I think it’s worth looking deeper at what you mean with pain. A sleeping person can have body tension and sleep quite badly because of something that you could call “pain” as a naive person but which is not pain in the official definition because it’s not consciously perceived.
Given that human memory is driven by the peak-end rule, there are some choices when doing a medical procedure that reduce peak and end pain and thus memory of pain while increasing the total amount of consciously perceived pain. It’s generally seen as clever by the field to make those choices to reduce remembered pain even when it increases felt pain.
I think there’s some fetishizations of objectivity, where “subjective” concerns like pain get downweighed in contrast to what’s more objective because you can more reliably measure it every if in a post-surgery questionnaire.
Elsewhere in medicine you have “placebo-blinded” studies where whether or not the patient consciously knows whether they get the drug is irrelevant for whether the study counts as “placebo-blinded”. It’s so irrelevant that nobody asks the patients whether they can tell (and they often can tell).
I think it’s a pity that most philosophers shy away from these questions of what we should prioritize in cases like trading off memory of pain vs. conscious in the moment experience of pain and unconsciously experienced pain and focus on ivory tower problems.
I think it’s worth looking deeper at what you mean with pain. A sleeping person can have body tension and sleep quite badly because of something that you could call “pain” as a naive person but which is not pain in the official definition because it’s not consciously perceived.
Given that human memory is driven by the peak-end rule, there are some choices when doing a medical procedure that reduce peak and end pain and thus memory of pain while increasing the total amount of consciously perceived pain. It’s generally seen as clever by the field to make those choices to reduce remembered pain even when it increases felt pain.
I think there’s some fetishizations of objectivity, where “subjective” concerns like pain get downweighed in contrast to what’s more objective because you can more reliably measure it every if in a post-surgery questionnaire.
Elsewhere in medicine you have “placebo-blinded” studies where whether or not the patient consciously knows whether they get the drug is irrelevant for whether the study counts as “placebo-blinded”. It’s so irrelevant that nobody asks the patients whether they can tell (and they often can tell).
I think it’s a pity that most philosophers shy away from these questions of what we should prioritize in cases like trading off memory of pain vs. conscious in the moment experience of pain and unconsciously experienced pain and focus on ivory tower problems.