Pathos (Feb 2023)
Is feeling pain like perceiving red?
Abstract
The debate between neuroscientists and philosophers on the concept of pain still continues today, also revived by the updates of the classic IASP definition. From the various contributions we understand that the core of the discussion still consists in the effects of the mind-body dualism of Cartesian origin. On the one hand, pain has subjective and indubitable, perhaps even unspeakable qualities; on the other hand, it can be physically located in a well-defined region of the body. Recently philosophers have resorted to a vision that does not focus on the brain alone, but contests pain in the relationship between the body and the world. Neuroscientists instead refer to computational theories involving a distributed network of neural circuitries encoding sensory and emotional aspects of pain such as expectations, prediction errors and prediction in perceptual inference.
