WE ALL LIVE in virtual bodies.
The pain in my elbow is really in my brain. The sensation you get when you rub two fingers together is really in your brain, not in your fingers.
In a sense, we're operating our bodies by remote control from a command center in the middle of our head, and only seeing or feeling the world and our bodies through the monitors and earphones up there—which have already filtered, interpreted—and even distorted—the input.
Much of what our brains do with the information the nerves bring in from various parts of our body can be understood mechanically.
That is, although we don't have the whole picture yet, much of what we call "thinking" or "experiencing" can be explained, in principle, from the outside.
A scientist, peering at a brain through a scanning apparatus, or tracking chemical reactions in the brain tissue could, in principle, say, "See! There's the signal coming in from the arm, and it's exciting those neurons in that part of the brain, there, and causing this part to light up over here, which, causes this reaction..." etc.
And, eventually, it's possible, in theory, that we could even describe the course of events from the nerve endings in my elbow, though all the brain processes that eventually lead to my lips moving as I utter the word, "OUCH!".
But here's the problem.
That whole chain of events, described in minute scientific detail, will nowhere contain a pain.
It simply won't hurt. The pain is something that cannot be observed from the outside.
It might, conceivably, be possible that someday we could isolate exactly where in this process the pain occurs.
Suppose, for example, that our understanding of the brain had advanced (and I admit that I don't know whether it already has) so far that a scientist could look at a brain scan, wait for a particular region to light up, and say with complete confidence, "That's a pain in his elbow."
How could she possibly know that? Not from the outside alone.
At some time or other, during the study of brain function, some scientists, somewhere, would have had to correlate pain-related behavior ("OUCH!" or a cringe, or...) to that particular region lighting up.
And when they did that, they would still have only been correlating certain, exteriorly observable, behaviors to the event in the brain—not the actual pain itself.
The only way any scientist knows that those behaviors indicated pain itself is that that scientist knows by personal experience from the inside what pain is, and that those behaviors are associated with it in his own case.
And now we are getting close to the heart of the matter...
To be continued...
