Webinar: "Pain Suffering and the Self"

The Philosophy of Psychiatry webinar series from the UQÀM department of philosophy will feature Philip Gerrans from the University of Adelaide at 6pm on Thursday, September 21, 2023.   

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Abstract

The neuroscience of pain has moved a long way in the last few decades. The classic  modular accounts distinguish “sensorimotor pain” and  emotional suffering and associate them with different neural substrates. On these accounts some conditions such as “social pain” (of ostracism or humiliation) empathy and chronic pain are the result of activity in systems associated with distress, not primary sensory (nociceptive) processing. Recent “matrix” accounts of pain offer a different explanation. Complicating these questions is the degree of overlap between neural activity in conditions such as observation of another’s injury and injury to the self. Leading some to claim that empathy and pain experience depend on activity in the same systems. This is not quite right but it is suggestive.

I offer an Active Inference account of pain and suffering that reconciles tensions between different  accounts. While active inference can be a highly technical theory in biophysics or neurocomputation we can detach the basic principles from the formalism.  The core idea is that processing across the mind is anchored by a multidimensional self-model that co-ordinates regulatory activity for the organism’s benefit. The dimensional structure of pain and suffering  reflects the dimensional structure of that model. I show how the patterns of association and dissociation between pain, suffering and self awareness can be explained by this model.