No Pain, No Gain (in Darwinian Fitness): A Representational Account of Affective Experience

Abstract

Reductive representationalist theories of consciousness are yet to produce a satisfying account of pain's affective component, the part that makes it painful. The paramount problem here is that that there seems to be no suitable candidate for what affective experience represents. This article suggests that affective experience represents the Darwinian fitness effects of events (roughly, the effects that an event has on a creature's chances of propagating its genes). I argue that, because of affective experience's close association with motivation, natural selection will work to bring affect into covariance with the average fitness effects of types of event, and that this covariance makes fitness effects a promising candidate for what affect represents. I also argue that this account is to be preferred to Cutter and Tye's recent proposal that affect represents harmfulness, and answer an objection that Aydede and Fulkerson recently offered against representational accounts of affect.

A possible evolutionary function of phenomenal conscious experience of pain

“…For instance, subjects presenting with pain asymbolia ( Berthier et al 1988 ; see Klein 2015 ; Gerrans 2020 for recent discussions) report registering the pain but not “minding” it. This condition can be brought about by a surgical alteration of brain connectivity ( Carruthers 2018 ; Kozuch 2020 ). Here is how Kozuch (2020 , p.695) describes pain asymbolia resulting from a surgical intervention: “That pain has both sensory and affective components is something vividly demonstrated in the effects of a cingulotomy (removal of the anterior cingulate cortex), an operation performed on patients with chronic, excruciating pain.…”

“…This condition can be brought about by a surgical alteration of brain connectivity ( Carruthers 2018 ; Kozuch 2020 ). Here is how Kozuch (2020 , p.695) describes pain asymbolia resulting from a surgical intervention: “That pain has both sensory and affective components is something vividly demonstrated in the effects of a cingulotomy (removal of the anterior cingulate cortex), an operation performed on patients with chronic, excruciating pain. After the operation, patients say that they still feel the pain (i.e., they have the sensory component), but that they do not mind it (i.e., they lack the affective component)[.…”

“…Little work has been devoted to this question to date, most of it focusing on the distinction between representational and motivational accounts (for a learning-based functional account of consciousness that is orthogonal both to this distinction and to the hypothesis that we develop here, see Cleeremans et al 2020 ). According to the former, conscious states are uniquely useful representations of behaviorally important information ( Feinberg and Mallatt 2013 ), or even evolutionary fitness ( Kozuch 2020 ). According to the latter, conscious states are uniquely useful because of their motivational power ( Panksepp 2005 ; Anderson 2019 ).…”

“…If, as we hypothesize, bidding costs are indeed represented in the basal ganglia/thalamus/cortex loop, the functional links between this circuit and the many other parts of the brain involved in the pain experience ( Chudler and Dong 1995 ) should be investigated in depth. Of particular interest would be the links to the cingulate cortex, where a lesion can abolish the hurtfulness of pain ( Kozuch 2020 , p.695), and to the anterior insula, whose normal functioning is critical for the feeling of pain ( Gerrans 2020 ). Interestingly, functional imaging studies in humans indicate that noninvasive therapy methods effectively alter the connectivity between some of the pain-relevant regions; see Lazaridou et al (2017) and Nascimento et al (2018) , where the effects on the basal ganglia functional connectivity are explicitly discussed.…”

A possible evolutionary function of phenomenal conscious experience of pain

“…For instance, subjects presenting with pain asymbolia (Berthier et al, 1988; see Klein, 2015;Gerrans, 2020 for recent discussions) report registering the pain but not "minding" it. This condition can be brought about by a surgical alteration of brain connectivity (Carruthers, 2018;Kozuch, 2020). Here is how Kozuch (2020, p.695) describes pain asymbolia resulting from a surgical intervention: "That pain has both sensory and affective components is something vividly demonstrated in the effects of a cingulotomy (removal of the anterior cingulate cortex), an operation performed on patients with chronic, excruciating pain.…”