Does illusionism kill sentientism?

The argument

Sentientism is the view that moral patienthood is grounded in sentience: typically, the capacity to have positive and negative experiences, like pleasure and pain.

Why does one believe pain is bad? I don’t know about you all, but the reason I think pain is bad is in virtue of it feeling bad. I have a conscious experience of pain which is really negative. I hate being in it; I don’t want to be in it.

What’s the metaphysical nature of pain? I don’t know; there’s lots of disagreement about it. But there’s a notion I’ve seen many illusionists espouse that it doesn’t really matter what the metaphysical nature of pain is; it’s bad because it feels bad, whether that feeling is something phenomenal, functional, representational, or biological. This seems to suggest that the term “pain” does not acquire its reference via a definition which stipulates its metaphysics.

How, then, does pain acquire its reference? How do we know which states to label “pain”?

One intuitively appealing way is by ostension. I get a burn, a cut, a pinch, salt in a wound: those are painful states. There’s some experiential feature that they have in common; that’s what I mean by pain. Whatever that feeling is.

The question now is: what am I ostending? According to the phenomenal realist, I am ostending some phenomenal state. According to the illusionist, however, phenomenal states don’t exist. So either I am ostending something which doesn’t exist, or I am ostending a “pseudo-phenomenal” state: a state which seems to be phenomenal, but isn’t.

But a question remains: what kind of states are pseudo-phenomenal states? Does my ostensive definition refer to a functional state, a representational state, a physical type, a physical token, a biological realization of a physical state?

How would you know the answer to that question? When someone points at a golden chalice full of H₂O and says “that’s water,” we can ask: do you mean that “water” rigidly designates whatever substance is in that cup, or that “water” designates “watery stuff” (transparent, low-viscosity, high-density, non-flammable liquids), or that “water” designates “whatever liquid is in that golden chalice”? Those are all distinct intensions, and you can distinguish which is which by asking “in virtue of what is that stuff you’re pointing at water?”

But if I ask “in virtue of what is that state pain?”, the only answer I can give via introspection is “in virtue of the fact that it feels bad.” It is pain qua negative experience that I am referring to. But the problem is that whenever I am in pain, I am always both in a functional state and in a physical state, and both of those states can be considered causes of my judgment that I am having a negative experience. The functional is entailed by the physical, and possesses no additional causal power. I might try to say things like “pain is the aspect of this mental state in virtue of which I judge it to be bad,” but that description is underdetermined: in every case in which I have been in pain, the physical and functional descriptions are coextensive, and my introspection is totally uninformative as to which I mean. I just have this unhelpful, simplified feeling of badness.

Therefore, it seems that my ostensive definition of pain is indeterminate. If you built a robotic clone of me with the same functional organization and a very different physical substrate, and began to “torture” it, I would have to say there is no fact of the matter as to whether it is in pain, because there is no fact of the matter as to whether my ostensive definition refers to a physical or to a functional state. But this seems to undermine sentientism, which says it’s bad to torture the robot if it feels bad to the robot. There is no fact of the matter here, so therefore there is no fact of the matter about whether it’s bad to torture the robot.

Replies

One might try to make an argument for functionalism by saying that if my neurons were swapped for functionally identical silicon chips, I would still judge myself to be in pain, and therefore I must be ostending a functional state. I think this begs the question. If my whole brain were swapped for a typewriter that just prints “I am in pain, and it’s awful!”, then “I” would still “judge” myself to be in pain. If it’s fair play to substitute neurons for silicon chips, why isn’t it fair play to substitute a brain for a typewriter? If you say “a typewriter doesn’t have the same functional organization, whereas the chips do,” then the argument is circular: you were supposed to convince me why functional organization matters more than physical or biological organization.

Another approach might be to argue that what I am referring to just is the belief that my experience is negative, and beliefs are defined functionally or dispositionally; they don’t exist on a physical level of description. But then this seems circular: I judge myself to be having a negative experience in virtue of the fact that I judge myself to be having a negative experience. The term “negative experience” is semantically vacuous. Or maybe a negative experience is just defined as an experience I don’t want to have. Very well, but why don’t I want to have the experience; in virtue of what? You can’t say “because it’s painful; because it feels bad,” because that would be circular. Either I just have a brute preference to not be in this state and the “feeling of pain” is entirely illusory, or there is something in virtue of which I don’t want to be in this state, and we’re back to determining whether this is something physical or functional.

A further approach would be to say that I am introspectively aware of functional properties of pain, but not of their physical properties, and therefore I can’t be rigidly designating a physical state. I don’t know whether my periaqueductal grey is active, but I do know I have a disposition to avoid this state; how could the periaqueductal grey qua physical state make a difference? But that doesn’t seem to make a difference in other reference cases. If I point at a cup of liquid H₂O, and I ostensively label that stuff water, I am referring to H₂O despite not knowing water = H₂O. But if you ask me whether the stuff I’m pointing at is a covalent or ionic compound, I have no idea. If you ask me to describe it, I’d say it’s transparent, makes me feel cold when I touch it, pretty low viscosity, high density, etc. Those sound like properties of “watery stuff,” not H₂O; those properties could in principle be “realized” by a different substrate. But that doesn’t mean that what I am ostending is “watery stuff”; I could still be referring to H₂O.

The best arguments, I think, are going to have to show that when I judge a mental state to be “painful,” it must be in virtue of its functional properties and not its physical properties. Unfortunately, I don’t see a great way to do this. Functional properties are entailed by physical properties, both are equally good causal explanations of my introspective judgment, and introspection does not pick out one over the other. Therefore, it seems to me that one of the following must be true:

Sentientism is false.
Illusionism is false.
Pain cannot be defined by ostension.

I would like to be persuaded out of this trilemma. All thoughts are welcome.