Ah wait, did your first comment always say “similar”? No worries if not (I often edit stuff just after posting!) but if so, I must have missed it—apologies for just pointing out that they were different points and not addressing whether they are sufficiently similar.
There’s a good chance I edited that in, but I don’t remember for sure.
Re 1, we don’t need to appeal to scientific evidence about whether it’s 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 that’s somehow an illusion, it’s the illusion that needs a lot of scientific evidence to debunk.
I don’t 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 doesn’t seem like such a stretch to me to say that forming the feeling “my hand is on fire and it in particular hurts” shapes our motivations in the right direction more effectively than forming the feeling “my hand is on fire and I’ve just started feeling bad overall for some reason”, 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 don’t need a field of valences, just for your attention to be pulled to the right parts of your sensory field.
There’s a good chance I edited that in, but I don’t remember for sure.
I don’t 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 don’t need a field of valences, just for your attention to be pulled to the right parts of your sensory field.