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.

"Commitment": Phenomenology at the rock wall

If you watch people rock climbing enough (in my case, only in the gym, as I have seen disturbing outdoor climbing safety numbers, while gym climbing safety numbers are excellent), you will hear a climber get advised to “commit” more. The context is usually a dynamic move for a hold, one where the climber’s momentum is essential to getting into position to secure the hold, with the paradigm example being a literal jump. The main physiological brunt of the advice to “commit” is to put greater focused effort into jumping higher, reaching further, grabbing more strongly, etc. But the phenomenological brunt of the advice is to will more strongly, with greater, well, commitment. And sometimes when one misses a move, one feels the miss as due to a lack of commitment, a failure to will strongly enough.

While once I heard someone at the gym say “Commit like you’re married to it”, the notion of commitment here seems quite different from the ordinary notion tied to relationships and long-term projects. The most obvious difference is that of time. In the ordinary case, a central component of commitment is a willingness to stick to something for an extended period of time. The climber’s “commitment” lasts at most a second or two. This results in what seems to be a qualitatively different phenomenology, but it could still be that the difference is quantitative, much as living through a week and living through a second only feels qualitatively different.

But there seems to be a more obviously qualitative difference. The rock-climbing sense of “commit” is essentially occurrent: there is an actual expending of effort. But the ordinary sense is largely dispositional: one would expend the effort if it were called for. Moreover, the rock-climbing sense of the word is typically tied to near-maximal effort, while in the ordinary sense one counts as committed to a project as long as one is willing to expend a reasonable amount of effort. In other words, when it would be unreasonable to expend a certain degree of effort, in the ordinary sense of the word one is not falling short of commitment: the employee unwilling to sacrifice a marriage to the job is not short on commitment to the job. The rock-climbing sense of commitment is not tied to reasonableness: a climber who holds back on a move out of a reasonable judgment that near-maximal effort would be too likely to result in an injury is failing to commit on the move—and typically is doing the right thing under the circumstances (of course in both sense of the word “commit”, there are times when failure to commit is the right thing to do).

Finally, the ordinary sense of divides into normative and non-normative commitment. Normative commitment is a kind of promise—implicit perhaps—while non-normative commitment is an actual dispositional state. Each can exist without the other (though it is typically vicious when the normative exists without the dispositional). In the climbing case, normally the normative component is missing: one hasn’t done anything promise-like.

Here is a puzzle. Bracket the cases where one holds back to avoid an over-use or impact injury (I would guess, without actually looking up the medical data, that when one is expanding more effort, one is more tense and injury is likely to be worse). One also understands why someone might fail to commit to a job or a relationship, in either the normative or the non-normative sense: a better thing might come one’s way. But when one is in the middle of a strenous climbing move, one typically isn’t thinking that one might have something better one could do with this second of one’s time. So: Why would someone fail to commit?

My phenomenology answers in two ways. First and foremost, fear of failure. This is rationally puzzling. One knows that a failure to commit to a climbing move increases the probability of failure. So at first sight, it seems like someone who goes to a dog show out of a fear of dogs (which is different from the understandable case of someone who goes to a dog show because of a fear of dogs, e.g., in order to fight the fear or in order to have a scary experience). But I think there is actually something potentially rational here. There are two senses of failure. One sense is external: one is failing to meet some outside standard. The second sense is internal to action: one is failing to do what one is trying to do. The two can be at cross-purposes: if I have decided to throw a table tennis match, my gaining a point can be a failure in the action-internal sense but is a success in the external sense.

In climbing, outside of competitive settings, it is the action-internal sense that tends to be more salient: we set our own goals, and what constitutes them as our goals is our willing of them. Is my goal to climb this route, to see how hard it is, or just to get some exercise? It’s all in what I am trying to do.

But in the action-internal sense, generally the badness of a failure increases with the degree to which one is trying. If I am not trying very hard, my failure is not very bad in the action-internal sense. (Of course, in some cases, my failure to try very hard might bad in some external sense, even a moral one—but it might not be.) So by trying less hard, one is minimizing the badness of a failure. There is a complex rational calculus here, whether or not one takes into account risk averseness. It is easy to see how one might decide, correctly or not, that giving significantly less than one’s greatest effort is the best option (and this is true even without risk averseness).

The secondary, but also interesting, reason that my phenomenology gives for a refusal to commit is that effort can be hard and unpleasant.

Imagination and dreams

When I visualize a car in my imagination, the experience is obviously different from seeing a car. It's not even close. Similarly, if I imagine a sound, the experience is obviously different from hearing it. In part this is due to shortcomings of my imagination. But I suspect it's not just that. Rather, imagined experiences are qualitatively different from actual experiences. This isn't the difference disjunctivists get at between hallucinations and veridical experiences. I am willing to concede that a hallucination and a veridical experience could be phenomenally the same, but then both would be different from imagined experiences. There are, of course, structural analogies. Imagining a red triangle is related to imagining a blue square much as seeing a red triangle is related to imagining a blue square. And there may be some resemblance between imagining a red triangle and seeing a red triangle.

Here's a hypothesis about dreams: The "visual" experiences in dreams are phenomenally more like the ones in visual imagination than like seeing, but one's ability to tell the difference is suppressed.

Seeing dark nebulae and silhouettes

We can see shadows, even though surely shadows don't exist—there is nothing to them, but lack. Dark nebulae can also be seen, as the photo shows. However, a dark nebula isn't a complete nonentity like a shadow. It is a molecular cloud of particles that obscure the stars behind it. Those who believe in unrestricted compositionality will even think that they are really existing objects. But seeing a dark nebula is rather different from seeing a shadow. The shadow's shadowy being is constituted by the absence of light. The absence of light in the case of the dark nebula does nothing to constitute the nebula—it is simply that the dark nebula has absorbed the light from the stars and other objects behind it.
Here is an argument that we see dark nebulae. Two nights ago, I tried to see Barnard 91. I thought I saw it, but I was looking at the wrong thing. So, I tried to see it, and failed. But this suggests that there is a distinction between seeing and not seeing it.
There may seem to be something paradoxical here. Isn't seeing supposed to be a causal process, where patterns of light are seen and caused by the object seen? But in the case of the dark nebula—or a human silhouette in the dark, outlined against a light—it is precisely a matter of the absence of light caused by the object seen. However, patterns can be constituted by absence as well as presence. When I look at a sheet of transparent red plastic, the redness of the plastic comes from the plastic's selective transmission characteristics: it lets red light through, and holds back much of the rest of the visible spectrum. The case of the dark nebula and silhouette are just limiting cases of this.
But what the above helps show is that the "in the right way" causal condition for seeing is going to be very complicated. Does this matter? Maybe: it does make life harder for reductionist accounts of perception.

The recalcitrance of matter

When I work with material objects, I am sometimes annoyed at things just not working. The cord of the mower gets caught on a bush. The wood I am drilling into splits. The phenomenology of annoyance is no doubt complex, but I think the following is right: when one is annoyed at x doing A, one is (emotionally) treating x as if x were functioning improperly in doing A. Consider, then, the following argument:

1. (Premise) It is sometimes appropriate to be annoyed at matter failing to serve one in some way even when no human being designed the matter to serve us in this way.
2. (Premise) It is only appropriate to be annoyed at something insofar as it is functioning improperly.
3. Therefore, matter can be functioning improperly in failing to serve us in some way even when no human being designed the matter to serve us in this way. (1 and 2)
4. (Premise) If x functions improperly in failing to do A, then it is a function of x to do A.
5. Therefore, matter sometimes has the function of serving us in some way even though no human being designed it to do so. (3 and 4)

All of this coheres with, and suggests, the Christian story of the Fall: matter does have the function of serving us in all kinds of ways, but after the Fall it fails to do so.

But now this failure can be understood in two mutually non-exclusive ways: (a) the matter fails to do "its job" narrowly defined; and (b) we fail to make use of the matter in the way we should thereby making it impossible for the matter to do "its job" broadly defined (it can't serve us if we don't use it rightly). The argument above fits well with (a), but it may well be that (b) is the right story in a lot of cases, and maybe even in all of them. Now, if (b) but not (a) is the right story in a given case, then premise (1) will not exactly be true in that case: annoyance might be appropriate, but not annoyance at the matter. The annoyance should be directed at oneself, or at humankind, or at Adam and Eve. However, this objection presupposes that to be annoyed at x doing A entails being annoyed at x. But I do not know that this entailment holds. It may be that there is a difference between being annoyed at x doing A and being annoyed at x for doing A. If there is such a difference, then one can hold that (1) is compatible with (b) being the right story even in all cases. (Perhaps there is an argument similar to the above that can be formulated that fits with this. The conclusion will be that we are sometimes appropriately annoyed with ourselves for not having skills for working matter, skills that it is not our function to have unless some story about how we were given mastery over matter but then fell is true.)

Actually, theologically, I find both (a) and (b) plausible. The Fathers do think the Fall extends both to the human being and to the rest of nature. If so, then (1) is true, and the argument is probably sound, but of course to base the soundness of (1) on the theology of the Fathers would beg the question.

For a better justification of (1), I would note that I am drawn to the thesis that every basic distinct kind of emotion is sometimes appropriate, but I do not know how to make that precise, not knowing how to define "basic" and "distinct". If the thesis is true, and if there is a basic distinct kind of annoyance at "dumb matter" (i.e., at matter not designed by a human being for anything), then we will be able to have (1) be true.

In any case, the argument I gave strikes me as not very strong. It is very easy to deny (1) by saying that in the cases of annoyance at dumb matter, one has misplaced the proper object of annoyance. Nonetheless, that move is a sceptical move, and sceptical moves should be epistemically costly. So while one can get away with denying (1), this adds to the cost of any position that forces that denial.

The post is triggered by frustrations with converting the Coulter 13.1" telescope that I bought into a split tube (else it wouldn't fit in our Taurus, and would break my back). Or, more precisely, frustrations with reassembling it. Alas, I've learned that plywood splits and that cross dowels need to be pretty close to exactly at right angles to the bolt. Fortunately, there is always JB Weld, my favorite adhesive for projects where Duck tape just isn't good enough. Hopefully the scope will be ready for the Philosophy Department Star Night tonight, assuming the weather cooperates (oddly, though, I don't get annoyed at the weather in the way I get annoyed at objects).

A contribution to the phenomenology of seeing a wall

I see a wall. What do I see? Something white. But not just something white. Something white and not to be walked into. I do not infer from seeing something white that I am facing something solid, or from facing something solid that I am facing something not to be walked into. On the contrary, I directly see something not to be walked into, and I demonstrate my perception by navigating around the wall. Moreover, seeing something not to be walked into may happen independently of seeing the color. Solidity may come later, after seeing that something is not to be walked into—after all, "Don't walk into me" is the wall's urgent demand on me, something I must act on right away. Moreover, if I should hesitate about following that demand, I am apt to see the truth of the counterfactual Were I to walk into the wall, I would get a bump (and if I still hesitate, then I get a bump).

So we perceive both normative and counterfactual states of affairs. Moreover, phenomenologically, we often see the normative and sometimes the counterfactual aspects of a situation first, before we see the non-normative categorical ones.

Furthermore, our perceptions are directly motivating. I see something not to be walked into, and so I do not walk into it. And just as this is true of perceptions, it is true of beliefs. My belief that moving a king two squares diagonally in chess "just isn't done" is directly motivating. Hume was wrong about beliefs not being directly motivating.