The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain

these perceptions of warning properties ground the direct epistemic awareness that something bad is happening to the person perceived

according to imperativism, pains have a content that commands one to do certain things.

if pain is representational, then there should be an appearance/reality gap for pains, but there allegedly isn’t.

representationalism about pain: the idea, roughly, that pains represent the world to be a certain way.

“How is it that pain is both a sort of experience, but also the object of our experience?”

Some leading neuroscientists in pain research hold that pain should be modeled as an interoceptive, homeostatic system that monitors the body and motivates responses when appropriate, while others maintain that pain serves not only interoceptive self-monitoring functions, but also exteroceptive functions that monitor the world and identify external threats.

Melzack and Wall’s gate-control theory of the 1960s,

Our answer to the question “what is pain?” might focus on a level of description appropriate for identifying treatment targets, i.e., the physical mechanisms that might be appropriately targeted for treatment.

If we focus on the sorts of actions that we take in response to pain, we might begin to think that rather than telling us something about what is happening to our bodies, pains are experiences that tell us about something that we need to do for our bodies.

Pains, on this view, are identified with a certain kind of brute, unpleasant feeling.