>>4696 (OP)

>Почему чаще считают деньги, а не боль?

>числа

>испытанная боль первого типа, второго и т.д.

https://www.academia.edu/31152399/FROM_SCRIPTURE_TO_FANTASY_ADRIAN_JOHNSTON_AND_THE_PROBLEM_OF_CONTINENTAL_FUNDAMENTALISM

Отрывок:
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman considers the riddle of why we retrospectively underrate our suffering in a variety of contexts. Given the same painful medical procedure, one would expect an individual suffering for twenty minutes to report a far greater amount of suffering than an individual suffering for ten minutes. Such is not the case. As it turns out duration has “no effect whatsoever on the ratings of total pain.” Retrospective assessments, rather, seem determined by the average of the pain’s peak intensity and its coda. Otherwise, humans suffer what Kahneman calls ‘duration neglect,’ a brute inability to incorporate information signalling the time spent suffering.
Perhaps this is why we’re so prone to remove the bandage slowly.

Far from being academic, duration neglect places healthcare providers in a very real and quite curious therapeutic bind. After all, what should the physician’s goal be? The reduction of the pain actually experienced, or the reduction of the pain remembered? Kahneman provocatively frames the problem as a question of choosing between selves, the ‘experiencing self’ that actually suffers the pain and the ‘remembering self’ that walks out of the clinic. Which ‘self’ should the therapist serve?

Kahneman sides with the latter. “Memories,” he writes, “are all we get to keep from our experience of living, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self.” He continues:
"Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion— and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined. The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self."
There’s many, many ways to parse this fascinating passage, but what I’m most interested in is the brand of tyranny Kahneman invokes here. The use is metaphoric, of course, referring to some kind of ‘power’ that remembering possesses over experience. But this ‘power over’ isn’t positive: the ‘remembering self’ is no ‘tyrant’ in the interpersonal or political sense. We aren’t talking about a power that one agent holds over another, but rather the way facts belonging to one capacity, experiencing, regularly find themselves at the mercy of another, remembering.

Insofar as the metaphor obtains at all, you could say the power involved is the power of selection. Consider the sum of your own sensorium this very moment—the nearly sub-audible thrum of walled-away urban environs, the crisp white of the screen, the clamour of meandering worry on your margins, the smell of winter drafts creeping through lived-in spaces—and think of how wane and empty it will have become when you lie in bed this evening. With every passing heartbeat, the vast bulk of experience is consigned to oblivion, stranding us with memories as insubstantial as coffee-rings on a glossy magazine.

It has to be this way, of course, for both brute biomechanical and evolutionary developmental reasons. The high-dimensionality of experience speaks to the evolutionary importance of managing ongoing environmental events. The biomechanical complexity required to generate this dimensionality, however, creates what might be called the Problem of Indisposition. Since any given moment of experience exhausts our capacity to experience, each subsequent moment of experience all but utterly occludes the moment prior. The astronomical amounts of information constitutive of momentary experience is all but lost, ‘implicit’ in the systematic skeleton of ensuing effects to be sure, but inaccessible to cognition all the same.

Remembering experience, in other words, is radically privative. As a form of subsequent experiencing, the machinery involved generating the experience remembered has been retasked. Accordingly, the question of just what gets selected for that tasking becomes all important. And given the metabolic expenses involved, the answer is bound to be ecological. In the case of duration neglect, evolution skimped on the metacognitive machinery required to reliably track and assess certain durations of pain. Remembering intensity apparently packed a bigger reproductive punch.

Kahneman likens remembering to a tyrant because selectivity, understood at the level of agency, connotes power. The automaticity of this selectivity, however, suggests that abjection is actually the better metaphor, that far from being a tyrant, remembering is more a captive to the information available, more a prisoner in Plato’s Cave than any kind of executive authority.

If any culprit deserves the moniker of ‘tyrant’ here, it has to be neglect. Why do so many individuals choose to remove the bandage slowly? Because information regarding duration plays far less a roll than information regarding intensity. Since the mechanisms responsible for remembering systematically neglect such information, that information possesses no downstream consequences for the machinery of decision-making. What we have traditionally called memory consists of a fractionate system of automata scattered throughout the brain. What little they cull from experiencing is both automatic and radically heuristic. Insofar as the metaphor of ‘tyrant’ applies at all, it applies to the various forms of neglect suffered by conscious cognition, the myriad scotomas constraining the possibilities of ‘remembering experience’—or metacognition more generally.

Kahneman’s distinction wonderfully illustrates the way the lack of information can have positive cognitive effects. Bandages get pulled slowly rather than yanked quickly because only a spare, evolutionarily strategic fraction of experiencing can be remembered. We only recall enough of experience, it seems safe to assume, to solve the kinds of problems impacting our paleolithic ancestors' capacity to reproduce. Metacognitive memory is ecological, heuristic.

This raises the general question of just what kinds of problems we should expect deliberative theoretical metacognition —‘philosophical reflection’—to be able to solve given the limitations of its access and resources. After all, if we don’t possess the metacognitive capacity to track the duration of suffering, why assume theoretical reflection to possess the access and capacity to cognize any ‘truth of experience’ otherwise? Given the sheer complexity of the brain, the information consciously accessed is almost certainly adapted to various, narrow heuristic functions. It’s easy to imagine specialized metacognitive access and processing adapting to solve specialized problems possessing reproductive benefits. But it seems hard to imagine why evolution would select for the ability to theoretically intuit experience for what it is. Philosophy, after all, is an exaptation, a cultural achievement. As such, it is almost certainly a naive metacognitive consumer, something that repurposes information absent any means of intuiting the sufficiency of that information.

Not only should we expect theoretical reflection to be blind, we should also expect it to be blind to its own blindness. We have solid empirical grounds, in other words, to worry that philosophical reflection is at once blind, yet perpetually convinced it can see.
Delusional. It would explain the last twenty-five centuries, at least.