- seCtIon tWo: tHe BRAIn
conscious experience arise?’ And this he puts into
his category of ‘Problems we may never solve’. If we
are to have any chance of a solution, we must think
comparatively: about cognition across species and
across levels of explanation about the brain.
For their part, Noë and Thompson conclude their
discussion of the hunt for the NCCs by observing
that this quest relies on a specific and contro-
versial notion of conscious content. For them,
the moral to be drawn from all this research ‘is
that neuroscience, far from having freed itself of
philosophy, needs the help of philosophy now
more than ever’ (Noë and Thompson, 2004, p.
26). Certainly the claim to be tackling one of the
easy problems without begging any conceptual
questions seems hard to sustain based on what
we have seen so far, and the need for careful
research that crosses disciplinary boundaries
seems obvious.
In the next chapter we will take another step into
the neural labyrinth by asking how the idea of
mind maps on to that of brain – or fails to – and
what kinds of metaphors may help or hinder our
attempts to think about how they fit together.
‘philosophers often ask
good questions, but they
have no techniques for
getting the answers’
(Crick, in Blackmore, 2005, p. 74)
‘neuroscience, far from
having freed itself of
philosophy, needs the
help of philosophy now
more than ever’(Noë and Thompson, 2004, p. 26)FIGURE 4.9 • Ramachandran’s mirror box.
A mirror divides the open box in
half. The patient puts her right
hand into the right side of the
box and imagines her phantom
hand in the left. When she looks
into the box she sees two hands.
When she tries to move both
hands simultaneously a previously
frozen and painful phantom is
experienced as moving.
of pain’ is equated with an ‘image of pain’ – notions that imply
something watching the displayed image, and hence raise all
the problems of the Cartesian theatre. As in global workspace
theories, where the contents of consciousness are displayed
to the unconscious audience in the rest of the brain, this dis-
play is not a magic screening for a psychic homunculus, but
is neural activity being made available to other patterns of
neural activity. Even so, the problem remains. What is special
about this interaction between two neural patterns? What
transforms it into a self feeling pain?
The notion of display and the problems of non-identity between
brain and mind are avoided by theories that treat sensation as
a kind of action. In explaining ‘How to solve the mind–body
problem’, Nicholas Humphrey says that ‘sensory awareness is an
activity. We do not have pains, we get to be pained’ (2000, p. 13).
So, when I feel a pain in my hand, I am not sitting there passively
absorbing the sensations coming in; ‘I am in fact the active agent’
reaching out with an evaluative response, and experiencing this
efferent activity. The kind of reaching out characteristic of pain is
the movement of pushing away, rejecting, or getting rid of it. In
this way he redescribes the ‘mind’ side of the mystery. ‘Thus the
phantasm of pain becomes the sensation of pain, the sensation
of pain becomes the experience of actively paining, the activity
of paining becomes the activity of reaching out to the body surface in a painy
way’ (p. 15). The hard problem is, he claims, transformed into a relatively easy
problem, although others disagree (see the commentaries following Hum-
phrey, 2000).
Note that Humphrey’s theory, although similar, differs from O’Regan and Noë’s
sensorimotor theory (Chapter 3). They tried to escape from both dualism and the
Cartesian theatre by doing away with the idea that perception consists in repre-
senting the world or the perceiving self. But for Humphrey, the organism ‘needs
the capacity to form mental representations of the sensory stimulation at the
surface of its body and how it feels about it’ (p. 109). Without this kind of ‘inner
knowledge’, he suggests, sophisticated planning and decision-making simply
would not be possible.
We do not know what the necessary and sufficient conditions are for con-
sciousness in general or for particular conscious experiences like experiences
of pain. We do, however, know a little about the correlations between brain
events and reports of experience. We know, for example, that more activity
in the pain system means more intense pain. So, it is natural to wonder – will
we one day be able to look into someone’s brain and thereby know exactly
what they are experiencing? There are hints that this might be possible, but
we have also explored some of the reasons why we cannot be confident that
the answer to this question will ever be ‘yes’.It seems that even with detailed knowledge of the correlations between brain and
experience, we are still far from bridging that gap. In an article called ‘Unsolved
problems for neuroscience’, Adolphs includes the question ‘How and why does‘We do not have pains,
we get to be pained’
(Humphrey, 2000, p. 13)
WHERE IS THIS PAIN?