There’s room for nuance here. You can have a sensation without noticing, if it is at the edge of attention. The question in my mind, is the extent to which pain requires attention. I see two ways in which pain involves attention: passively—it can force itself on your attention—and actively—you can be grappling with it in some way.
I am reminded of an anecdote from Celia Green. One day, she thought she had figured out that the essence of pain is the violation of will. A sensation is painful if you don’t want it there and can’t drive it away. Therefore, she reasoned that if you don’t fight the sensation, it will lose its painful valence. She then had an opportunity to test this theory during a trip to the dentist. She was to have a tooth removed, and persuaded the dentist to not use anesthetic.
According to her own account, by embracing what was happening, she was able to neutralize the pain, and the sensations became simply sensations, varying in certain ways but not intrinsically painful. But she hastened to add that this experiment required elaborate psychological preparation in advance, and would not recommend it to the unprepared person.
I think this was recounted in her book Advice to Clever Children.
Interesting: I’ve had the same thought and did the same experiment, though it wasn’t a tooth removal, but some tooth-drilling that I was assured would not be touching a nerve. The normal anesthesia would have been local Novocaine, and I hate how Novocaine feels for the rest of the day. (So it was a choice between two sensations, over two different time periods.) Without the Novocaine, it was like a distant, dull pounding, like falling on a bone, which can be managed. I did this more than once, but my current dentist argued more strongly against it and I acquiesced rather easily.
The main thing I was worried about was controlling my body—I didn’t want to flail and disrupt the dentist.
Just like you (and Celia Green) said about the preparation involved, I’d make a distinction between unexpected pain and expected-and-prepared-for pain. You can affect how you feel about a dentist visit, but not a sudden, stabbing pain in the back. (That may be a System-1, System-2 thing.) I’ve also found that I can relax into something cold—sitting on a stone in winter—but not something hot—being near a fire. We can choose to modify our will about some things, but others are too low-level and force themselves upon us from below.
(Which is part of the topic of “mind breaks down into smaller pieces” that I’m thinking about.)
There’s room for nuance here. You can have a sensation without noticing, if it is at the edge of attention. The question in my mind, is the extent to which pain requires attention. I see two ways in which pain involves attention: passively—it can force itself on your attention—and actively—you can be grappling with it in some way.
I am reminded of an anecdote from Celia Green. One day, she thought she had figured out that the essence of pain is the violation of will. A sensation is painful if you don’t want it there and can’t drive it away. Therefore, she reasoned that if you don’t fight the sensation, it will lose its painful valence. She then had an opportunity to test this theory during a trip to the dentist. She was to have a tooth removed, and persuaded the dentist to not use anesthetic.
According to her own account, by embracing what was happening, she was able to neutralize the pain, and the sensations became simply sensations, varying in certain ways but not intrinsically painful. But she hastened to add that this experiment required elaborate psychological preparation in advance, and would not recommend it to the unprepared person.
I think this was recounted in her book Advice to Clever Children.
Interesting: I’ve had the same thought and did the same experiment, though it wasn’t a tooth removal, but some tooth-drilling that I was assured would not be touching a nerve. The normal anesthesia would have been local Novocaine, and I hate how Novocaine feels for the rest of the day. (So it was a choice between two sensations, over two different time periods.) Without the Novocaine, it was like a distant, dull pounding, like falling on a bone, which can be managed. I did this more than once, but my current dentist argued more strongly against it and I acquiesced rather easily.
The main thing I was worried about was controlling my body—I didn’t want to flail and disrupt the dentist.
Just like you (and Celia Green) said about the preparation involved, I’d make a distinction between unexpected pain and expected-and-prepared-for pain. You can affect how you feel about a dentist visit, but not a sudden, stabbing pain in the back. (That may be a System-1, System-2 thing.) I’ve also found that I can relax into something cold—sitting on a stone in winter—but not something hot—being near a fire. We can choose to modify our will about some things, but others are too low-level and force themselves upon us from below.
(Which is part of the topic of “mind breaks down into smaller pieces” that I’m thinking about.)