Total Eclipse

The paradigmatic example of a sentence a physicalist holds true is “Pain is the firing of C Fibers.” This is an identity claim; It’s not that an action potential in C-Fibers causes pain, but rather that if we come to know the true nature of pain, it simply is firing of C-Fibers. Even most Functionalist would swear by this (with a functional twist, naturally).
Now, say we go up to our biologist friend with this sentence, he’d likely reply something along the lines of “Well, yes, sort of, but not exactly.”

And so we’d ask him “Well, what’s wrong?” So the biologist would answer “Well, for one thing, there’s also Aδ Fibers for example.”
“Ah, well, that’s not a problem, we can easily modify our sentence to Pain = Firing of C-Fibers OR Aδ-Fibers.”

“Well, no, it doesn’t quite end there. See, those are just the vanilla kind of nocireceptors, there’s also Silent Receptors which are only sometimes activated in pain.”

“Uh-Huh…”

“Oh, and there’s also Neuropathic pain, which has nothing to do with Nocireceptors at all.”

“Oh. But. Wait. Still, there’s no reason I couldn’t in principle form a long and complicated sentence that would be a physicalist Definite Description of pain.”

“Hmm. Well, I guess you could have a long list of Insufficient yet non-redundant components of an unnecessary yet sufficient causal chain leading to the sensation of pain.”

“Sounds Go.. Wait, no, “Causal chain”?? We’re talking identity here!”

“Oh, did I mention C-Fibers are also responsible for our sense of warmth?”

“Wait wait wait, let’s set things straight. I want an identity claim here.”

“Well, in our language at least, feeling pain is not a reducible physical event.”

“Are you turning dualist on me??”

“No no no, nonsense. It’s just that even if your first sentence were true, and from the scientific language pain was the firing of C-Fibers, in ordinary language that’s hogwash. Pain is a qualitative sensation, and can’t be reduced to a single physical event.”

“So you’re a dualist.”

“No, I’m a biologist. Have you heard the story of the soldier who got shot in the leg during a battle and didn’t even notice until hours later?”

“Yes, I think so. Something to do with the Endorphines.”

“Exactly. In a situation we biologists like to call Fight or Flight (or F..), people’s parasympathetic system pumps up, and a whole complex array of systems within systems, modulating hormones, stereoids and opiods flood our system. So, the Aδ-Fibers of a spinal-injury victim still fire when I poke him in the leg with a needle, but it makes no sense to us to say that he’s feeling pain, because he isn’t.”

“Because the nerve impulse isn’t reaching his brain due to his spinal injury.”

“Right. There are virtually countless contextual conditions that need to be met for us to say someone is experiencing pain. Our brains are not passive sensors either, they have a lot of ‘say’ in what input they receive.”

“Countless conditions? I don’t like that one bit. Pain is a mundane phenomena, it happens all the time. Surely there is a definable threshold of conditions met that can be called pain.”

“Surely? Any Psychophysicist can tell you that research into any sensory thresholds has led mainly to a frustration of definitions. Surely you’re aware of Fechner’s Law and Stevens’ Power Law?”

“I don’t like where you’re going with this. And I’m also not sure that I accept that painy-stuff is the feeling of pain. That smells of dualism too. Is it really necessary for us to feel pain in order to experience it? I’d like to think the phenomenal qualitative aspect simply supervenes on the physical event.”

“Well, you can invent a new scientific word, let’s call it “Quain,” where that’s not necessary, but in our ordinary language, pain simply is the sensation of pain.”

“But that’s just confusion, because our sensations can be understood in physical terms, so I don’t need “Quain”, because Pain itself is a physical term too, even if I can’t define it due to technical problems.”

“But what makes you say those problems are by nature technical and not fundamental? Take for example Karl Lashley’s persistent search for the Engram – the localized locus of memory in the brain. He performed every sort and combination of brain lesions and lobotomies he could think of, and yet still his rats would remember the way out of his maze (even when they barely had any motor capabilities left). His conclusion was that memory was not localized, but distributed throughout the cortex. I’m telling you something similar; Trying to understand a complex-adaptive system in reductionist terms is futile, when what you’re looking for is an emergent phenomena.”

“Meh. To me ‘Emergent’ seems like a word scientists toss around a lot when they don’t know how to explain something.”

“Or maybe it’s a word we use when we begin to really understand how some things work.”

What this fictional dialog was meant to point out was not that physicalist account is wrong; Hardly, to me dualists and others seem hopelessly confused in the world of nonsensical mere-conceivability arguments, zombies and disembodiments and everything nice.

Rather, as I have already pointed out in the past, how the explanatory gap which lies in physicalist theories is insoluble in principle. The gap lies in the incomplete physico-functionalist account of qualia, and the insolubility lies in the impossible-to-meet expectation of a deductive-nomological explanation for fundamentally irreducible phenomena.

Tagged as ad absurdum, ad reductionum, biology, causality, d-n, david chalmers, deductive-nomological, dialogue, disembodiment, dualism, emergentism, engram, explanatory gap, functionalism, joseph levine, Mind-Body Problem, pain, physicalism, physico-functionalism, reductionism, Shay Brog, smoke and mirrors, zombieworlds, שי ברוג + Categorized as Philosophy