Milinda’s Questions

A few weeks ago Victor Reppert posted a response to this earlier post of mine. In this installment, Reppert uses a quotation from C. S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain to make a useful distinction:

But the truth is that the word Pain has two senses which must now be distinguished.

1. A particular kind of sensation, probably conveyed by specialised nerve fibers and, recognizable to the patient as that kind of sensation whether he dislikes it or not, (the faint ache in my limbs would be recognized as an ache even if I didn’t object to it).
2. Any experience, whether physical or mental, which the patient dislikes.

Reppert uses this distinction to criticize my view as follows:

If we are talking about pain in sense b, this does not seem to make sense at all. It is impossible for there to be a state that a person dislikes if there is no person to dislike it. On this conception of pain the idea of “pain without a sufferer” is analytically incoherent.

My response here is a fairly obvious one: I’m talking about pain in sense a.
Reppert goes on to ask:

And are pains in the particular locations of space that we suppose that they are, in the same sense that, for example, a green stapler can be behind my back and still green? Isn’t it possible to have a pain “located” (phenomenologically) in body part that no longer exists? I can (phenomenologically) have a pain in the butt even though I have no butt. The pain in the butt is relative to the way it appears to my self, and if there is no self, then we really can’t make sense of the idea of a pain in the butt.

It seems to me that phantom pain phenomena, (pains that are felt in limbs that have been amputated) actually supports my point of view. On the picture of things I’m suggesting, when I say “I have a pain in my foot,” I have not designated the spatial location of that pain. “There’s a pain in my foot” could be more perspicuously expressed as “I perceive a pain in the same region of space where I perceive my foot to be.”
Rather than belabor these points, I’m going to post a fairly lengthy discussion of the issue that has appeared in print. (For stylistic reasons, I’m going to put in in a separate post rather than append it to this one.) I hope it will provide some context in which I can present my point of view, and respond to Victor’s objections, more cogently.