How pain fools everyone: An inference to the best explanation.
Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews October 1, 2025 Brian Key, Deborah J. Brown 1 citation
The commonsense idea that feelings such as pain cause behavior is challenged. No known mechanism explains how subjectively experienced pain could directly modulate neural activity or gate ion channels. The real cause of behavior is neural activity, not the feeling of pain itself. This raises whether pain has any causal function or is merely epiphenomenal. Epiphenomenalism struggles to explain why such an attention-consuming feeling would survive evolution. The authors infer from neuroscientific evidence that pain has a novel, non-causal function: it marks neural pathways that cause behavior as salient, serving as a ground but not a cause of decision-making and action. Decisions are caused by threshold detection of accumulated evidence of pain, not by pain per se.