ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to clarify the nature of, and relationships among, pain, painfulness, and direct suffering—which it will simply term suffering, henceforth. It is concerned with the attitude of pain researchers—comprising philosophers and scientists—to consciousness, that is phenomenal consciousness. When pain is conscious one normally knows one is in pain, and this knowledge comes from ‘introspection’, a form of attention to one’s experiential state as such, providing non-inferential knowledge. Most theories certainly veer too far in the direction of separating pain and suffering. Corresponding to the theory that painfulness consists in desiring that s-pain cease, there is a desire theory of suffering on which to suffer pain is to desire that it not exist. No-one would consent to being unconsciously tortured throughout their sleeping hours by an ingenious electro-shock treatment which, while causing a good deal of unconscious pain, left no physical or psychological mark in waking life—not even if money was at stake.
