Pain as Enactive Perception: Applying Noe's Theory of Perception

Pain as Enactive Perception: Applying Noe’s Theory of Perception Alice I. Kyburg (kyburg@uwosh.edu) Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Oshkosh, WI 54901 USA Abstract Pain as “Active” Representation We begin with a view defended elsewhere that pain is a representation of tissue damage that is dependent on what one is doing. We extend this view by exploring a relation between pain and action inspired by Alva Noe’s theory of perception. We consider whether sensorimotor knowledge related to tissue damage plays a role in pain experience. We explore this possibility by considering various kinds of pain, including the pain of a thorn in one’s foot, that of a herniated disk, and the chronic pain that sometimes follows the healing of an injury. We find that there is a large class of pain for which the phenomenal experience could easily be informed by sensorimotor knowledge in much the way Noe claims it is for vision and other forms of perception. We also find that conceiving of pain in this way inspires new understanding of phantom limb pain and chronic pain. I support Tye’s representational account of pain, with the qualification that representations of tissue damage are dynamic and very likely to depend on the activities the subject is engaged in and the demands they place on his representational resources. To emphasize that actions influence how things are represented, I call this version of the representation account of pain the active representational account. The idea is that pain is, in several ways, like vision and other forms of perception: (1) there are special-purpose sensorimotor pairings that serve to reduce the subject’s representational load while facilitating specific actions and (2) the total representational load dedicated to representing tissue damage is a function of the other demands on a subject’s representational resources. 1 If one has stepped on a thorn the traditional representationist will say that one’s foot pain is the representation of damage to one’s foot by the thorn. The active representationalist will agree, but will emphasize that one’s foot pain may vary with the activity one is engaged in. If one is walking with a thorn in one’s foot one will have a pain that facilitates such walking. In this case the particular representation of tissue damage is part of a specialized sensorimotor pairing. If the subject lies down for a nap in the woods the pain will have a different phenomenal content – it will still be a representation of a foot injury, but it will lack the content necessary for walking. Consider the type of pain one often has when one is first injured. There is the initial “Ow!”, a sudden, intense, all encompassing pain. The content of this representation includes particular information about the injury, such as its location and whether it is, for instance, a burn, a stab, a cut, or a knock with a heavy object. The greater demand on representational resources comes from the urgent need to act (sometimes, even, the instinct to act) by, for example, withdrawing one’s limb from the heat source, stepping away from the poking stick, or just removing all stress from the injured limb. It is likely that the representation of tissue damage during this initial phase facilitates the carrying out of such defensive acts. Consider the initial pain of a thorn entering deeply into one’s foot. One experiences the sharp piercing pain, has a sudden and powerful urge to raise one’s foot and keep it up, and tries to do so. Nearly all unrelated thoughts and actions cease. Keywords: pain;perception;enactive perception;action Introduction Philosophical accounts of pain have covered a wide variety of theories. A recent theory by Colin Klein (2007) is that pain is an imperative, the content of which defines the quality of the experience. Michael Tye (1995, 2005) conceives of pain as a nonconceptual representation of tissue damage (or disruption). I have argued that these two accounts are much closer to each other than they at first appear and that the representationist account can be expanded to incorporate the strengths of the imperative account by acknowledging the role of action in determining how tissue damage is represented. In this paper I further develop this action-based representational account of pain by incorporating insights from (Noe, 2004) on active perception. In Section Two I describe the active representational account of pain, an expanded version of Tye’s representational account of pain, that explicitly incorporates the hypothesis that how pain is represented is influenced by the activities one is engaged in. In Section Three I present some aspects of Noe’s action-centered account of perception that have interesting applications to pain when pain is understood as a kind of perception. In Section Four I apply these ideas to the expanded representational account of pain presented in Section Two. In Section Five I consider how this augmented active representational account of pain fares with some of the more philosophically difficult cases of pain. See (Hayhoe & Ballard, 2005) and (Ballard et al., 1991)