Colin Klein

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462 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2016 last heard Jan 2016

Colin Klein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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New Books in Philosophy · Colin Klein, “What the Body Commands: The Imperative Theory of Pain” (MIT Press, 2015) · 15 Jan 2016 podcast

Um so th you know, they're the ones that take information to the spinal cord.

Uh so they're not even in your brain.

It's like saying vision is the optic nerve firing.

Uh but it's not you know, you might think, well, it's it's just a placeholder or whatever, but I think it's actually even there's an even more important flaw there.

And here again I'm guided by the the kind of two big names in uh 2013 Wall and uh Ronald Melzak, who spent a lot of time on this.

There's still this kind of idea, what used to be called a specificity theory or the labeled lines theory, uh that, you know, you've got pain receptors down in the skin, there's a single kind of pain fiber uh that carries it up to the brain, and let's say, you know, there's a pain area that lights up when you feel pain.

Uh and I think that kind of empirical picture, the sort of naive empirical picture that a lot of people have, is one of the things that contributes to this feeling that, you know, conceivabil uh these conceivability arguments.

But in fact, uh the pain system is extremely complex.

So in addition to C fibers, you have A delta fibers, which carry different sorts of information about damage.

Uh, but there are also a lot of others, so touch fibers, uh or the f you know, some of the uh a beta fibers and some of these things that carry information that we normally think of as touch information also modulate pain.

Uh and as you go up it just gets more and more complex.

There's also it doesn't seem like any

particular single pane area in the brain.

So pain itself is a very complicated and very integrative system.

So it takes in a lot of information both about what's happening in the body but also in your current state and puts that together into the sensation.

Um so this is uh Melzak sometimes called a neuromatrix theory rather than a labeled lines theory.

And I think once you start thinking about pain in this more complicated way, uh, that pushes you towards at least a more sort of empirically realistic view uh that your philosophical thesis is gonna have to account for.

So that's um I'm not sure if that entirely gets it, but that's sort of some of the things that are going on.

So yeah, as you mentioned, one of the things you

the in the book I'm defending what I call pure imperativism where you've only got the imperative content.

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