IUBio

Is This Pain?

John johnhkm at logicworld.com.au
Sat Nov 28 08:43:08 EST 1998


kkollins at pop3.concentric.net wrote in message
<365F84BE.85A8869A at pop3.concentric.net>...

>Is there anything like a metl fork involved? Or does it just happen
>"spontaneously"?


Spontaneous.

If it's the latter thing, it's more difficult. Whenever the innateneural
>circuitry is mucked-around-with, there's the possibility that, to a greater
or
>lesser extent, the resulting "circuitry" will still signal, but in a
different
>way... yielding something akin to "referred pain", but artificially
>"engineered". This's analogous to the difference between using a computer
>program as it's shipped, and opening the ".exe" in a binary editor and
snipping
>out a few bits of binary data... snip the stuff in the right way and the
program
>still runs... but it "says 'ouch'" every now-and-then... because the
"circuitry"
>of the
>
>>[...] Is there something unique about pain that precludes it being a sense
like
>hearing, smell, vision, touch, and taste? Or is that we just live in a
culture
>with the vestiges of atavistic Calvinist morals?
>
>We "sense" (experience) "pain", but "pain" doesn't drive the creation of
>"memory" of itself...

Tell a post traumatic stress syndrome soul or a severely abused child  that.
Pain does create its own form of memory. I had extensive neurosurgery at
four years of age and approaching a hospital can sometimes put the horrors
through me. Most who have experienced severe pain know its mnemonic echoes.
Given the specific regions of the neocortex have been demonstrated to be
implicated in pain sensation I see no reason why we should eliminate pain
from the memory store. Pain can shape us as much as pleasure.

it drives creation of memory with respect to the energy
>gradients inherent in the external environment when the "pain" is
experienced,
>and which is topologically-distributed within the nervous system in a way
that
>will functionally-"prefer" TD E/I-minimization with respect to "moving away
>from" similarities to such "pain"-coupled environmental energy
distribution..


Ok I 'm stupid, but I really would prefer it if people would construct their
statements in simple English. Save the jargon for the experts, I'm just a
vagabond in Popper's World 3 and de Chardin's Noosphere. I'm interested in
the neuroanatomy\chemistry of this, not ideas concerning energy
distributions. Reductionism is a methodology, don't turn it into a
philosophy.

"At some point then, every attempt to reduce psychology to neuroscience must
fail."

    Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire.

All the moreso when others try to invoke physics as the exemplary
explanation of every phenomenon. The whole reductionist philosophy (not
method!) is contradicted by the historical fact that human knowledge and
understanding has increased through the proliferation of multitudinous
models, theories, paradigms whatever. After all, the three interacting
bodies dilemma (cf Poincare's 1889 theorem) still plagues us, so how can
reductionist methodologies down to atomic\field levels ever find relevance
in the greater body of biosciences (molecular genetics is one *occasional*
exception, Van der Waal forces can be invoked to explain genetic drift),
particularly given that despite nearly a century of Quantum mechanics only 3
or 4 chemical reactions have been explained via quantum mechanics? I believe
the concept of domain relevance may also be applicable here. We cannot and
never will squeeze the universe into a ball, to steal a line from TS Eliot.

Reductionism is a powerful methodology but that doesn't make it final (think
of Newton). Dualism, it still haunts all of us (with due respect to the fine
work of John Eccles!). These two statements are apparently contradictory but
then consider these.

Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the soul

"If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are wrong."

John Barrow, mathematical physicist.

"If we define a religion to be a system of thought which contains unprovable
statements, so it contains an element of faith, then Godel has taught us
that not only is mathematics a religion but it is the only religion able to
prove itself to be one."

 Cited in:
"Frontiers of Complexity: The Search for Order in a Chaotic World, Peter
Coveney & Roger Highfield [Interested in time? read The Arrow of Time by
these two excellent scientists and writers.]

Lower order syntheses are a dream, albeit an occasionally reified one (watch
that process reach the zero point with time), but it is delusional to expect
this to always be the case or that it should always be the case. What
matters is what works, and in that regard the final truth is not always
necessary. Plato was great, but that doesn't mean he was always right. Great
thinkers make great mistakes. (Ernst Mach and atomism, Einstein and quantum
mechanics, Popper and Eccles "The Self and its Brain", Penrose and
microtubules[Hah!], Watson [founder of bloody behaviourism] and "physics is
the only science and the rest is social work" [idiot]).

"A man's errors are his portals of discovery."

James Joyce.

Better still that another man's errors are my portals of discovery.

So Ken, forgive my ignorance, consider me grossly ignorant in these matters,
and please frame your responses accordingly.

"To write well, express yourself like the common person, but think like a
wise person."

Aristotle


John

Who occasionally expresses himself like a common person and is assiduously
persuing the latter.

Now, I have this pain in my tooth ... .




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