The Guise Problem

Pain is transparently something bad. It’s an experience that we desire to avoid, and that we typically think makes the world a worse place. It doesn’t take any deep insight to recognize the badness of pain.

 Physicalists believe that pain is identical with some kind of physical state. Perhaps pain is identical with some kind of abstract functional role. Or maybe to experience pain is to contain representations of tissue damage in the global workspace. Or perhaps pain is some kind of coordinated activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and the somatosensory cortex.

The physicalist conceptions of pain are not transparently bad. In fact, I think that they are transparently neutral.  There is nothing about occupying a certain functional role that is bad. There is nothing about nociceptive representations in the global workspace that is intrinsically bad. There is nothing about coordinated activity in the somatosensory and cingulate cortical regions that is intrinsically bad.

These two intuitions are inconsistent. If pain just is a certain physical state, then it can't be that the pain is intrinsically bad and the state is not. Under one guise it seems good. Under another it seems bad. Which is it?

Most people will want to say that it turns out that the physical state is intrinsically bad. Some nihilists will want to say that it turns out pain is not really intrinsically bad. I see the appeal of both responses, but neither is obviously right. I am not sure how one would figure it out.