[SydPhil] HPS Research Seminar, Monday 21, August 2023 at 5:30pm (Date Correction)

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School of History and Philosophy of Science
RESEARCH SEMINAR
[The University of Sydney]
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Pain suffering and the self
Philip Gerrans (University of Adelaide)
Dates: Monday, 21/8/2023
Time: 5:30pm
Venue: Madsen Building (F09), Level 3, Room 331
How to register: Free, no registration required
Abstract: Pain, suffering and the self.  Pain Aysmbolia as Depersonalisation?

The neuroscience of pain processing has moved steadily from a modular to a network or matrix conception of pain processing. The matrix conception has been applied to explain
 variety of disorders characterised by pain and suffering, Pain Asymbolia,  Insensitivity to Pain, Chronic Pain, “Social” Pain (of humiliation or exclusion) phantom limb pain and nocibo and placebo effects. Philosophers interested in pain and suffering have offered a variety of accounts these atypical cases. Examples are the idea that pain has dissociable affective and sensori-motor components (shared by some classic neuroscientific accounts); that the representative content of pain is imperative not descriptive, eliminative accounts (there is no such thing as pain) and, more recently, active inference accounts. One thing that is distinctive  of the last is that they treat pain as an aspect of biological regulation not primarily a phenomenon of representation (e.g. of location and intensity of damage or of value and significance to the self).

This paper shows how the active inference account can integrate representational and regulatory accounts of pain and suffering. The core idea is that processing across the mind is anchored by a multidimensional self-model that co-ordinates active inference. The dimensional structure of pain and suffering  reflects the dimensional structure of that model. I show how the phenomenon of pain asymbolia and other atypical conditions can be explained by this idea.


Bio: My main research interest is the use of psychological disorder to study the mind. I have written on developmental disorders (autism and Williams syndrome), cognitive neuropsychiatry, on moral psychopathologies (such as psychopathology) and the emotions as well as a large monograph and associated series of papers on delusion and disorders of rationality. I am an Associate of the Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences where I collaborate with philosophers psychologists and neuroscientists. Currently I am completing a project on the relationship between emotional processing and self-representation with an emphasis on psychiatric disorders. Chris Letheby and I have just commenced a project on philosophical issues raised by the nature of psychedelic experience. In all these cases my focus is on the role of computational models linking experience to neural processing.

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