Where is the Pain?

Philosophers typically assume that pain is something in the mind. It is a certain sort of feeling, a phenomenal state. Indeed, it is perhaps the paradigm case of a psychological state that has phenomenal character.

In a new paper in Journal of Consciousness Studies, Justin Sytsma asks whether ordinary people see things in the same way. He reports a series of new studies indicating that they do not. On Sytsma's view, people do not think of pain as a psychological state. Instead, they think of pain as a real thing out there in the world, something located in their bodies. The idea is that the pain you feel when you stub your toe isn't in your mind at all -- it is in your toe.

Sytsma begins by just asking people the questions directly:

• Do you think that the pain you feel when you forcefully stub your toe is in your mind?

• Do you think that the pain you feel when you forcefully stub your toe is in the toe?

In response, he finds that people tend to disagree with the claim that the pain is in the mind but to agree with the claim that the pain is in the toe.

He then uses a series of other methods to get at these issues indirectly. For example, participants in one study were given the story:

Bobby and Robby are conjoined twins that are joined at the torso. While they are distinct people, each with their own beliefs and desires, they share the lower half of their body. One day while running through a park they forcefully kicked a large rock that, unbeknownst to them, was hidden in the grass. Bobby and Robby both grimaced and shouted out ‘Ouch!’

Participants were then asked whether Bobby and Robby felt the very same pain or whether they had two different pains. Strikingly, participants tended to say that there was only a single pain here!

(Sytsma also included a control condition in which Bobby and Robby are two ordinary people who are running together and each stub a toe. In that condition, participants tend to say that they feel two different pains.)

Comments

[Clayton]

People interested in the topic of pains and places should look at John Hyman's paper, "Pains and Places" (John Hyman (2003). Pains and Places. Philosophy 78 (303):5-24.) He defends the view that pains are typically where we take them to be and I've long found his arguments to be rather persuasive.

[Elizabeth]

The wording of the first question seems non-ideal. If you tell someone a pain is " all in your mind," it implies there is no bodily injury. So choosing the pain as in the toe may simply be a way of affirming that there was an injury.

[Brandon N Towl]

Bizarre! Then again, my views might already be tainted by philosophy.

To be fair, though, I wonder if the folk concept is tainted by our language. Though philosophers talk about pain being in the mind, there is usually little reason for the folk to do so. Indeed, they (or we, pre-reflectively) tend to say things like "My toe hurts". It would be easy to misinterpret such statements as not the content of a representation but as an actual action on the part of my toe, and thus the location of the painfulness.

I guess the test would be to see if the same responses were given by people in other linguistic communities that did not have the same metaphors for pain. Does anyone have any data? (I have not quite finished the Sytsma paper, so apologies if he covers this!)

[Nora]

Two comments: One--the study uses the archaic term "mind", implying something distinct from the brain/body. This forces the question into an either-or situation, and since most people know the toe connected with the real world, they may be forced to choose the real toe over the not-so-real mind.

And two: the two questions seem unrealistically opposed--I would answer Yes to both, since the pain begins with the injury to the toe, but is perceived and processed when the signal reaches the brain. These encompass a continuous process, and it makes no sense to try to separate them and make the issue one of "either x or y" when "both x and y" more closely matches what we think really happens.

[Matthew]

Why this "black & white" contrast? Can we not say that the pain is in both? The brain is a componment of the nervous system as well as the nerves in the toe. Without the toe there would be no pain and likewise, without the brain there would be no pain. The debate seems like a short-sighted attemp to falsely boost the self-esteem of the study's author and demoralize the general public by trapping the interviewees in a question that prevents a thorough, thoughtful answer.

[Felsby]

Dualism has reared its ugly head again! The pain is not in the toe - pain needs a brain. It is not in the mind - the signal came from the toe.
Pain is in the organism.

[acm]

There are also subtleties in how the question is asked -- for example, they might feel the "same pain" in the sense that both feel pain from the same injury (qualitative sameness, sameness of source, but not necessarily neurological identity). Everyday speech doesn't use the same referents -- would be interesting to engage the participants in a short discussion of how pain is transmitted, a rumination on how, say, aspirin works, and then ask them some of the same questions in that deeper context...

[Garrett Marks-Wilt]

I haven't quite finished reading yet, but an interested study...

Brandon: I find your idea--that ordinary language might somehow taint the kind of response people give here--interesting and intuitively plausible. I'd like to take it a step further in saying that it seems to me that tactile experiences, like a toe being stubbed, tend to be associated with the body (.e.g, we also say "my nose itches"--as though itching were an action on the part of noses). Auditory and visual experiences tend to be associated, I think, with the outside world (as opposed to the body)--and thus with the mind (because we use the mind to understand the outside world). This is also reflected in our ordinary language when we are told to “envision in your mind’s eye…”

Plus, in so far as people perceive Bobby and Robby to be "sharing" that part of the body, people might reason that they are "sharing" the same pain.

I do not think the same effect would emerge, for example, if you changed the sensory domain from a tactile sense to some other sense (e.g., if robby and bobby endured a bright, painful light or super loud noise) because in this case they wouldn't be sharing the sensory organ (Robby and Bobby have individual sets of eyes, but share a set of toes) and the domain of sensory experience would lead them to interpret the pain as being "in the mind".

All the same, I’m not saying this would undermine the claims made in the paper. Just offering some speculations…

[Jorgen]

Very interesting. Since reading this, I've asked four of my "folk" (i.e., prephilosophical) friends whether pain is in the mind or toe, and three of the four said "both".

I wonder what the folk would say about phantom limb pains.

[Sam L]

@Nora: Where is the mind if not in the 'real-world'?

[Kris]

I think, in the cases provided, the tendency to locate the pain in the toe rather than the mind may have evolutionary meaning. Pain is a warning about injury. When you are in pain, what you should take care of is your damaged body, not your mind.

[Alex K]

I think Elizabeth (comment 2) hits the nail on the head. Given the exclusive disjunction normally implied by the questions asked jointly, it's natural to interpret "in the mind" as "in the mind only", but the latter suggests that the pain is hallucinated or something, which the example gives no reason to believe. Also, the fact that people say there is only one pain in the conjoined twin case is compatible with the view that pains are in the mind, since one might assume that the twins share a mind in this respect. So unless the remaining arguments in the study have more force or the first question was posed in a way that rules out the exclusive interpretation of question 1, it doesn't support the view that people think of pains as non-psychological.

[Onemorebrown.wordpress.com]

If anyone is interested there is some discussion of this paper going on here:

https://plus.google.com/106710195230390706428/posts/BVFuG77FevB

[Knotsinmythinking.wordpress.com]

Why would you say pain is IN anywhere? What would a pain that was out look like? Perhaps I've been reading too much Wittgenstein, but I'm not sure you get anywhere treating pain as an object a bit like a physical object but not. The answers are bound to be a bit all over the place.

[Gilbertramsay@gmail.com]

In everyday spoken Arabic, although there are other ways one could express the concept, the normal way to talk about bodily pain would be to use 'hurt' transitively - 'my foot-finger is hurting me'. I think this example actually helps to clarify what the colloquial English means. I also think that there is a sensible pragmatic reason why we (and therefore presumably other language speakers) would talk thus: what really concerns us is the bodily cause of the pain (which may imply damage) rather than the mental experience. I would further suggest that to say 'there is a pain in my toe' is not even inaccurate, but rather that the experimenters have misunderstood the ordinary language meaning of 'pain'. What it means (I suspect) is: 'something has happened to my toe such as to cause it to transmit the sort of data which I experience as pain'. It's worth pointing out that the nerves which transmit damage/pain are actually distinct from those which transmit ordinary feeling caused by pressure or heat. So in that sense the pain really is in the affected member of the body.

[John Gibbs]

One of the questions Wittgenstein seems to be concerned in his PI discussion of pain about is how empathy is possible. If we can't know conclusively whether what someone else calls pain is the same thing we have experienced as pain, what is really going on when we empathize?