Pain

  • to Philosophy of Mind"> An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind

    adminAnimals, Computers, Dualism, Free Choice, Knowledge, Mental States, Pain, Pleasure, Science

    When you think about the mind you can easily find yourself feeling confused. You might start asking questions like these: What is a mind? How does it relate to the body, something that is physical? Is it something we have control over? How does one know that other people have minds? Could computers have minds? Do animals have minds? These are the sorts of questions that philosophers of mind wonder about and have also given answers to. Though there is no consensus to these answers. In the lectures to come, you will get to think about these questions and other related questions. You will see how philosophers think about them too. As you ponder the questions try to think slowly about them. I once read that to do philosophy is to think in slow motion. You may react initially emotionally to a question, but try to fight this reaction. Think about your reasons for your beliefs and think about why someone might disagree with you. You strengthen your views when you can give reasonable responses to objections to them. The questions that philosophers ask about the mind are difficult to answer. This is why philosophers are still trying to answer them for so many centuries.  Part of the reason philosophy is enjoyed is that it can be therapeutic. Even if you can’t be sure of the answers to the questions, the act of thinking about them in a slow, reasoned way can sometimes help remove some of the confusion.

    In the paragraph above I used the term ‘mind’. However, in the lectures I will rarely, if ever, use this term. Instead, I will use the term ‘mental state’ for two reasons. One reason I do this is that the term ‘mind’ may suggest that it is a kind of thing, and this view is controversial. Some philosophers do think of the mind as a kind of thing that has or supports mental states, such as thoughts and feelings. But there are other philosophers who think of the mind, not as a thing, but rather as collection of mental states, that belong to a brain. Although philosophers disagree about whether a mind is a thing, almost all agree that there are mental states. Another reason I have chosen to use the term ‘mental state’ instead of ‘mind’ in the lectures is that the term ‘mind’ may cause you to think that we’re just talking about human minds. We must, however, think more generally when thinking about the mind, for there may be other things besides humans that may have minds. Most of us believe that animals have minds. Some philosophers believe that computers could have minds. If there are extra-terrestrial beings or if God exists, we may wonder about their minds. So for the sake of generality, the questions that we will explore will focus on mental states, not minds. Let me say a little more about these questions. (more…)

  • The Mental States of Pleasure and Pain

    adminMental States, Pain, Pleasure

    In life we experience pleasant sensations (what I will refer to as pleasure) and painful sensations (what I will refer to as pain). These mental states play a central role in our lives. We are motivated by them. For example, people go on vacations and take drugs to acquire pleasure or avoid pain. We appeal to them in our judgments of the quality of people’s lives. We generally think it benefits an individual to experience pleasure and a disadvantage for an individual to experience pain. Some people say things like, “Your life is not worth living when you’re suffering too much pain”. We think they matter when we consider the morality of people’s intentions and actions.  People say things like he’s a morally good person because he is always trying to give others pleasure or he is trying to ameliorate their pain or his action is morally wrong because it has caused unnecessary pain. Many even think that animals deserve moral consideration because they have the capacity to experience pleasure and pain. In this lecture, we will consider several central questions that philosophers have explored concerning pain and pleasure.  These questions issues include,

    • Are some pleasures/pains qualitatively better/worse than others?
    • Can death be good or bad for a person if she cannot experience any pleasure or pain from it?
    • Does the fact that an animal can experience pleasure and pain make it worthy of moral consideration?
    • Are pleasure and pain the only intrinsically good and bad things?

    Before I begin to discuss these questions, I want to explain why I say that pain is a mental state and what it means to say that pleasure has intrinsic value and pain has intrinsic disvalue.

    I use the term ‘pain’ to refer to both emotional pain (e.g. the kind of feeling you have when you think about something that distresses you, such as the loss of a loved one) and physical pain (e.g. the kind of feeling you have when you injure your body, such as stubbing your toe). What both of these types of pain have in common – why they are both called pain – is that they feel a certain unpleasant way to the individual who has them. Any state that feels a certain way to an individual is a mental state because to feel something is to be conscious of something, and consciousness is an essential mental feature. This is why I say that both emotional pains and physical pains are mental states.

    Why do we appeal to pain and pleasure when we assess the quality of people’s lives as well as the morality of their intentions and actions? It’s because these mental states have intrinsic value. Let me explain what ‘intrinsic value’ means.

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