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.
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.
