pinkfloydpsw's Blog

I will be looking at the specific reaction of the mind to the condition of pain from the point of view that the mind is a functional device or machine that processes pain as possibly more than just the predictable end product of stimulus. I should start by stating that although it is pleasant to think that we are more than just complicated difference engines reacting to inputs that idea requires an externality that must be labelled the soul or will of God. This is not an easy position to take as if one grants God then one is in the realm of faith so reasoning about functionalism is all but pointless. However, if man is not more than machine then reasoning is also pointless as we can postulate a solution or at least advancement in understanding when a better way of measuring comes along. I’m going to have a go at it anyway.

If there is a mind then it is a device of sorts, we are yet to find anything outside of the laws of physics that could be called the soul. There is much reason to hope but little reason to conclude that there is anything that exists within the body that is not of the body. The soul that historically was the stuff of consciousness continues to give ground to the scientific discoveries of neurons and pathways that are functional, physical and explainable; where is the soul when a person suffers head trauma in a road accident and awakens from their treatment to present a radically different mental entity from the person who existed beforehand? If the soul has only the stuff of continuity that represents the possibility of person but not the continuity, then of what matter is it in this discussion if it is indeed immaterial and immeasurable?

Descartes Dualism

To follow Descartes thinking one must first establish belief in a creator, his whole argument is problematic for those, like me, who don’t have that. Descartes postulates a realm of the immaterial that is immeasurable and continuous beyond the physical (Cottingham, 2011), if this is the case then why has the human entity only existed for what we know is a very short time in the vastness of time itself? If the timeline of the earth was represented as 24 hours on a clock face we have only shown up in the last 2 minutes, where were our souls when dinosaurs roamed the earth? Descartes insight that he is (Cottingham, 2008) is not wrong but I disagree that this necessitates anything other than the same sort of awareness that a computer could have of itself if it had the software to scan other things that are not it and come to the conclusion that it is different to them. As in any comparison of differences it is the exclusionary factors that define the thing, eliminating what I am not is what defines me as me in the same way that functionally I am not the same as any other human, I am unique. This uniqueness could be the problem in posing the question of how a computer could achieve the same thing, they are not unique enough and we have not the ability to build into them yet the sort of broken elements of function that can be found in the human machine; I smoked cigarettes for 20 years before quitting and I drink far too much coffee, would it even be possible to make a machine do something that is so against its own best interests? Of course a scientist can highlight that computer processors can be erratic too but that is explainable by meta-state electronic discrepancies at the microscopic level. Aside from these discrepancies a complicated machine will not operate other than its parameters allow it to, animals and humans appear to operate outside rational functions, animals less so than humans, this is maybe why the inference of automata is applied to them.

Derek Matravers (Matravers, 2011) uses the analogy of a watch still being a watch if it is radically altered to highlight Descartes ponderings on the I as still remaining after reductions to the physical body but I disagree that the watch is a watch even if we describe it as so because we are describing function rather than anything intrinsic, as soon as a watch does not represent time it is functionally no longer a watch; every component of the watch that is necessary is Conditio Sine Qua Non, whereas the body is surely linked to and influences the brain but exists as only partially necessary to the mind. The brain, however, is necessary to the mind so there must be something going on there for the realisation of pain? In response to criticisms his contention that clear and distinct understanding will necessarily contain no obscure elements it is important to remember that Descartes lived at a time when modern science was in its infancy, it’s unlikely that anyone knew enough about human physical complexity, or how to measure brain activity, to remove the obscurity which he alludes to.

Functionality

Block uses the China Brain thought experiment, with type being the causal phenomena and token being the realising physical manifestation (Block, 1980), to illustrate an expansion of the theory of identifying conditions for and realisation of a mental state. I find myself objecting to this on the grounds that it is too abstract a comparison; the brain as a functional item is more linked with itself and the physical entity of the body that relays the sensation of pain than a billion Chinese people are to each other. For this thought experiment the proposer would have to be able to prove that the brain could be as unaware of other functions and realisations as the people are when performing this function only; it is the connected nature of the brain that allows this move from physical sensation to physical realisation. There is no human transfer of the physical sensation of pain in any but the first of the people, all matters beyond this are purely descriptive and this description of the cause of pain is only comparable to the human relay of pain conceptually; a description is not a thing it merely stands in place of the thing. For the last man to be aware of the pain he would have to be able to turn a description back into the realisation of pain in the mind as was the brain state of the first participant.

If we contend that a machine could be constructed that would mimic the human mind in this way in that it could measure the conditions as apt to cause the sensation of pain then relay that information to a processing centre that would then manifest the correct (programmed) reaction based on the measure of the sensation then we can say that functionally the machine has felt pain. It is in what our definition of pain is, i.e. the descriptive term that we experienced something, that the fault in our reasoning lays. If we described our pain to someone else we could not contend that they had felt it, only that they had come to some sort of understanding that it was occurring. Our pain may be unique to us; another’s pain using the same descriptive terms but not being the same sensation even if caused by the same sensation type and present as the same token brain state as it would be in identity theory. For identity theory the pain is present in the place that is realising it and if it were not it would not be pain regardless of its functional correctness.

Realisation without sensation

If we take for as an example phantom limb syndrome, experienced by some amputees, as a refutation of the proposed necessary parameter of causal physical phenomena (because there is no limb to have a causal effect on) we find ourselves back in the territory of attributing pain in realisation as a separate substance to pain in the physical realm. My counter to this argument is simply that the functional human is not machine-like, the machine is human-function-like, much is faulty about the human because the human is a product of replicated faults in DNA; the manifestation of billions of slight differences we refer to as errors in a cycle of copying and recopying chemical structures that has gone on since the birth of life on earth. In transferring information from physical phenomena to chemical reaction and into conscious realisation it would appear that nature has built mistakes that work, maybe if it is our intention to mimic humans with artificial intelligence we must first realise artificial error and stupidity.

Extended cognition

The postulate that mental processes can exist outside the body (Crane, 2011) just seems nonsensical to me. It seems intuitively correct to think that the reduction of complexity in a task is inversely related to the amount of mental energy expended in completing it; if you can know more initially then less working out is required to complete. Extended cognition is not cognition at all it is merely more available information. From the argument that these are functions that are analogous to functional states within the mind I still go back to the contention that a brain-state is only what is capable of being done by a brain, anything else is mimicry by more simple objects, if we agree with Clark and Chalmers that these objects act like functions then anything that acts as a function of the mind is a function of it and this is not appealing. Let’s take for instance the atmosphere at a football match, I am sure atmosphere (the descriptive term) is a mental state that is dependent on others agreeing that they are experiencing it also. Atmosphere is created by expectation and perception within the mind; nothing is going on in the physical world other than in the physicality of the brain.

Conclusion

I have looked at the theories behind the functional explanation for pain. If we purely follow functionalist’s logic on this we will arrive at a point where pain can be replicated within a machine built for that purpose; we will also logically arrive at the point where it is possible to replicate all functions of the mind within machines. So if pain is in a dualists mind then there is the problem of how it transfers, if it is in an identity theorist mind there is the question of how it could be replicated and is it not replicated in other species and if it is in a functionalists mind there is the problem of what realises it. I am going to say that I prefer the functional theory overall but I think pain lacks definition, what is pain for one maybe called pain for another or described as an unpleasant physical or psychological condition apparent in the mind (realised) but there is no way of knowing if the agreed descriptive term pain is providing the basis for a false comparison. It seems more apparent that if a part of the brain lights up during an MRI scan in a time of physical trauma then that is the brain state of pain and if it does not it isn’t, it’s something else or that pain is a bad definition of the brain state.

Paul Simon Wilson

Ref:

Cottingham. J (2011). Cartesian Dualism. [ONLINE] Available at: https://learn2.open.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/1262383/mod_resource/content/1/a222_2011j_b5_aud002.mp3

Descartes. R, (2008). ‘New foundations for knowledge: Rene Descartes, Meditations’ In: Cottingham. J (ed), Western philosophy an anthology. 2nd ed. 2008: Oxford pp.25.

Matravers. D, (2011). ‘Descartes and dualism’ In: Matravers. D (ed), Mind. 1st ed. 2011: Milton Keynes pp.13.

Block. N, (2011). ‘Functionalism’ In: Matravers. D (ed), Mind. 1st ed. 2011: Milton Keynes pp.67-68.

Crane. T (2011). What is the extended min?. [ONLINE] Available at: https://learn2.open.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/1262395/mod_resource/content/1/a222_2011j_b5_aud004.mp3