Jessica asked:

Can the mind-brain identity theory account for the subjective 'raw feel' of experience?

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One answer to your question, Jessica, has got to be the counter-question: why should the mind-brain
identity account for raw feels? A worm has raw feels but no mind.

Now this cannot be the end of it; after all, your question reflects what is currently a hot potato in mind
research. Now as far as I am concerned, the main problem is that someone asked this question for
the first time, and verily I believe it was a philosopher: but he neglected to specify what was to be
understood by the notion of raw feel. Like many proponents of provocative questions, he left the term
dangling in a sort of limbo where many concepts hang around that are supposed to explain
themselves. Well this one doesn't; and as my answer suggests, if you don't draw up a precise
itinerary of raw feels, you're likely to find everyone with an opinion dealing with it according to their
own private views. And so to some it is the same as "gut feeling", to others "pain", to yet others a sort
of "super-awareness", and so on.

Nevertheless, I'll try to give you a reply to what I believe your question is asking. I will assume that
what you mean by "raw feels" are just unfiltered sensa, in other words, what your taste, touch, smell
etc bring home in such a way that it seems to you there is no filter intervening. For instance, if you cut
yourself with a sharp knife, that pain would class as a raw feel, yes?

Now the way I have phrased this should have set alarm bells ringing. If there are such raw, unfiltered
sensa, where does the mind come in? And in particular, if the brain and the mind are one and the
same, how does this two-in-one system decide how strong a pain has to be before it is allowed to
pass through without filtering?

Obviously these are problems I'm not going to solve here and now. The best I can do is to throw out a
suggestion and to hope that someone else is also replying to you, so that perhaps there is a
difference of opinion. My view of it is this:

(a) When I look at the world of nature, I find several million species of creature life with nerves and/or
a brain but without a mind. I am dubious about apes, dolphins etc, but amenable to proof that I'm
wrong. Until such proof is offered (and when I say proof, I don't mean personal opinion of even those
who have lived with them), I remain sceptical and hold to the notion that only humans in the creature
world possess a mind. But this implies, of course, that the mind is not directly involved in the
evaluation of raw feels (sensa). They remain assigned to the brain, like most somatic functions, and
at most it can be said that certain stimuli may "blot out" the mind, e.g. a really vicious toothache. But
this has no real bearing on the mind's function, but rather falls into the same category as (say)
starvation or pathology, which can disable the mind.

(b) A supplementary thought on raw feels, independent of your question. One of the results of the
enormous industry in brain research of the 20th century has been that memory holds the key to a
great deal of what we actually experience. I mean by this that many experiences which seem totally
real to us are in reality mediated or even constructed by and from our memory. Behind this seemingly
crazy feature is the way our nervous system is "tuned" from birth. The nervous system of a baby,
infant, child gobbles up experiences like a wildfire; and for obvious reasons, because at that age the
pattern is established for the possibility of all experiences that you are likely to encounter in your life.
The "tuning"I referred to is the sensitisation of nerves for certain types of sensory influxes as well as
the responses of your body; and all these are laid down as memories. It gets to the point where, on
reaching maturity, an individual will have had so many experiences that much (and eventually most)
of what happens in life are simple variations on previous experiences; and in these cases the most
economical way for the brain to handle a situation is to "construct" it — mostly memory, a small
increment instant sensation. It might sound a bit extreme to state it in such uncompromising
language, but a boxer who's been hit a hundred times on the jaw might still feel the same sharp pain
the 101st time, but it is very much more probable that the sense of pain was generated internally. So
that as we age, though partly depending on how sedentary our life is, the experience of raw feels will
tend to ease out, because the brain, which "knows" exactly how a blow to the jaw feels, is no longer
going to be "bothered" with all that expensive and time-consuming effort of interpreting the fist's
impact on your facial bone, but "replays it" from memory.

There's a bit of a nutshell view for you; but if this fascinates you, you're going to have to follow it up
yourself. Anyway, the main point is made, I think: you don't need a mind to interpret raw feels, and I
don't believe that this is what the mind is all about.

Jürgen Lawrenz

Sydney