I don’t think it is an objective fact. Can you give me evidence that you are not just a biological computer, with mechanisms made of proteins, vitamins, neurons and other things that just react with each other, but that, additionally, you are a being able to feel, to experience pain?
No, it’s not. The notion of “evidence” here is problematic. What could count as evidence? What argument would conclude with the entailment “…therefore I have a pain”? Evidence has no place here.
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Of course not. It’s not called the Hard Problem for nothing. But I’m certain others feel pain as I do. I’d bet you do. I’ll give people the benefit of the doubt when they say they do. There’s no reason to doubt it, despite the lack of proof. I see people behave as though they are experiencing pain from things that would cause me pain. Our stories of experiences match up.
Detection by science is not the test for existence, not even for science itself.
Yes, of course it isn’t, but is needed for a degree of objectivity. How can you say that something exists objectively if science is unable to say anything about it? This inability doesn’t mean that that thing doesn’t exist. It means that we are unable to get an objective certainty about its existence. It is like God: science is completely unable to say that God exists, but this doesn’t mean that science states that God doesn’t exist. It just means that we cannot get objective evidence of its existence.
This analogy is unfitting and it is mixing up different levels that @Corvus actually already made very visible, but let me try again nontheless.
Pain as “something someone is feeling” is inherently “mind dependent” and can therefore not exist objectively, since objectivity requires “mind-independence”. Whether the statement “X feels pain.” is true will always be mind-dependent, to be precise, dependent on X´s mind. Whether on a meta level the statement “A mind-dependent something referred to as pain exists.” is true, is mind-independently true. We can ask around and gather empirical data on its existence. Now here you could design a standard sceptical scenario regarding pain and argue that since pain is mind-dependent, one can never know if anyone, except myself, is actually feeling pain. But making this argument would already require you to concede that “pain is mind-dependent” and hence “pain is”.
And furthermore, existence requires only a single instantiation, hence it is enough to know that oneself feels pain to concede that “A mind-dependant something referred to as pain exists”.
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For this discussion to be fruitful we need to make sure we keep in mind this distinction between
a) X feels pain.
and
b) There exists a mind-dependant feeling/sensation referred to as pain.
Both propositions claim the existence of pain, but on two very different levels.
I firmly believe that if we keep treating them as synonymus we will get nowhere, since their truth-conditions are very different.
One could in response argue that proposition b) is synonymus with c) “There exists an X such that X is capable of feeling pain.” and that therefore the truthfulness of b) relies on the truthfulness of a) for at least one X. But that I believe does not present a problem, since we can just insert @ac64 in X, and @ac64 can put their hand into boiling water and check wheter they feel pain, if they do then a) is true and if one holds b) and c) to be synonymus then truthfulness of b) and c) follow from the truthfulness of a).
“Science” in the way you refer to it is not a necessary condition for a proof of somethings objective existence. “Mind-independence” is and science strives to make “mind-independet” claims about the world, I think, therefore, you are conflicting these two.
What you are refering to as Science is a rigorus understanding of the nature of something. We do not have a rigourus understanding of the nature of pain. But does that mean Pain does not exist? No! It pressuposes the existence of pain. How can you question our knowledge on the nature of something, whithout presupposing that this something exists in the sense that is has a nature which is to be understood?
Pretty much what @Grue_Some_Philosopher said.
Ultimately this is a subset of the hard problem of consciousness. And it’s one I’ve always found fascinating.
Imagine you have a bucket of vegetable soup; it would seem insane to think of that soup as “vulnerable” in any sense. And yet, there are sufficient carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen etc atoms in that soup to make a functional brain. So the soup *is* vulnerable; if you could rearrange the atoms one by one you could make something that now feels excruciating pain.
Or indeed “Strong AI”. The OP makes the assumption that strong AI is not possible, but we don’t know that. If it is possible, it implies that at some future time a sadist could press a key on a keyboard and cause worse suffering than a human genocide. If strong AI is possible then this would seem to be entailed, but it’s so hard to fathom.
When discussing the hard problem of consciousness, I used to begin by talking about pain, but for whatever reason it usually got misunderstood IMHO. I think it’s because pain is so natural to us, that many people can’t see the explanatory gap between an entity being able to sense “damage” and an experience. For whatever reason, people seem more likely to understand the issue when we’re talking about colours.
If I can chime in, I have to ask who this “science” character is ? Do you think human scientists can’t find any pain in their lives ?
To me the philosophical problem here is that people are looking for the world from someone’s else’s point of view within the world from their point of view.
As far as I can make out, physical objects are called “physical” because we can all see them, hear them, smell them, etc. We trust so automatically in this co-perception that we forget that perception requires an actual flesh-and-blood perceiver. In many cases, it doesn’t matter who records the measurement, but someone has to do it. And that involves “private sensation.”
We can agree upon pain existing, or we can quibble pointlessly because it isn’t in the realm of scientific inquiry, where the only evidence is shocked action.
I for one understand that lots of life is beyond scientific inquiry.
If we take shocked action as evidence, yes, the phenomena of harming someone does have this result. We have evidence of reaction to harmful stimuli.
Screaming, spasms, etc.
Remember, consciousness, is beyond the realm of science, and it’s a major constituent of life.
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In my opinion, sense data should over-rule scientific inquiry if the objective is reasonable.
Such as, ‘does pain exist?’. It’s reasonable for sense-data to over-rule science here.
Think of it as enforcement of mind’s intellect.
You also said that we can all see them, hear them, smell them etc.
So which is it?
Is your reading this private? But I wrote it, and others can read it, and your reading of these marks is dependent on your having learned to read a language, the whole of which inherently binds you to a community.
Its not so simple as is supposed.
I see “the forum” as presupposed. If others can’t perceive the objects that I perceive, there is no science. But I don’t believe that I can see through the eyes of others. Indeed, “seeing through the eyes of others” only makes sense metaphorically. “Try to look at things as Joe.”
The forum includes “physical” objects (interpersonal possibilities of perception caught up in a projected causal nexus ). Some of those objects are signs ( marks and noises and so on ) that play a huge role in our sense of sharing the world.
So of course we can see, with our own eyes, that the eyes of another are aimed at a particular object. We can witness witnessing. "No man you were there ! You were pointing and laughing ! "
I would also even double-down on the presupposed inter-personal or communal significance of signs. Just look at stop signs and stop lights, and the way that the “average” driver responds to them.
In short, too much skepticism is a performative contradiction. “Communication is impossible” is an absurd claim.
But too much naive faith in the sign system locks us into pseudo-problems. Forgetting that signs “signify” to individual organisms differently — as a function of their history and physiology — tends toward a mystified pseudo-physical object and a disavowed platonism of “universal essences” hidden inside marks and noises. The “meaning” is not inside the mark or noise. Waldo does not hide in the pointing finger. Two perceivers of the same object can learn to direct one another’s attention to this or that feature of the shared object. "Look at the brush strokes of those clouds ! "
I agree with you on that, for sure. I can’t squeeze years of thinking about this stuff into a paragraph, and the topic is infinitely rich.
But I still think it may help some people to be reminded that they are absurdly looking for the-world-for-Joe as if for a thing within the-world-for-them. While Joe is a thing in the-world-for-them and they can scan his brain, the-world-for-Joe — which include Joe’s pain — is of course elusive.
Hmmph. The “world-for-Joe” is already, and always, interpreted by the community of which Joe is a member. Separating this phantasm out in any way is trying to talk of something apart from what can be spoken about.
You agree that we share language, yes ? If you believe that the words above have an addressee, then you tacitly grant the-world-for-me. I emphasize that it is the world ( shared ) but perceived and interpreted by differing participants in the conversation.
Consciousness does not exist. There is only the world. But this is not a formal assertion. It’s a contextualized pointer, embedded in a particular dialogue.
I believe that you will recognize a chain of familiar signifiers. “Ideal” iterable “words.” I don’t believe that they will “signify” for you as they do for me, but I hope that they will help us better understand one another, as part of a larger dialogue.
As I see it, I have to use weird expressions just to point at mundane life — to get around insincere metaphysical pretenses about the way we share the world.
Too fast. No; world-for-me is an unjustified phenomenological phantasm you added. There’s just the shared world, or better that leg of the tripod on which our mutual interpretation and game playing stands. It’s not private, because it is already part of the conversation.
I’ll grant you your beliefs, and note that they differ from mine. I will not grant you a world distinct from mine.
I think you are misunderstanding me. There is only the one shared world. I have emphasized this since I joined the new forum.
This world we share is fundamentally a “forum” or “stage.” To join in a conversation is to enact this sub-theoretical “presupposition.”
So it’s The-world-for-Jack and The-world-for-Jill. Of course ! Because I expect others to perceive the marks and noises I offer them.
The “consciousness” of others is not a stuff in the world, that I can find with my sense organs. I grant that my sense organs play a central role in whether or not I take others to be “conscious.”
I’m just saying that “weak” readings of the sign “consciousness” don’t get the job done. Beneath all the theoretical pretense, we speak from a “faith” of being heard and seen. If others don’t hear and see us from a different “perspective” on the world, then there is no philosophy in the first place. Basically weak readings of “consciousness” (as a stuff in the world rather than its “being-there-for” ) are tacitly solipsistic.
Perhaps. I find it difficult to reconcile your “world-for-Joe” and your “There is only the one shared world”. it seems to be an unneeded complication of the commonplace that we live in the one world and yet have differing beliefs concerning what is the case.
If we agree on the measurement, we can set aside the first person account and move on. And we agree on far more than we disagree. Science, and indeed discourse of any sort, relies overwhelmingly on our agreement. Your reading this post is evidence of just that.
if those mooted “private sensations” are such that they cannot be spoken of, then they cannot play a part in our discourse, and so drop out of our consideration. And if they are to play a part in our considerations, then by that very fact they are not so private.
So with pain. If it were private, we would have no use for analgesics.
So it seems we must drop the ineffability of your “world-for-Joe”.
This is interesting, it looks like a strong argument, but, at a deeper analysis, I think it isn’t. Analgesics and their experimental effects are not evidence that we can have some kind of access to somebody’s private experience of pain. By using a proper software or hardware, you can stop a computer as well from reacting with certain behaviours. That software or hardware would works exactly like an analgesic. We don’t even need to deny what the suffering person says. We can totally accept and believe that the patient feels pain, but this does not mean that we have had access to the existence of the patients private experience of pain. Even from inside myself, about my own pain, I can suspect that even my own private experience of pain could be just an effect of mechanisms inside me. This questions Nagel’s enquiry about feeling what a bat feels: we don’t need to think of bats, we can think even just about ourselves.
The real difference is not between what I can feel from inside me and what I can just imagine about other people’s pain. The real difference is in the approach, if it is an approach that tries to be descriptive, objective, metaphysical, or, on the other side, just expressive, subjective, instinctive, artistic, emotional. I think that, in this context, St. Augustine’s statement is very insightful: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know”. We should make a little amendment to Augustin: you don’t know what time is not only if you wish to explain it to him who asks, but even if you want to try to explain it to yourself, because what makes the difference is not the different perspective between being you yourself and imagining the other person, but between feeling and wanting to explain.
If I refrain from wanting to understand, to describe, to explain, to translate into concepts, language, ideas, and I instead try to pay attention to my feeling, feeling my feelings, listening to my feeling going on, happening over time, going through my body, my person, then, that moment, I am really myself, I am experiencing my life from inside, I am living, I am a subject. As a consequence, this produces subjectivity, which means something that, from traditional points of view, cannot be proven, cannot give evidence.
Instead, the moment I move into wanting to understand, I am moving into a perspective external to myself, I am imagining myself as I am seen from other people; that moment I am not anymore a subject, but an object, I am objectifying myself, I am external to myself, I have lost sight and memory of my existence as a subject able to experience feelings from inside. This has the advantage of making me able to describe, give evidence, proof, but also the disadvantage of having turned myself into an object.