What is the relationship between pain and the body? I claim that pain is best explained as a type of personal experience and the bodily response during pain is best explained in terms of a type of mechanical neurophysiologic operation. I apply the radical philosophy of identity theory from philosophy of mind to the relationship between the personal experience of pain and specific neurophysiologic mechanism and argue that the relationship between them is best explained as one of type identity. Specifically, (...) pain is a specific type of personal experience identical to a specific type of allostatic stress response comprised of interdependent nervous, endocrine and immune mechanical operations. (shrink)

In my thesis, I challenge existing philosophical and scientific accounts of pain to explain certain constitutional, functional and empirical problems. Though difficult, some of these problems will be familiar. Unlike perceptual experiences, pains are strikingly affective and when we are in pain we are primarily concerned with the experience itself rather than mind-independent objects. The obvious explanation, that pain is not a perceptual experience, would be appealing if it were not for the fact that pains vary in quality, intensity and (...) location. These seem to be features of paradigmatic perceptual experiences. The magnitude of another problem, the weakness of the correlation between pain and the stimulus, has been under-played. It is widely observed that those with chronic conditions experience pain in the absence of the stimulus and in circumstances like sport and war severe injuries occur in the absence of pain. I argue that the variable relationship between pain and the stimulus is normal; it is not confined to abnormal cases or circumstances. As no existing account proves explanatorily adequate, I develop a novel position called ‘near-motivationalism’ from a revisionary approach to the conceptual models of pain science. This has the power to solve the problems I set. (shrink)