AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

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.