Pain

The notorious "explanatory gap" can only be bridged by understanding the raison d’être of pain

The changes we see in the world today are intellectual, moral, physical in their ideal and intention: the spiritual revolution waits for its hour and throws up meanwhile its waves here and there. Until it comes the sense of the others cannot be understood and till then all interpretation of present happening and forecast of man’s future are vain things.¹

Preface

Let me begin today’s post by reminding you of what Edmund Husserl called the paradox of human subjectivity. The paradox consists in the seeming incompatibility of the following two statements:

• Our consciousness exists in the world.

• The world exists in our consciousness.

Most philosophers have found Husserl’s paradox intolerable; hence the attempt to treat one or the other statement as expressing the true fact of the matter. The common reaction in our day is to discount the second statement. “In this,” philosopher David Carr wrote, eliminative materialists “resemble nothing so much as theologians trying to argue evil out of a world of whose uniform goodness they are convinced in advance”:

What stares them in the face is not only the qualitative difference between consciousness and the third-person processes of the brain and nervous system, but also the fact that subjectivity and intentionality are the always presupposed conditions of the possibility of the scientific investigations on which their philosophical conclusions so heavily depend.²

To Erwin Schrödinger, as was mentioned in a previous post, “the best simile of the bewildering double role of mind” was that of a painter or poet who introduces into his work “an unpretending subordinate character who is himself” — the blind bard in Homer’s Odyssey who is Homer, the humble side-figure in Albrecht Dürer’s All-Saints painting who is Dürer himself: “On the one hand mind is the artist who has produced the whole; in the accomplished work, however, it is but an insignificant accessory that might be absent without detracting from the total effect.” While human consciousness — this goes without saying — isn’t the sovereign creator of the world it contains, we must not slight the roles the logical structure of human thought and the spatiotemporal structure of human perceptual experience play in structuring our knowledge of the objective world.

Daniel Dennett like many others of his ilk is convinced in advance that phenomenology — your seeing or hearing something, your being in pain, your feeling hungry or hot or cold or remorseful — can be reduced to (i.e., fully explained in terms of) cerebral activity. While Dennett does not question that there appears to be phenomenology (which consist in the appearance of feelings and such), he is adamant in denying that there actually is such a thing as phenomenology, despite the fact that our knowledge of cerebral activity is arguably less certain than the phenomenology on which it is based — the empirical data of neuroscience and the cogitations of cognitive scientists. Regarding cognitive science, Hilary Putnam had this to say:

One hears a lot of talk about “cognitive science” nowadays, but one needs to distinguish between the putting forward of a scientific theory, or the flourishing of a scientific discipline with well-defined questions, from the proffering of promissory notes for possible theories that one does not know even in principle how to redeem.³

The explanatory gap

The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential damage, or described in terms of such damage,” and adds: “Pain is always subjective.”

Vincent van Gogh: Old Man with his Head in his Hands

Pain correlates with neural events. When someone is injured, numerous chemical changes take place. Signals pass along specialized thin, unmyelinated, neurons called C-fibers to the spinal cord, thence to the brain stem, thalamus, and to various parts of the cortex. Interestingly the correlation between the amount of pain experienced and the amount of activity in these cortical areas turns out to be rather close, with fMRI and PET studies showing larger areas of cortical activation when pain is rated as more intense. This suggests that there are reliable neural correlates of the amount of pain someone is experiencing.⁴

The gulf between the firing of C-fibers and the experience of pain — and more broadly between the neural correlates of consciousness and the subjectivity of consciousness — is known as the explanatory gap. Nobody seems to have the slightest idea how this gap could be bridged. Specifically, “why pain emerges when c-fibers are excited will forever remain a mystery,” the philosopher Jaewon Kim wrote,⁵ “we have no choice but to accept it as an unexplainable brute fact.”

Countless arguments against the functionalist reduction of subjectivity in general and of pain in particular have been proffered, to little avail. As the MAGA horde remains committed to the Big Lie, so materialist philosophers remain committed to their brazen materialism. (Functionalism is the contemporary version of behaviorism. While the latter tried to account for mentality entirely in terms of the behavior or behavioral dispositions of the whole organism, functionalism tries to account for mentality entirely in terms of the computational or information-processing behavior of brains or similarly equipped physical systems.)

Here is one such argument. If the truth of “pain = C-fiber firing” licenses us to say that there is nothing more to pain than C-fiber firing then, according to Colin Mc Ginn,⁶ it also licenses us to say that there is nothing more to C-fiber firing than pain: C-fiber firing has no properties not possessed by pain; it reduces to pain, consists of it, is constituted by it; it has no reality beyond that of pain. If this reduction is wrong, then so is its converse.

And yet there is a way to bridge the explanatory gap. While we cannot explain pain in terms of C-fiber firing, nor vice versa, we can understand C-fiber firing as instrumental in the manifestation of pain (to us), just as we can understand molecular motion as instrumental in the manifestation of heat or electromagnetic radiation as instrumental in the manifestation of color (to us). We can even think of atoms and subatomic particles, not as parts or ingredients of the manifested world, but as instrumental in its manifestation to us (see here or here).

It used to be said that a color is nothing but a frequency. (Actually, color perception is more closely correlated with the reflectances of surfaces and quite independent of the color temperature of the light illuminating said surfaces.) It would, however, be much closer to the truth to say that frequencies (or reflectances) are nothing but ways to manifest colors to us.

My emphasis on the words “to us” suggests that the world we perceive is the one which exists in our consciousness. While this is in fact true, it does not diminish the value of what science has been able to infer from an ever-growing stock of empirical data (but also forced to continually revise). Rather, it alerts us to the fact that the world shared across our individual “spheres of consciousness” (to use Schrödinger’s term) depends more strongly on the nature of our mental consciousness than we are generally willing to consider. It suggests that the emergence of a supramental consciousness will be able to change the world we presently think of as objective in ways that would be impossible if it existed “in itself,” independently of how we perceive and think about it. It suggests that the evolution of physical structures supporting consciousness will eventually be overtaken by the evolution of the consciousness which supports the structure of the physical world.

Necessarily, this calls for a much broader ontological framework than materialistic philosophy affords. It calls for an inspired vision of reality such as Sri Aurobindo has put into words. As I have indicated in another post, neither mind nor matter is fundamental. Both are stops along two opposite routes: one downward from something above mind to something below matter, the other upward from something below matter to something above mind.

First to appear along the downward route is a supramental consciousness which is one with being, in the sense that there is no differentiation into subject and object: what manifests the world is a creative self-knowledge. The last to appear along this route, before the final plunge into unconsciousness and non-being, is inanimate matter.

The upward route is the more familiar to us; we call it “evolution.” When conscious experience appears, what takes place is the co-evolution of consciousness and being. Out of the unconsciousness of their evolutionary foundation there emerges subjective content, and out of the non-being of their evolutionary foundation there emerge determinations of being which are instrumental in the manifestation of subjective content. Neither subjectivity nor determinations of being could have evolved if both had not been involved in that from which they evolved.

Evolution, as was stated here and here, is far from finished. When the supramental consciousness evolves, along with a species of supramentally conscious beings, our anatomical insides will no longer be needed. They will eventually be discarded, much like a scaffolding or the chrysalis of a butterfly.

Pain’s raison d’être

So now we have some idea of how there can be pain. But why is there pain? To say that it confers an evolutionary edge is questionable, for we remove our hands from a fire before we feel the pain. It only seems to us that we remove our hands in response to the pain. (The effect is based on a subjective reversal of the objective temporal order.) We appear to be designed to entertain illusions of authorship, and this not merely in the metaphorical sense in which advantageous motor responses are said to be “designed” by natural selection. To cut a long story short, the evolution of consciousness — from the submental to the supramental — is also the evolution of freedom: from illusory freedom to genuine freedom to absolute freedom.

Let us then turn to Sri Aurobindo’s answer to the question of why there is pain. Having said that the world has three layers, infra-ethical, ethical, and supra-ethical, he turns to what is common to all of them.

That which is common to all is ... the satisfaction of conscious-force of existence developing itself into forms and seeking in that development its delight. From that satisfaction or delight of self-existence it evidently began; for it is that which is normal to it, to which it clings, which it makes its base; but it seeks new forms of itself and in the passage to higher forms there intervenes the phenomenon of pain and suffering which seems to contradict the fundamental nature of its being. This and this alone is the root-problem. [LD 105]

Pain of mind and body is a device of Nature, that is to say, of Force in her works, meant to subserve a definite transitional end in her upward evolution. The world is from the point of view of the individual a play and complex shock of multitudinous forces. In the midst of this complex play the individual stands as a limited constructed being with a limited amount of force exposed to numberless shocks which may wound, maim, break up or disintegrate the construction which he calls himself. Pain is in the nature of a nervous and physical recoil from a dangerous or harmful contact.... Its office begins when life with its frailty and imperfect possession of Matter enters on the scene; it grows with the growth of Mind in life. Its office continues so long as Mind is bound in the life and body which it is using, dependent upon them for its knowledge and means of action, subjected to their limitations and to the egoistic impulses and aims which are born of those limitations. But if and when Mind in man becomes capable of being free, unegoistic, in harmony with all other beings and with the play of the universal forces, the use and office of suffering diminishes, its raison d’être must finally cease to be and it can only continue as an atavism of Nature, a habit that has survived its use, a persistence of the lower in the as yet imperfect organisation of the higher. Its eventual elimination must be an essential point in the destined conquest of the soul over subjection to Matter and egoistic limitation in Mind.

This elimination is possible because pain and pleasure themselves are currents, one imperfect, the other perverse, but still currents of the delight of existence. The reason for this imperfection and this perversion is the self-division of the being in his consciousness by measuring and limiting Maya and in consequence an egoistic and piecemeal instead of a universal reception of contacts by the individual. [LD 115‒16]

Such then is the view of the universe which arises out of the integral Vedantic affirmation. An infinite, indivisible existence all-blissful in its pure self-consciousness moves out of its fundamental purity into the varied play of Force that is consciousness…. The delight of its existence is at first self-gathered, absorbed, sub-conscious in the basis of the physical universe; then emergent in a great mass of neutral movement which is not yet what we call sensation; then further emergent with the growth of mind and ego in the triple vibration of pain, pleasure and indifference originating from the limitation of the force of consciousness in the form and from its exposure to shocks of the universal Force which it finds alien to it and out of harmony with its own measure and standard; finally, the conscious emergence of the full Sachchidananda in its creations by universality, by equality, by self-possession and conquest of Nature. This is the course and movement of the world.

If it then be asked why the One Existence should take delight in such a movement, the answer lies in the fact that all possibilities are inherent in Its infinity and that the delight of existence — in its mutable becoming, not in its immutable being, — lies precisely in the variable realisation of its possibilities. And the possibility worked out here in the universe of which we are a part, begins from the concealment of Sachchidananda in that which seems to be its own opposite and its self-finding even amid the terms of that opposite. Infinite being loses itself in the appearance of non-being and emerges in the appearance of a finite Soul; infinite consciousness loses itself in the appearance of a vast indeterminate inconscience and emerges in the appearance of a superficial limited consciousness; infinite self-sustaining Force loses itself in the appearance of a chaos of atoms and emerges in the appearance of the insecure balance of a world; infinite Delight loses itself in the appearance of an insensible Matter and emerges in the appearance of a discordant rhythm of varied pain, pleasure and neutral feeling, love, hatred and indifference; infinite unity loses itself in the appearance of a chaos of multiplicity and emerges in a discord of forces and beings which seek to recover unity by possessing, dissolving and devouring each other.

In this creation the real Sachchidananda has to emerge. Man, the individual, has to become and to live as a universal being; his limited mental consciousness has to widen to the superconscient unity in which each embraces all; his narrow heart has to learn the infinite embrace and replace its lusts and discords by universal love and his restricted vital being to become equal to the whole shock of the universe upon it and capable of universal delight; his very physical being has to know itself as no separate entity but as one with and sustaining in itself the whole flow of the indivisible Force that is all things; his whole nature has to reproduce in the individual the unity, the harmony, the oneness-in-all of the supreme Existence-Consciousness-Bliss. [LD 118‒19]

Ignorance would ... bring no pain of dissatisfaction if the mental consciousness were entirely ignorant, if it could halt satisfied in some shell of custom, unaware of its own ignorance or of the infinite ocean of consciousness and knowledge by which it lives surrounded; but precisely it is to this that the emerging consciousness in Matter awakes, first, to its ignorance of the world in which it lives and which it has to know and master in order to be happy, secondly, to the ultimate barrenness and limitation of this knowledge, to the meagreness and insecurity of the power and happiness it brings and to the awareness of an infinite consciousness, knowledge, true being in which alone is to be found a victorious and infinite happiness. Nor would the obstruction of inertia bring with it unrest and dissatisfaction if the vital sentience emerging in Matter were entirely inert, if it were kept satisfied with its own half-conscient limited existence, unaware of the infinite power and immortal existence in which it lives as part of and yet separated from it, or if it had nothing within driving it towards the effort really to participate in that infinity and immortality. But this is precisely what all life is driven to feel and seek from the first, its insecurity and the need and struggle for persistence, for self-preservation; it awakes in the end to the limitation of its existence and begins to feel the impulsion towards largeness and persistence, towards the infinite and the eternal.

And when in man life becomes wholly self-conscious, this unavoidable struggle and effort and aspiration reach their acme and the pain and discord of the world become finally too keenly sensible to be borne with contentment. Man may for a long time quiet himself by seeking to be satisfied with his limitations or by confining his struggle to such mastery as he can gain over this material world he inhabits, some mental and physical triumph of his progressive knowledge over its inconscient fixities, of his small, concentrated conscious will and power over its inertly-driven monstrous forces. But here, too, he finds the limitation, the poor inconclusiveness of the greatest results he can achieve and is obliged to look beyond. The finite cannot remain permanently satisfied so long as it is conscious either of a finite greater than itself or of an infinite beyond itself to which it can yet aspire. And if the finite could be so satisfied, yet the apparently finite being who feels himself to be really an infinite or feels merely the presence or the impulse and stirring of an infinite within, can never be satisfied till these two are reconciled, till That is possessed by him and he is possessed by it in whatever degree or manner. Man is such a finite-seeming infinity and cannot fail to arrive at a seeking after the Infinite. He is the first son of earth who becomes vaguely aware of God within him, of his immortality or of his need of immortality, and the knowledge is a whip that drives and a cross of crucifixion until he is able to turn it into a source of infinite light and joy and power. [LD 260‒62]

[W]hen we get into a deeper and larger consciousness [we find] that there is a cosmic and individual utility in what presents itself to us as adverse and evil. For without experience of pain we would not get all the infinite value of the divine delight of which pain is in travail; all ignorance is a penumbra which environs an orb of knowledge, every error is significant of the possibility and the effort of a discovery of truth; every weakness and failure is a first sounding of gulfs of power and potentiality; all division is intended to enrich by an experience of various sweetness of unification the joy of realised unity. All this imperfection is to us evil, but all evil is in travail of the eternal good; for all is an imperfection which is the first condition — in the law of life evolving out of Inconscience — of a greater perfection in the manifesting of the hidden divinity. But at the same time our present feeling of this evil and imperfection, the revolt of our consciousness against them is also a necessary valuation; for if we have first to face and endure them, the ultimate command on us is to reject, to overcome, to transform the life and the nature. It is for that end that their insistence is not allowed to slacken; the soul must learn the results of the Ignorance, must begin to feel their reactions as a spur to its endeavour of mastery and conquest and finally to a greater endeavour of transformation and transcendence. [LD 421‒22]

Wherefore God hammers so fiercely at his world, tramples and kneads it like dough, casts it so often into the blood-bath and the red hell-heat of the furnace? Because humanity in the mass is still a hard, crude and vile ore which will not otherwise be smelted and shaped: as is his material, so is his method. Let it help to transmute itself into nobler and purer metal, his ways with it will be gentler and sweeter, much loftier and fairer its uses. [EPY 210]

In a long passage of Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem Savitri, which I quoted in a previous post, the heavenly sage Narad replies to questions posed by Savitri’s mother, the queen. These were her questions:

“O seer, in the earth’s strange twi-natured life
By what pitiless adverse Necessity
Or what cold freak of a Creator’s will,
By what random accident or governed Chance
That shaped a rule out of fortuitous steps,
Made destiny from an hour’s emotion, came
Into the unreadable mystery of Time
The direr mystery of grief and pain?
Is it thy God who made this cruel law?
Or some disastrous Power has marred his work 
And he stands helpless to defend or save?”

What follows are excerpts from Narad’s reply that throw further light on the why and wherefore of pain:

“O queen, thy thought is a light of the Ignorance, 
Its brilliant curtain hides from thee God’s face.
It illumes a world born from the Inconscience
But hides the Immortal’s meaning in the world.
Thy mind’s light hides from thee the Eternal’s thought, 
Thy heart’s hopes hide from thee the Eternal’s will, 
Earth’s joys shut from thee the Immortal’s bliss.
Thence rose the need of a dark intruding god,
The world’s dread teacher, the creator, pain.
...
Pain was the first-born of the Inconscience
Which was thy body’s dumb original base;
Already slept there pain’s subconscient shape:
A shadow in a shadowy tenebrous womb,
Till life shall move, it waits to wake and be.
In one caul with joy came forth the dreadful Power.
In life’s breast it was born hiding its twin;
But pain came first, then only joy could be.
Pain ploughed the first hard ground of the world-drowse. 
By pain a spirit started from the clod,
By pain Life stirred in the subliminal deep.
...
Pain is the hammer of the Gods to break
A dead resistance in the mortal’s heart,
His slow inertia as of living stone.
If the heart were not forced to want and weep,
His soul would have lain down content, at ease,
And never thought to exceed the human start
And never learned to climb towards the Sun.
...
Pain is the hand of Nature sculpturing men
To greatness: an inspired labour chisels
With heavenly cruelty an unwilling mould.
...
A power is in thee that thou knowest not;
Thou art a vessel of the imprisoned spark.
It seeks relief from Time’s envelopment,
And while thou shutst it in, the seal is pain:
Bliss is the Godhead’s crown, eternal, free, 
Unburdened by life’s blind mystery of pain:
Pain is the signature of the Ignorance
Attesting the secret god denied by life:
Until life finds him pain can never end.
...
Because afflicted by the little self
Thy consciousness forgets to be divine
As it walks in the vague penumbra of the flesh
And cannot bear the world’s tremendous touch, 
Thou criest out and sayst that there is pain. 
Indifference, pain and joy, a triple disguise,
Attire of the rapturous Dancer in the ways, 
Withhold from thee the body of God’s bliss.

I conclude with a minute’s worth of the wonderful music of Sunil Bhattacharya, which contains the last three lines read by the Mother:

1. Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, p. 211. First published in the Arya in August 1917.

2. D. Carr, The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition, p. 138 (Oxford University Press, 1999).

3. H. Putnam, Functionalism: Cognitive Science or Science Fiction?, in D.M. Johnson and C.E. Erneling (Eds.), The Future of the Cognitive Revolution, pp. 32–44 (Oxford UP, 1997).

4. S. Blackmore, Consciousness: An Introduction, pp. 236–37 (Oxford University Press, 2004).

5. J. Kim, Philosophy of Mind, p. 229 (Westview Press, 1996).

6. C. Mc Ginn, What is it not Like to be a Brain?, in: P. van Loocke (Ed.), The Physical Nature of Consciousness, pp. 257‒68 (John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2001).