Embodied pain, chronic pain, and Grahek's legacy

Abstract

This paper argues in favour of the embodied approach to pain. We start by asserting that an appropriate philosophical treatment of pain must be empirically informed, rather than relying solely on the conceptual analysis typical of what we call "orthodox views of pain. " We then examine contemporary empirically informed views, specifically enactivism and eliminativism, by testing them against the aberrant pain phenomenon, namely chronic pain. This method of using fringe cases and aberrations to test philosophical theories of pain follows the approach of Grahek (2007), who criticized subjectivism and objectivism based on their failure to account for pain asymbolia and congenital analgesia. We contend that the embodied approach holds an advantage over eliminativism and enactivism as it integrates the subjective, phenomenal aspect of pain-understood as a form of perceptual expectation-with the objective behavioural and neurological aspects by proposing a specific top-down connectionist cognitive architecture. We test two predictions of this approach: (1) that pain is multimodal and cognitively penetrable, and (2) that aberrant forms of pain, such as chronic pain, can be modulated not only by manipulating its immediate neurological source but also by altering the multimodal body image through virtual reality (VR) technology and our cognitive states, primarily our expectations about the environment.

Keywords

• chronic pain
• cognitive penetrability
• embodied cognition
• philosophy of pain
• virtual reality technology