Milinda’s Questions

The following is quoted from pp. 39-41 of Mark Siderits’s Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy: Empty Persons (Ashgate Publishing Company, Burlington, VT, 2003.) It’s posted here as a supplement to my previous post.

The Reductionist denies that persons ultimately exist, but affirms the existence of such psychological events as pains. Since, Schechtman might assert, no sense can be made of the claim that there are subjectless pains, the Reductionist must have some subject or other in mind when they speak of reducing the person to such states. . . .
The Reductionist will, of course, agree that it is conventionally true that pains require subjects; we say that twinges, aches and other such noxious sensations are had by persons (and other sentient beings — though we shall ignore that here.) What the Reductionist disputes is that this consensus represents anything more than the result of our adopting a useful form of discourse. To see why, let us consider how one might set about trying to prove that there can be no subjectless pains. We may take it as a given that pain has as its essential nature being hurtful. The question may be raised whether this essential nature is intrinsic to pain — whether it is primitive and unanalyzable, something that cannot be accounted for in terms of the natures of other things — or whether this nature is something that pain has only by virtue of its relations to other entities. To use the terminology of Buddhist Reductionism, one may ask whether pain bears its own essential nature from other entities. We shall not attempt to answer this question here. Rather, we shall attempt to show that on neither possibility can it be demonstrated that pains require subjects.
When Buddhist Reductionists claim that pain sensations are ultimately real (that is, are in the domain of discourse for the ultimate truth), they are asserting that pain sensations bear their own essential nature. For this tradition, something is ultimately real if and only if it bears its own essential nature. The Buddhist Reductionist will ground their claim about pain’s ultimate reality by identifying its essential nature of hurtfulness with its phenomenal character, that distinctive “what-it-is-likeness” that immediately announces pain’s presence. Here the resort to the quasi-demonstrative “what-is-it-likeness” as a way of indicating the quale in question suggests precisely that this nature is primitive and unanalyzable, something known only by acquaintance, hence that pain sensations do indeed bear their own essential nature. And on this point many will agree with them. Far more controversial is their claim that while there are (ultimately) pain sensations, there are (ultimately) no persons who feel them. It is important to understand that in claiming this, they are not denying that the occurrence of a pain sensation is typically brought about by some distinctive sense-object-contact event, is typically accompanied by the occurrence of a consciousness episode taking the sensation as object, and typically causes the occurrence of such mental forces as, for example, attentiveness or desire for cessation. They are not, in other words, claiming that pains somehow float freely about in the air, devoid of connection to any other physical or mental events. They are simply claiming that there are no intrinsic connections between the existence of a pain and the occurrence of these other physical and mental events, that such connections as do obtain are wholly contingent and not implicated in the very natures of the entities involved. How, then, might one show their hypothesis to be absurd? Simply to insist that pains are adjectival on persons — that to speak of a pain is to presuppose a subject who feels it — is no argument. The Reductionist has proposed an account according to which our talk of persons as owners of pains is just a shorthand way of referring to a set of discrete but causally connected psychophysical elements. If we agree that pain bears its own essential nature, it is difficult to see how to rule out this conception of pain as something that is discrete but contingently connected to other psychophysical elements.
In order rule out this alternative, it seems one must show that it is part of the nature of pain that it be that state of some larger system. This is just what a functionalist analysis of pain does. On such an account, something’s being a pain sensation necessarily involves its playing a certain functional role in a certain sort of complex system. Pain’s hurtfulness will then be understood to be tied to pain’s role in alerting the system’s monitoring and control subsystem to potentially damaging situations. This approach guarantees that pains require a subject: something could not be said to be a pain, that is, hurtful, unless it were hurtful for some system of which it was a part or state. But this would also make pain something that borrows its essential nature from other things, that is, not something that is ultimately real. Moreover, it is not clear that the required subject of pain states would itself be ultimately real. A Buddhist Reductionist would, in any event, deny that the sort of system in question here could be any more real than the chariot. Only a real self could, in their eyes, serve to make the requisite subject ultimately real. And if neither pain nor its subject is ultimately real, then the most that could be said about pain is that it is conventionally true that it requires a subject – something to which the Reductionist has already agreed.
That pain is not itself ultimately real does, as Shoemaker points out, have consequences for the Reductionist ID thesis. For Reductionists frequently treat pains as among the atomic primitives out of which persons are to be constructed, and this requires that they be ultimately real. So even if the opponent cannot prove that pains necessarily require subjects, still adopting a functionalist analysis of pains will call into question at least one common way of formulating the ID thesis. But a Reductionist might evade this result by distinguishing between different levels of analysis at which persons and pains disappear. They might, that is, claim that while the ultimate truth will contain references to neither persons nor pains, there is a level of analysis intermediate between ultimate truth and conventional truth at which we may speak of pains but not of persons. So then impersonal descriptions that make reference to pains, while not ultimately true, will be closer approximations to the ultimate truth than are conventional attributions of pains to persons.
To see how this might be, we must first note one important respect in which Shoemaker seems to be wrong. He claims that on a functional analysis, pains will turn out to be ontologically dependent on persons. But, strictly speaking, all that follows from such an analysis is that something cannot be a pain unless it plays a certain sort of (functionally specified) causal role in a certain sort of system. The point here is not that among such systems there might be some that we would not be inclined to call persons (which is no doubt true — many would be reluctant to call bats persons). The point is rather that when we speak of pain’s role in such a system we have already descended to a sub-personal level of analysis. We are no longer thinking of the system as a single, unified subject of experiences and agent of actions. It has instead become a collection of interrelated sub-subsystems, each with its own (functionally specified) causal role. Of course functional specifications are often expressed in terms of characterizations of the system as a whole: something’s being a factory whistle might be explained through reference to the factory’s use of shift labor. But there is no reason to believe that such talk may not likewise be discharged through functional analysis of other parts of the system. Pain, we may say, signals potential damage, something that the system will seek to avert. But if something’s having a hurtful sensation can be unpacked as something’s playing the causal role of alerting the monitoring and control subsystem, why cannot that subsystem and its functions likewise be understood in terms of a range of causal connections with other parts of the system?
At this level of analysis, persons seem to have already slid from view. Pains, however, have not. Granted, pain can no longer be thought of as bearing its own essential nature. Pain’s hurtfulness is now seen as not intrinsic to the sensation itself, but as the result of pain’s role of mediating between system-damaging input and aversion output. From this vantage point we can see that pain may itself disappear on further analysis. For if pain’s hurtfulness depends upon its causal role, then it may well turn out that what actually realizes the role lacks this property, that hurtfulness supervenes on very different sorts of base properties. . . . At the level of systems analysis, though, we still have a use for talk of pains as hurting. So a Reductionist with functionalist inclinations with respect to mental states might still claim that pains are more fundamental than persons. If Shoemaker is correct to suspect that such a Reductionist must in the end reduce all mental events to purely physical states, then the Buddhist Reductionist is wrong about what belongs in the ultimate ontology. Still the sort of approach they and many other reductionists favor is not thereby shown to be incompatible with a functionalist analysis of pain.