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

And I actually think pains are not the only things with imperative content.

I actually think it applies to this whole class of bodily sensations that I start by marking off as what I call the homeostatic sensations.

Um so as you mentioned, these are the sensations whose function is uh to kind of maintain bodily parameters within some range.

Now sometimes your body can do that on its own, as it were, without any help, right?

So there are a lot of kind of internal ion concentrations and things like this that they go on all the time.

You're not aware of them.

Um and in part because there's nothing you can really do about them.

But there are many things like so suppose your fluid levels drop, um, so you don't have enough water.

Uh you can your body can do some things with that.

It can, you know, stop sweating and so on, but really it needs you to take action.

So you need to go get more water.

And so what I think happens in the way the body solves this problem is there are sensations like thirst and the content of something like thirst is a command, go drink water.

If you follow that command, then under ordinary circumstances, and that's always an important proviso, then under ordinary circumstances, you'll solve the problem that gave rise to the sensation in the first place.

Um so that's what's going on with homeostatic sensations.

And then what I want to do is identify pain as one of those homeostatic sensations, and that's why we ought to also think about it as an imperative.

Hm, yeah, that that's a really good question.

So uh as a bit of background, and as you say, it's quite right, I want to focus in a book on the role of pain and recuperation.

And I was really inspired in this by part by uh the work of Patrick Wall, who's one of the two big names in pain science in the twentieth century.

Uh and he emphasizes a lot that role of pain, you know, in keeping you resting, um, keeping you from injuri r reinjuring yourself or from using body parts that are sort of healed but still weak.

that sort of thing.

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