Hmm... Hill on the paradox of pain

1. Pain perception Bodily sensations, for instance pains, are often thought to pose insuperable difficulties for representational theories of consciousness. Chris is never one to dodge a problem, and chapter 6 of his splendid and instructive Consciousness is devoted to outlining a perceptual/representational theory of pain, in the tradition of Armstrong and Pitcher. Perceptual theories of pain are not the same as representational theories of pain. According to a perceptual theory of pain, when one has a pain in one’s toe (for example), one perceives some sort of disturbance in one’s toe. (At least in a typical case: the perceptual theorist will want to allow for illusions and hallucinations of such disturbances.1) Pain perception is interoception—perception specialized for delivering information about one’s own body, like proprioception and the vestibular sense. According to a representational theory of pain, the felt quality of pain, or the “phenomenal character” of pain, can be fully explained in representational or intentional terms. A perceptual theory does not entail a representational one, anymore than a perceptual theory of vision (which of course everyone holds) entails a representational one (which not everyone holds). Neither does the converse entailment hold. One may hold a representational theory of imagery, say, without thereby turning imagery into perception. I will set aside the issue of representationalism, and concentrate here on what Chris calls the “paradox of pain”, which he presents chiefly as a problem for perceptual theories of pain. Perception involves dedicated mechanisms of sensory transduction that result in the delivery of ecologically useful information about the perceiver’s environment. Vision, to take the most prominent example, delivers a large variety of information about the