Colin Klein

speaker

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

Uh so they are motivated, I claim, to uh protect their backside.

They've just got an overriding motivation to keep going.

And then overriding motivation is there's actually then a third order state of taking pleasure in the hurt.

So one of the nice things about treating pleasure, you know, pleasantness and painfulness as higher order sensations is you then get this iterable structure.

And so at least structurally it's possible to have the mental state that uh say pleasantness qualifies be something like painfulness.

Actually you can get the reverse too, and what I call bittersweet pleasures.

So that's the sort of that's the structural story.

And then there's a a longer story about why you might find painfulness to be a pleasant state to be in in certain cases.

And there I talk about the story about sort of um most the thing that most of these things have in common is being on the edge of kind of being too much to bear.

And you can link that in with various things like self-control and trust and intimacy, depending on the kind of masochistic pleasure you care about.

So that gives the explanation of why it's there.

Although, you know, one of the things the chapter does is also spell out further, you know, the puzzles that you can solve when you make this pain painfulness distinction and then talk about this kind of iterable higher order structure.

Yeah, well I've always got a lot of things going on.

I do a lot of work on functional brain imaging and kind of methodology and psychology, but I do want to continue working on pain.

So one of the things that I'd like to move into is thinking about how a theory like this might apply to something like chronic treating chronic pain.

I've said some things in the book about, you know, the problems with

really long term unsatisfiable imperatives and why they might be uh particularly demoralizing.

Uh so I have a young son now and one of the things I found is there's something about, you know, a kid screaming when they're upset uh for an hour at you that's uniquely bad.

And it's not just the bad of having a loud noise near you, it's this bad of not being able to do something about uh this insistent demand.

Uh so that's a place where I think improv

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