The Causal Effects Of Painful Qualia: A Mind-Body Thesis And Supportive Evidence

Common sense suggests that painful qualia per se can cause reparative responding and implies that such qualia should not exist if they cannot do so. Epiphenomenalism counters that reparative responses to pain are determined by the neural substrates of pain, not by the subjective sensations of pain, and that such sensations need not exist (even though they inexplicably do exist). The goal of this article was to develop a mind-body thesis that allows for painful qualia per se to have a causal effect: a psychophysiological thesis positing (a) that painful sensations are the subjective qualities of peripherally activated nociceptors, (b) that every organism establishes its own criteria for evaluating the tolerability of nociceptors' painful subjective qualities, and (c) that the neural underpinnings of intolerable evaluations trigger the trial-and-error generation of pain-alleviating and pain-avoiding responses, which can become part of an organism's learned repertoire of successful responses to pain. Notably, if painful sensations are instead posited to be subjective qualities in the central nervous system (CNS), then nonconscious neural signals from nonconscious nociceptors constitute the only input for CNS evaluation, and the signal-based evaluation is sufficient to innervate the trial-and-error generation of nociceptor- and signal-quelling responses-in which case, any painful qualia that subjectively accompany any CNS operation are causally unnecessary epiphenomena. The empirical implications of this article's psychophysiological thesis are explored, and the human, animal, and genetic data relevant to these implications are summarized.