A natural assumption is that the function of pain is to cause nocifensive behaviour. But what if this causal assumption is just wrong? An alternative theory is that the function of pain is to explain not cause behaviour. This is the sense making sense hypothesis (SMS). According to SMS, although withdrawal behaviour is caused by non-conscious neural processing, the brain needs a model of this processing that it can use in decision-making. This paper explores two questions: (1) What kind of explanation could plausibly fit a subjective experience like pain? and (2) Does it make sense to suppose that pain could have a non-causal function? The physical closure principle seems to entail that if one physical event is connected to another in an explanation, the two must be causally related. But is this really so obvious? Recent work on grounding offers one buffer against that inference, but there might be other ways without relying on grounding to question whether a commitment to physical closure entails anything about the relationship between explanation and causation.
Deborah Brown is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project. She is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and past President of the Australasian Association of Philosophy. Her research interests include philosophy of mind... Read More →
Among the many drivers of the 21st-century ‘practice turn’ in philosophy of science are a shift from theory construction to modelling; another was the thesis that psychoneural identity claims function as dispensable heuristics guiding discovery. An examination of the history of research on reward and motivation suggests otherwise. What are often taken to be conjectures about psychoneural identities are better understood as appeals to familiar forms of mechanistic reasoning about constitution and localisation. A clearer understanding of scientific representation does not necessarily support the rejection of traditional identity theories.
The environment is immoral and needs to be engineered to accord with our measures of the good, claim animal ethics and effective altruist philosophers. We should engage in “paradise engineering”: the deliberate deployment of advanced biotechnology to engineer nature according to a welfare or utility-based metric. This movement has taken transhumanist thought, amplified and funded by the EA-rationalist movement, and then applied it to nature. This requires a denial of non-welfare-based forms of non-instrumental value. While I agree with critics that radical transformationalism is unwarranted due to feasibility and deference-based reasons, I will raise a more fundamental ethical objection. I argue that the subjugation of nature to accord with human moral metrics diminishes nature's ability to be a robust producer of non-instrumental values. I develop what I call a meta-option-value argument: nature is a robust and open-ended generator of non-instrumental value relations, and people reliably create novel forms of such valuation over time. The intentional transformation of ecological systems cuts this generative capacity in ways that no instrumentalist accounting can recover. The transformationist, therefore, needs to not only show that their displacement of existing value is legitimate but that they are justified in diminishing a source of future value.
My paper argues that cognition is fundamentally and constitutively structured by an agent’s ongoing engagement within social roles and shared norms. It investigates how socio-cultural structures constitute the space of possible actions and inferences available to embodied agents. I propose that roles, and the expected and regular norms that individuate them, function as dynamically evolving constraints on shared state spaces, shaping trajectories of action and forming the basis of habitual, socially situated cognition. On this view, sociocultural structures are not merely external influences but organizing conditions that co-constitute what counts as intelligible action. Conceptually, the project defends the claim that the stabilizing patterns of sociocultural structures should be treated as constitutive elements of distributed cognitive systems. Norms and shared practices organize what actions make sense, shape the appearance of reasons, help determine what is experienced as appropriate, expected and possible for agents as they skillfully navigate the world. Drawing on enactivism, I develop an account in which social practices sediment into habits, stabilize as institutions, and recursively structure future cognition and action. This framework integrates distributed cognition, social ontology, and collective intentionality.
