Though the word “pain” is a noun it is not a person, place, or thing. We can examine any human body with any number of powerful instruments and never find it.
Its etymology attests that the word comes from the ancient Greek “Poena”, who was the spirit of suffering for the goddess Nemesis. This humble beginning perhaps necessitated its usage as a noun-phrase among ancient superstition until the modern day.
Given this, “pain” can never exist beyond its status in grammar and imagination.
“Poena” is not Greek, but Latin. The Greek word is poiné (ποινή). The name of the Greek spirit Poine (Ποινή) comes after the simple Greek word, not before. After the word existed, it was personified into a spirit. Superstition comes after the word already existed, it is not the origin of the word.
If pain
it becomes very difficult to explain the existence certain strong facts, such as the usage of analgesics in medicine and the practice of torture in other contexts.
We can call it a process or a tradition. But it depends on perceptual access to shared objects that are therefore called “physical.” Basically you get numerology ( not even that really ) if you lose the primacy of perception.
And we wouldn’t bother about this science thingy if we didn’t care, because X hurts and Y feels good, etc.
Fretting over the existence of pain takes us way back to the confusion of secondary qualities opposed to primary qualities. That distinction, in retrospect, was nakedly pragmatic. “Primary” qualities are qualities that so-and-so currently knows how to weave into a mathematical model.
The piece of metal was glowing red, but I touched it and felt no pain, felt no heat. What then ?
We might imagine a dentist corrupted by philosophy, who refuses to acknowledge the pain of a patient. He’s saved money on local anesthetic, you see, because he hasn’t seen a proof that “pain exists.”
I think you are reasonable enough, so my target here is the absurd and hackneyed hand-wringing over “problems” that aren’t problems. The problem is reducing pain, at least stupid and useless pain, and not in acknowledging its existence.
I wonder if we can “find” imagination and grammar, while we are looking for such things.
?
Simply looking around is insufficient to doing science. It also involves a process that with demonstration and testing over time maximises our agreement as to how things are. It is inherently communal, not merely phenomenal.
Yes, pain exists.
What is actually being asked by the OP is if there is a proof of experience that does not require an appeal to experience.
The machine analogy for organisms was typical of 19th c biology and is still influential in biology, but there are plenty of grounds to challenge it. Chief among them that organisms are (in modern biological terms) autopoietic, that is self organising and self-maintaining. Machines are entirely different to that, as they’re manufactured artefacts which have an external organising principle devised by those who make them.
And the denial of the reality of suffering doesn’t even warrant a counter argument. But something along the same lines is considered in my OP, Is Everything Real Something that Exists? In the terms of that argument, pain is indubitably real, but is not existent as an objective phenomenon.
This is a cognitive science question posing as a question about suffering.
Not sure, if it would be correct to say pain exists. Wouldn’t it be correct to say, you have pain? Because “exist” implies, it can exist external to you. Your pain is never external to you. Therefore, you have pain. You cannot have pain external to your body. Therefore pain cannot exist. You have pain.
My experience exists. Other people can tell I am in pain when it is too overwhelming to hide. Intimacy provides the means of detecting its presence.
We can inflict pain upon other creatures. Punishment exists as a form of coercion. We are wired to avoid pain to learn what is dangerous in our environment.
Your experience is the same. It only occurs internally in your own body and mind. When you say, experience exists, it could imply it might exist externally somewhere in the world unless you specify clearly where it exists.
What others are accessing is the signs of pains via your verbal expression or facial expressions, which is not your pain experience itself.
I understand that what I experience privately is not “accessed” directly by others. But other people know how to hurt me. I have hurt other people. The existence of pain is within and without me.
Why is “access” a guarantor of existence?
That is possibility not actuality.
Other folks don’t have full knowledge of your pain experience. Hence they can only access it indirectly via your expression of pains.
It is both. It has happened and will happen again. I don’t understand how you are using the distinction.
I just admitted that. Why is “existence” a category strictly confined to what can be directly “accessed?”
It is only actuality when happening now. Talking about it, is just a scenario.
Existence is not confined. Existence can exist anywhere in the universe. But your pain can only exist in your body.
If you say your pain exist, then it could imply it exists in Mars, which is nonsense. Hence it lacks clarity.
“exist” also implies that something is in place physically without doing anything at all, being visible, visitable and touchable too.
Pain does something to you i.e. it pains you and aches you. Pain exists doesn’t quite resonate. You have pain sounds better.
@Corvus exists.
I have pain.
Which sounds better?
Heidegger would say, it is fine. Human being exists, because they are being there, making decisions, doing works and living everyday-ness, therefore human is also dasein, which means being-in-the-world.
It sounds like your pain is aching you. You could do with some pain killers.
I don’t think that such a distinction between kinds of existence, or between having pain and existence of pain, is useful.
Imagine that one day we become able to determine with absolute precision which neurons show activity whenever somebody says that they are feeling pain. Morevoer, we will become able to dermine absolutely all charactericts of neurons organizing themselves not only when we say that we feel pain, but also when we say that we feel sorrow, or when we think of a specific concept, or even when we say that we are thinking of our feeling our actual presence as an I, as a self. This way we would be mastering with absolute precision any equivalence between any abstract idea and the specific organization of neurons connected to it. We could be able to even explain connections between concepts as based not on their content, but on the kind of organization of neurons. This means that we would be able to say that, for example, existentialism is not that kind of philosophy that says this and that. Rather, it is that kind of organization of neurons that works this way and is able to connect with other organizations of neurons this and that way.
At this point Chalmers’ hard problem of consciousness would be turned totally into and easy one. Do you want to make an idea how being a bat feels? No problem. We will induce into your brain some specific organization of neurons, so that you will just have to choose which aspects of being a bat you want to feel and which aspects of feeling yourself you want to keep at the same time.
This would be the total end of any abstract concept and of understanding based on content. Abstraction and content would be replaced completely by organizations of neurons.
Further, we would establish every aspect about how to mirror in AI all of these things that we would have found in organizations of neurons. This way we will get an AI able to feel everything a human can feel.
This will put and end to the distinction between living and non living things, between robots and humans.
This would also be the end of isolation of the self. Do you want to try how it feels being another person? No problem, we will induce in your brain those organization of neurons that are typical of that other person’s brain and this way you will take a trip into how it feels being that other specific person.
I was not proposing a “confinement;” You were.
Personal experience exists in the context of that experience. There is no need to make all observations equally valid (or not) by going to Mars.
You seem to embrace a kind of solipsism where only the immediately confirmed is real while rejecting that experience is germane to an absolutely objective truth.
Having the cake and eating it too.