Ah wait, did your first comment always say âsimilarâ? No worries if not (I often edit stuff just after posting!) but if so, I must have missed itâapologies for just pointing out that they were different points and not addressing whether they are sufficiently similar.
Thereâs a good chance I edited that in, but I donât remember for sure.
Re 1, we donât need to appeal to scientific evidence about whether itâs possible to have different amounts of, say, pain in different parts of the phenomenal field. It happens all the time that we feel pain in one hand but not the other. If thatâs somehow an illusion, itâs the illusion that needs a lot of scientific evidence to debunk.
I donât think this is an illusion. However, my understanding of the literature is that pain has 3 components: sensory, affective (unpleasantness) and motivational (aversive desire, motivational salience, how it pulls attention). The sensory component is location-specific and like a field. The affective component seems not like a field, imo, but this is not settled, AFAIK. The motivational component is (in part) the pull of your attention to the motivationally salient parts of your sensory field. It selects and amplifies signals from your sensory field.
it doesnât seem like such a stretch to me to say that forming the feeling âmy hand is on fire and it in particular hurtsâ shapes our motivations in the right direction more effectively than forming the feeling âmy hand is on fire and Iâve just started feeling bad overall for some reasonâ, and that this is worth whatever costs come with producing a field of valences.
I think the mechanism of motivational salience could already account for this. You donât need a field of valences, just for your attention to be pulled to the right parts of your sensory field.
Thereâs a good chance I edited that in, but I donât remember for sure.
I donât think this is an illusion. However, my understanding of the literature is that pain has 3 components: sensory, affective (unpleasantness) and motivational (aversive desire, motivational salience, how it pulls attention). The sensory component is location-specific and like a field. The affective component seems not like a field, imo, but this is not settled, AFAIK. The motivational component is (in part) the pull of your attention to the motivationally salient parts of your sensory field. It selects and amplifies signals from your sensory field.
I think the mechanism of motivational salience could already account for this. You donât need a field of valences, just for your attention to be pulled to the right parts of your sensory field.