Pain and Human Suffering (original) (raw)

In his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty, an American pragmatic philosopher, imagined that an expedition from Earth came upon a planet "inhabited by beings like us-bipeds without feathers who build houses and bombs, and write poems and computer programs". They are the Antipodes, persons who (in spite of living perhaps upside down) are totally like us, but do not know they have minds and, therefore, do not talk about mental states or explain the difference between "persons" and "non-persons" via notions such as "mind", "conscience" or "spirit". Even those who believe in their immortalityor in that of animals or robotsonly talk about resurrection of the body. But their knowledge of physiology was so advanced that all their well-constructed phrases corresponded to an immediately identifiable neuronal state. As he recounts: Neurology and biochemistry were the first disciplines in which great technological successes were reached, and a major part of the people's conversation was related to the state of their nerves. When their children headed towards hot stoves, the mothers cried 'He's going to stimulate his C-nerve fibres.' This did not occur only in conversation with other inhabitants of the planet, but even when they were on their own, and people described their actions with phrases such as: "I was suddenly in the S-296 state, and so I put out the milk bottles". Until the arrival of the expedition from Earth the Antipodes did not know that they lacked the concept of mind. The earthmen, nevertheless, would not let go their preconceptions and insisted on asking themselves: "Could it be that they have minds?"like the Spanish conquistadores, when confronting, for the first time, the Indians in recently discovered America, insisted on asking whether the latter had original sin or a soul (a stubborn superstition!). But pain certainly has a "mental" dimension. In fact, pain is an intense stimulus crossing our body from the extremes to the brain. The stimulus is initially transmitted (as the antipodes reckoned) through the C fibres to the spinal cord and thence to the brain. But despite the C fibres being very fine, they transmit this signal more slowly and gently than the A-delta fibres (thicker because they are shielded with myelin), which transmit the signal in a more high-pitched and rapid way. In the case of the Adelta fibres, with myelin, the transportation of the stimulus is salutatory and sometimes works