer need to make the implausible claim that we can be aware of picosecond-scale stuff. For in paining, our awareness is the awareness of the underlying process P, and that process always needs to have taken something in the millisecond range for it to constitute a paining.

This way out of the argument also has the consequence that it is not possible to have a pain before completing the first δt of one’s existence. Pain is not a momentary property.

The third way out will not appeal to dualists who think phenomenal states are fundamental.

More on the privation theory of evil

Back in April, I suggested that there are two possible privation theories concerning evil:

1. every evil is a privation

2. for every evil, what makes it be evil is a privation.

Well, Aquinas essentially scooped me, in the first article of the De Malo, by distinguishing two senses of evil in the statement “evil is a privation”. If “evil” means the evil thing, the claim is false. But by “evil” we could mean the evilness of the evil thing, and then Aquinas holds the claim to be true. And it seems to me that the evilness of the evil thing is basically that which makes it evil, so Aquinas’ theory is basically my theory (2).

I think too much of our current literature on the privation theory of evil suffers from a failure to explicitly make the distinction between the evil thing and the evilness of the evil thing. As a result, some of the counterexamples in the literature are only counterexamples to (1). And indeed it’s not hard to find uncontroversial counterexamples to the claim that every evil entity is a privation. Josef Stalin was an evil entity (I hope he has repented since), but he was never a privation; an act of adultery is an evil thing, but it is not a privation.

Consider, for instance, the most discussed example in the literature: pain. It gets pointed out that pain is not a lack of pleasure or any other kind of privation. That is very likely true. But Aquinas’ version of the privation theory does not require him to hold that pain is a privation. He can just say that pain is an evil thing, but evil things don’t have to be privations. Rather, what makes the pain be an evil is a privation. Of course that still requires a privative theory as to what makes pain be an evil. But there are such theories. For instance, one might hold a modification of Mark Murphy’s theory about pain and say that what makes pain in paradigmatic cases bad is a privation of a correspondence between our mental states and our desires, given that in paradigmatic cases we desire not to be in pain (and it’s not much of a bullet to bite to say that pain isn’t bad when it doesn’t go against our desires).

The story about pain doesn’t end here. One might, and I think should, question whether the correct ontology of the world includes such entities as “matches” between mental states and desires for pain to be a privation of. I think what Aquinas would likely say is that because being is said analogically, “matches” do exist in an analogical sense, and hence we can correctly talk of their privation. I think this is problematic. For once we allow that “matches” exist analogically, we should equally allow for privations and other lacks to exist analogically—and Aquinas indeed does. And then we run into the problem that even positive things can count as lacks: for instance, sight could count as a lack of the lack of sight. And once we have gone this far, the privation theory becomes trivial.

But the point remains: once we have seen Aquinas’s distinction between the evil being a privation and the evilness of the evil being a privation, the critiques of the privation theory are apt to get a lot more complex.

Slowing down pleasures and pains, once again

If suddenly everything in game and in my brain slowed down while I was having a good time playing Asteroids, my conscious sequence wouldn’t be subjectively affected, and the hedonic value of the game would not change in any way. It would just take proportionately longer to get the same overall hedonic value.

But this leads to a paradox. Suppose that I am experiencing an approximately constant moderate pleasure for five minutes, and you experience that pleasure for ten minutes. Then, obviously, you get approximately twice the hedonic value. But one way to make it be the case that you experience the same pleasure for ten minutes is just to slow down all of your life by a factor of two. And yet such a slowdown should not affect hedonic value.

I think I previously thought that one way out of this paradox was to suppose that time is discrete. But I don’t think so any more. In fact, it seems to me that making time be discrete makes the paradox worse. For in your slowed-down ten minutes of pleasure, there will be twice as many pleasurable moments of time, which should predict, contrary to the intuition I began with, that you will have twice the hedonic value. Granted, if time is discrete, there will be some technical difficulties with how the slowdown happens at very short time-scales. But that doesn’t matter for us, since if time is discrete, it is discrete on a Planck scale, which is way below any time-scales relevant to my enjoying a game of Asteroids. And we need not imagine any weird “microphysics slowing down” for the thought experiment: it suffices that the computer software slow down by a factor of two and that you be given drugs that make your brain work more sluggishly than mine.

A different way to try to solve the problem is to suppose that there is some kind of a clock in my brain, and that only states at a clock tick are pleasurable. Thus, if your life is slowed down by a favor of two, then that clock will slow down, and in ten minutes of your enjoying Asteroids there will be the same number of pleasurable ticks as in me, and so you will get the same total pleasure.

But this is tricky. Whatever process is generating the clock ticks in our brains is presumably a fairly continuous analog process. Thus, there will be no such thing as an instantaneous tick of the clock. Rather, there will be an extended period of time (on a time-scale many orders of magnitude above the Planck scale, so any discreteness of physical time will be irrelevant) at which the tick occurs. (Think of a physical clock ticking. The tick is a sound that occurs every second for a fraction of a second—but that fraction is non-zero.) So if I am having pleasure during the tick and you’re having pleasure during the tick, since your tick takes twice as long, it seems you have twice as much pleasure.

I can think of only one way out of the paradox right now, and that is to deny that it makes sense to talk of there being a pleasure or a pain at an instantaneous physical time. Rather, pleasures and pains (and presumably other qualia) always occur over an interval of times. The clock toy model can now be rescued. For we could say that what counts is a pleasurable or painful tick, but if the tick itself is shortened or extended, the hedonic value does not actually change. Let’s imagine that the clock works like some processor clocks. There is an electric square wave generated somewhere, and the ticks are the transitions from a high to a low voltage. Since real-life “square wave” isn’t actually square, but has transitions with wobbly smooth edges, the ticking—i.e., the transition from high to low—takes time. What makes it be the case that one has experienced a pleasure or pain during an interval of times is that this interval contained a clock transition from high to low together with some further state that is not itself pleasurable or painful but that, when combined with the clock transition, constitutes the pleasure or pain. The number of pains or pleasures during a period of time is the number of such transitions.

If one slows down the system, the clock transitions become slower. But the number of clock transitions is unchanged, as is the number of pleasurable or painful clock transitions. Thus there is no change in overall hedonic value.

But notice that on this toy model it is never true that one is experiencing a pleasure or pain at an instant. For there is no transition from high to low clock state at an instant. Transitions happen over an interval of times. This will bother presentists.

The above line of thought assumed supervenience of the mental on the physical. But a robust dualism faces the same problems of slowing down and speeding up, and the fundamental idea of the solution, that pleasures and pains are constituted by essentially temporally extended processes and that there are no instantaneous pleasures or pains, is still available.

Presentism and adding up pains and pleasures

A year of moderate pleasure is worth paying a second of intense pain for.

An eternalist explains this in the obvious straightforward way: the total pleasure you experience on this deal is more than the total pain.

But for the presentist, at any time during the pain, you just have the pain. You will have the pleasure, but it’s not a part of reality and hence of your life. And at any time during the pleasure, you just have the moment of pleasure, but because it’s moderate, it’s not enough to offset the past pain.

What we want is an explanation of why it makes sense—as it obviously does—to add up the pains and pleasures over a lifetime. For the eternalist, since all of them are a part of reality, adding seems to make a lot of sense. But for the presentist, it is really unclear why you should add unreal things to real things to get a “total benefit” or “total cost”.

Theism and qualia

The following six premises are logically incompatible:

1. Pain is intrinsically bad.

2. Pain is a quale.

3. Qualia are real entities.

4. All real entities are God or created by God.

5. God isn’t intrinsically bad.

6. Nothing created by God is intrinsically bad.

A theist could turn this into an argument against qualia.

I myself am inclined to deny premise (1).

Another variant of the knowledge argument

Let P be the pain center of the brain.

Suppose you knew all of physical reality and nothing else. Then you would know that stimulating P would cause squirming, shrieking and avoidance. But it seems you wouldn’t know that it’s bad for one to have P stimulated. Then, upon having one’s P stimulated, one would learn that it’s bad for one to have P stimulated. So, there are facts that go beyond physical reality.

Animal consciousness

I wonder if a non-theist can be reasonably confident that non-human animals feel pain.

Start with functionalism. The precise functional system involved with feeling pain in us has no isomorph in non-human animals. For instance, in us, damage data from the senses is routed through a decision subsystem that rationally weighs moral considerations along with considerations of self-interest prior to deciding whether one should flee the stimulus, while in non-human animals there are (as far as we know) no moral considerations.

We can now have two hypotheses about what functional system is needed for pain: (a) there needs to be a weighing of damage data along with specifically moral consideration inputs, or (b) there just needs to be a weighing of damage data along with other inputs of whatsoever sort.

We cannot do any experiments to distinguish the two hypotheses. For the two hypotheses predict the same overt behavior. And even self-experimentation will be of no use. I suppose one could—at serious ethical risk—try to disable the brain’s processing of moral data, and prick oneself with a pin and check if it hurts. But while the two hypotheses do make different predictions as to what would happen in such a case, they do not make different predictions as to what one would remember after the experiment was done or how one would behave during the experiment.

Similar problems arise for every other theory of mind I know of. For in all of them, it seems we are not in a position to know precisely which range of neural structures gives rise to pain. For instance, on emergentism we know that pain emerges from our neural structures, but it seems we have no way of knowing how far we can depart from our neural structures and still get pain. On Searle-style biologism, where functionalistically irrelevant biological detail is essential for mental properties, it seems we have no way of figuring out which biological biological details permit mental function. And so on.

I know of only one story about how we can be reasonably confident that non-human animals feel pain: God, who knows everything, creates us with the intuition that certain behaviors mean pain, and in fact these behaviors do occur in non-human animals.

An argument that the moment of death is at most epistemically vague

Assume vagueness is not epistemic. This seems a safe statement:

1. If it is vaguely true that the world contains severe pain, then definitely the world contains pain.

But now take the common philosophical view that the moment of death is vague, except in the case of instant annihilation and the like. The following story seems logically possible:

2. Rover the dog definitely dies in severe pain, in the sense that it is definitely true that he is in severe pain for the last hours of his life all the way until death, which comes from his owner humanely putting him out of his misery. The moment of death is, however, vague. And definitely nothing other than Rover feels any pain that day, whether vaguely or definitely.

Suppose that t₁ is a time when it is vague whether Rover is still alive or already dead. Then:

3. Definitely, if Rover is alive at t₁, he is in severe pain at t₁. (By 2)

4. Definitely, if Rover is not alive at t₁, he is not in severe pain at t₁. (Uncontroversial)

5. It is vague whether Rover is alive at t₁. (By 2)

6. Therefore, it is vague whether Rover is in severe pain at t₁. (By 3-5)

7. Therefore, it is vague whether the world contains severe pain at t₁. (By 2 and 6, as 2 says that Rover is definitely the only candidate for pain)

8. Therefore, definitely the world contains pain at t₁. (By 1 and 7)

9. Therefore, definitely Rover is in pain at t₁. (By 2 and 8, as before)

10. Therefore, definitely Rover is alive at t₁. (Contradiction to 5!)

So, we cannot accept story 2. Therefore, if principle 1 is true, it is not possible for something with a vague moment of death to definitely die in severe pain, with death definitely being the only respite.

In other words, it is impossible for vagueness in the moment of death and vagueness in the cessation of severe pain to align perfectly. In real life, of course, they probably don’t align perfectly: unconsciousness may precede death, and it may be vague whether it does so or not. But it still seems possible for them to align perfectly, and to do so in a case where the moment of death is vague—assuming, of course, that moments of death are the sort of thing that can be vague. (For a special case of this argument, assume functionalism. We can imagine a being of such a sort that the same functioning constitutes it as existent as constitutes it as conscious, and then vagueness in what counts as functioning will translate into perfectly correlated vagueness in the moment of death and the cessation of severe pain.)

The conclusion I’d like to draw from this argument is that moments of death are not the sort of thing that can be non-epistemically vague.

Note that 1 is not plausible on an epistemic account of vagueness. For the intuition behind 1 depends on the idea that vague cases are borderline cases, and a borderline case of severe pain will be a definite case of pain, just as a borderline case of extreme tallness will be a definite case of tallness. But if vagueness is epistemic, then vague cases aren't borderline cases: they are just cases we can't judge about. And there is nothing absurd about the idea that we might not be able to judge whether there is severe pain happening and not able to judge whether there is any pain happening either.

Qualia are not all fundamental entities if theism is true

This argument is sound. I am not sure if premise (2) is true, though.

1. If God exists, then all fundamental entities are intrinsically good.
2. Pain qualia are not intrinsically good.
3. So, pain qualia are not fundamental entities.

Two puzzles about pain and time

Supposing the growing block theory of time is correct and you have a choice between two options.

1. You suffer 60 minutes of pain from 10:30 pm to 11:30 pm.
2. You suffer 65 minutes of pain from 10:50 pm to 11:55 pm.

Clearly, all other things being equal, it is irrational to opt for B. But supposing growing block theory is true, there are only past and present pains, and no future pains, so why is it irrational to opt for B?

Well, maybe rationality calls on us to make future reality be better, and we have:

1. If you opt for A, then at 11:55 reality will contain 60 minutes of pain

2. If you opt for B, then at 11:55 reality will contain 65 minutes of pain.

Opting for B will make reality worse (for you) at 11:55, so it seems irrational to choose B. However, we also have facts like these:

3. If you opt for A, then at 11:30 reality will contain 60 minutes of pain.

4. If you opt for B, then at 11:30 reality will contain 55 minutes of pain.

Thus, opting for A will make reality worse at 11:30. Why should the 11:55 comparison trump the 11:30 comparison?

One answer is this: The 11:55 comparison continues forever. If you choose B, then reality tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and so on will be worse than if you choose B, as on all these days reality will contain the 65 minutes of past pain instead of the mere 60 minutes if you choose A.

However, this answer isn’t the true explanation. For suppose time comes to an end tonight at midnight. Then it’s still just as obvious that you should opt for A instead of B. However, now, it is only during the ten minute period after 11:50 pm and before midnight that reality-on-B is worse than reality-on-A, while reality-on-A is better than reality-on-B during the whole of the 80 minute period strictly between 10:30 pm and 11:50 pm. It is mysterious why the comparison during the 10 minute period starting 11:50 pm should trump the comparison during the 80 minute period ending at 11:50 pm.

I suppose the growing blocker’s best bet is to say that later comparisons always trump earlier ones. It is mysterious why this is the case, though.

The story is also puzzling for the presentist, as I discuss here. But there is no problem for the eternalist: on B reality always contains more pain than on A.

However, there is a different puzzle where the growing blocker can tell a better story than the eternalist. Suppose you will live forever, and your choice is between:

3. You will feel pain from 10 pm to 11 pm every day starting tomorrow
4. You will feel pain from 9 am to 11 am every day starting tomorrow.

Intuitively, you should go for C rather than D. But on eternalism, on both C and D reality includes an equal infinite number of hours of pain. But on growing block, after 9 am tomorrow, reality will be worse for you if you choose D rather than C. Indeed, at every time after 9 am, on option D reality will contain at least twice as much pain for you as on option C (bracketing any pains prior to 9 am tomorrow). So it’s very intuitive that on growing block you should choose C.

Maybe, though, the eternalist can say that utility comparisons involving infinities just are going to be counterintuitive because infinities are innately counterintuitive, as our intuitions are designed/evolved for dealing with finite cases. Moreover, we can tell similar puzzles involving infinities without involving theories of time. For instance, suppose an infinite line of people numbered 1,2,3,…, all of whom are suffering headaches, and you have a choice whether to relieve the headache of the persons whose number is even versus the headache of the persons whose number is prime. The intuition that C is better than D seems to be exactly parallel to the intuition that it’s better to benefit the even-numbered rather than the prime-numbered. But the latter intuition is not defensible. (Imagine reordering the people so now the formerly prime-numbered are even-numbered and vice-versa. Surely such a reordering shouldn’t make any moral difference.) So perhaps we need to give up the intuition that C is better than D?

Physical and psychological pain

In English, we have a category “pain” which we subdivide into the “physical” and the “psychological”. But this taxonomy is misleading.

Consider the experiences of eating some intensely distasteful food—once as a kid I added chocolate chips to my tomato soup and it was awful—or of smelling a really nasty odor. These sensations are not pains. But, phenomenologically, the difference between these unpleasantness experiences and the physical pains does not seem greater than the difference between some of the psychological pains and the physical pains.

Reflection on the phenomenology does not, I think, reveal any good reason to classify physical pains and psychological pains in one natural category and the experiences of nasty taste or smell in another.

Nor does there seem to be any good reason to classify this way when one thinks of what the representational content of the experiences is. Physical pains seem to represent our body as damaged. Psychological pains seem to represent complex external states of affairs as bad, particularly in relation to ourselves. And bad taste seems to represent a food as bad for us. There is a common core in all these cases, and there does not seem to be a tighter common core to the physical and psychological pains taken as a unit.

Thus it seems to me that having a category of pain that includes physical and psychological pains but excludes the other unpleasant experiences I mentioned is like having a biological category of bovinoequines that comprises cows and horses but excludes donkeys. It’s just not a natural taxonomy, and unnatural taxonomies can mislead one in reflection.

I propose that the natural category here is the unpleasant, under which fall most physical pains, most psychological pains and a large host of other experiences. But there seem to be such things as pleasant or at least not unpleasant pains.)

One can have suffering without pain—I suffered when I had the soup with cholocate chips, but it didn’t hurt (except my pride in my culinary ideas). One can have pain without suffering. So the tie between pain and suffering is not very tight. But perhaps there is a tighter connection between suffering and the unpleasant. I now have two options that are worth exploring, both quite simple:

• suffering is unpleasantness

• suffering is significant unpleasantness.

We can talk of physical pains and psychological pains, but we need to be careful not to be misled by the repetition of the word “pain” into thinking there is a natural category that includes just these two subcategories of pains but excludes the others.

How do we divide up the unpleasant? One way is to base things on the representational content. Maybe all of the unpleasant represents a state of affairs as bad, but we can subdivide the bads. Here are some potentially natural subdivisions of bads:

• to self vs. not to self (more precisely: qua to self vs. not qua to self)

• non-instrumental vs. instrumental

• intrinsic vs. relational

• actual vs. potential

• past vs. present vs. future

• bodily vs. mental.

We get something a little bit like the English category of “pain” if we consider unpleasantness that represents non-instrumental intrinsic actual present bad to self. But not quite: many psychological pains are backward looking, and some are complex experiences that include components of representing bads to others.

Asymmetric temporal attitudes and time travel

Philosophers sometimes use thought experiments concerning the asymmetry of attitudes towards future and past events as arguments for a metaphysical asymmetry between past and future. For instance, the fact that I would prefer a much larger pain in my past to a smaller pain in the future is puzzling if the past and future are metaphysically on par.

Here’s a thesis I want to offer and briefly defend:

• It is not rationally consistent to give use thought experiments in this way and to accept the possibility of backwards time travel.

The reason is quite simple: if backwards time travel is possible, our asymmetric attitudes track personal time, not objective time. If I am going to travel 100 million years back in six minutes, I will prefer a smaller pain in five minutes to a much larger pain 100 million years ago, since both of these pains will be in my personal future and only a minute of personal time apart. But the metaphysical asymmetry between past and future tracks external time, not personal time.

Pain and a hybrid privation theory of evil

According to Augustine’s privation theory of evil, evil has no positive reality, but is always a lack of something. It seems that theists are committed to the privation theory of evil. For if evil has a positive reality, then obviously that positive reality is other than God. But according to theism, every positive reality other than God is created by God. But God does not create evil. So theism is incompatible with the idea that evil is a positive reality.

However, that argument doesn’t seem to be quite right, as it assumes that the only two options for evil are that

1. Evil is a positive reality,

and

2. evil is a lack.

But in fact it is more plausible to think that

3. an evil is grounded in both a lack and a positive reality.

Consider Alice’s cowardice when she discovers that her employer is producing defective medication and nonetheless does not report this to the FDA. Alice’s cowardice is only partly grounded in by a lack of courage. It is also partly grounded in Alice’s humanity. After all, Alice’s pencil also lacks courage, but does not therefore count as a coward.

This observation is closely related to the fact that a careful definition of the privation theory of evil will specify that evil isn’t just a lack, but a lack of a due good, of a good that ought to be present. And courage should be present in a human but not in a pencil, so that evil is not constituted merely by a lack but by a lack plus whatever—say, humanity—that grounds the dueness of what is lacking. So perhaps the hybrid theory (3) just is a charitable way of understanding the classic Augustianian theory.

Note, too, that (3) can be reconciled with theism just as (2) can. For we need not say that God creates such things as holes that are constituted by combinations of positive and negative realities. We can say that God makes the positive realities, and the holes, shadows and evils are just a logical consequence of what he has made and what he has not made.

Now, one of the main objections to the privation theory of evil is pain, which sure doesn’t seem to be a lack, or even a lack of something due, but rather seems to be a positive reality. But the hybrid privation theory (3) can be reconciled with the phenomenon of pain.

Here’s how. We don’t know what constitutes pain. Start by imagining that a computer could feel pain (something that seems plausible given materialism). We don’t know what kind of program and data would constitute pain, but it might well be encoded as a sequence of zeroes and ones, or lacks and presences of electrical potential. Well, then, that fits perfectly with (3): the pain is constituted by a combination of negative reality—the zeroes—and positive reality—the ones. If we were to fill in all the negative realities, the pain would disappear, as we would have just a sequence of ones, which, we may suppose, wouldn’t be sufficient to constitute pain.

Similarly, if materialism is true, we don’t know what brain states constitute a pain. It is plausible that the brain states that constitute pains are grounded in both positive and negative neural realities. After all, that’s generally how the material representational states we know of work. As I type this sentence, its inscription on the screen is constituted by a combination of absences and presences of light— the black and white pixels. (Things are more complicated with colored text, but the absence of light of particular wavelength is always going to be crucial.) When I say something, the periodic combination of pressure and lack of pressure (i.e., lower pressure) encodes the sound. So, given materialism, it is plausible that pain is grounded in a hybrid of positive and negative states (and that so is pleasure, for that matter).

Now, if materialism is false, there are multiple options. One option is that pains are simple existences, qualia. If so, that’s incompatible with the hybrid privation theory. But we do not know that that theory of pain is true, even if we know dualism to be true. Just as on materialism, pain is constituted by more fundamental states, so too on dualism, pain could be constituted by more fundamental (but immaterial) states. For all we know it is so, and for all we know the more fundamental states are partly negative in nature.

So, whether materialism or dualism is true, for all we know, pain is consistent with the hybrid privation theory. (I should add that I am not actually confident that pain is an evil in itself.)