Yes, that's one of those common experiences which support the "neural allegiance" view of consciousness: if other stuff is going on, it's perfectly possible to be unaware of pain until you go looking for it. Then one catches sight of an injury, thinks (in effect) "That's got to hurt" and sure enough, there's the pain, right where you looked for it.

Van Rijn's "autopilot" driving fits right into the model. Another common phenomenon is to realize that some sensory signal has been present for some time before you consciously registered it: the agent in charge of that experience has just arrived in consciousness, bringing the experience with it.

Grant Hutchison

Yes, I know what you mean. Language is flexible and adaptable. Sometimes you have to wait for the things to settle and quiet down before you realize you are injured. I meant more in the sense that discovering a pain being like discovering a candy bar in a drawer. Pains are not distinct entities like that, but we sometimes talk about them that way.

That's fine too, but in the context of language, when we talk about pain, we attribute it to the person. The scientist may analyze the process at the subpersonal level, where the body may be considered a multitude of agents. But no single one is the pain, and no single one is the consciousness or the perceiver of the pain. That's the Cartesian homuncular fallacy, where we think there is something like a little man in the head that is responsible for feeling the pain or where the self is.

Your homunculus may be fallacious, but he's a straw homunculus.
Here's the actual model you're trivializing.

We have:
1) A body; call it "body"
which contains
2) A neural allegiance which gives the sensation of consciousness; call it "self"
3) A neural mechanism which gives the sensation of pain; call it "pain"

If "self" and "pain" are separate entities within "body", we have a person who feels no pain. If "pain" is a subset of "self" within "body", we have a person who feels pain.
The incorporation of "pain" into "self" is to some extent under the control of "self", and to some extent under the control of "pain": we may "look for the pain", or pain may intrude.
There are other, aversive routines that "self" tends to incorporate once it has incorporated "pain", but with a bit of practice we can limit that recruitment, even if "pain" is being particularly clamant. So there are ways of "dealing with pain", which are under greater or lesser control of "self".

Grant Hutchison

(Joe Durnavich: Considered in an ecological context, it is not too hard to understand why a dog might yelp when you step on its tail and then immediately step off of it. Pain sometimes functions as a dance of sorts between organisms.)

Yeah, you usually try to explain pain, consciousness, etc. from the inside out; start with the pain you feel and work outward. I never found that satisfactory because, well, nothing is really explained or clear. Look at the matter from the ecological, environmental, or evolutionary, or linguistic context and suddenly it seems you can get a foothold on the matter.

They key process here, I think is co-evolution. One animal bites another. The bitten one jerks violently, growls loudly, and snaps back. The other animal releases its hold and retreats. Both reactions, it seems likely, co-evolved together. All the inner elements, the states, the pains, whatever, were all part of the wiring, so to speak, that connected it all together. It was one physical system covering both animals—a pain system, if you will--that nature selected.

When we think about pain, however, we tend to use the dualistic model where we talk as if there are “pains” inside animals and as if the behaviors that we see are merely symptoms or displays of that inner pain. There's nothing wrong with that, but there is more insight to be gained by looking at the matter from other contexts, of course.

In the limited evolutionary context posited here, no, but now that the pain systems are in place, we can sometimes find it helpful to take advantage of some of their effects by crying or swearing alone.

From grunts and growls to, “Good day, Sir! Would you be so kind as to remove your foot from the top of mine. If I do say so myself, the pressure has been getting most uncomfortable. Why, thank you and I bid you good day.”

Excellent point.

The only part I struggle with in this view is having pain be any specific thing in the body, even as a subset of it. What might a headache be in that scenario? These neurons, those nerve fibers, these red blood cells, those muscle contractions, these neurotransmitters, etc.? Even though all that may all come into play when I have a headache, I just can't see calling all that the headache that is a subset of me. I don't think it could be something I could "look for" either since I believe I lack all the sense mechanisms required to detect all those things at that level of detail.

For sure, pain is very, very complicated, with all sorts of neurotransmitters and feedback loops involved, so it's a messy example that we're dealing with just because the example of a headache came up.
But there's a final common pathway, associated with activity in the sensory cortex and its association areas (as well as other, deeper responses). So there is a final cortical set of neurones, distilling the current "pain package", which will activate in response to some mischief in the peripheries. If that set of neurones becomes incorporated into the neuronal allegiance that is the current manifestation of "self", then you have a self that experiences pain.
You can "go looking" for sensory input any time you like, by deliberately shifting your attention, which will be reflected by a wash of neuronal activity linked to the appropriate bit of the sensory cortex.

To give you an idea of the sort of distillation of complex sensation that the brain can achieve and pass on to consciousness, I'd offer the Halle Berry neurone for your consideration.

Grant Hutchison

I remember that news. I have always assumed that Halle Berry took up a far larger portion of the typical mail brain...

If the connections to the Halle Berry neuron in my head were severed, but the neuron was kept alive, would I think of Halle Berry when it was artificially stimulated in the right way? What if it was moved to a tank and kept alive? If I was a thousand miles a way and the neuron was tickled back at the lab, would I suddenly think of Ms. Berry?

Oh dear. Since I'm sure you know perfectly well that the only possible answer to those questions is "no", it's evident that you're setting up for another series of steps in the behaviourist dance. I believe I can guess which steps they're going to be, but I'll let you get on with it.

To save a little time, it's perhaps worth pointing out at this point that we have no idea what would happen if this "Halle Berry neurone" had been stimulated, rather than sensed, in the intact brain of the experimental subject. All we know is that it fired under certain circumstances, chosen from a relatively small number of stimuli, and that all these circumstances included the concept "Halle Berry". Stimulating the neurone might do something, or nothing, depending on where it is sitting in the web of activity that Halle Berry triggers in this subject's brain.

Grant Hutchison

Grant, I take it there is a lot of bad blood between behaviorists and non-behaviorists in the cognitive sciences.

I was just trying to understand what a single neuron can do you for you and its importance in the overall Halle Berry-related neural fireworks.

Not particularly. Behaviourist approaches to learning about the brain are, of course, still in regular use. No-one denies that behaviour is jolly interesting stuff that can tell us lots of interesting things.
It's just the attempts of "strict behaviourists" to deny the usefulness of other approaches that have become a little wearisome by now: that notion was bankrupt by the middle of last century, and modern fast functional imaging makes it just plain silly to persist with it.

So why did you ask what happened when a single neurone was separated from the brain by a thousand miles? How did you imagine such an experiment would advance your quest for understanding?

Grant Hutchison

The 1000 miles part actually related to the notion I read somewhere of a bridge locus, which is a hypothesized small region of the brain that when stimulated, directly causes, say, vision. I always wondered if that notion turned out to be correct, could you then separate the bridge locus from the person and would he still see when it was stimulated the right way? And for fun, what if we kept just one pixel of the bridge locus in the lab and sent him to the Andromeda galaxy? Could we fire that pixel and make him see, say, a red dot in his visual field? Would it happen faster than light?

A central characteristic, in my opinion, of Cartesianist (folk) models is that there is a final resting place where feelings, perceptions, and the like are deposited upon which the subject feels the pain, sees the apple, etc. To borrow some of Dennett's phrasing, the models tend to hold in one fashion or another that a "perception" crosses a finish line at which point awareness immediately ensues. Note that nobody believes exactly that, so they try to fuzz up the picture a bit in various ways with oscillations or they make consciousness a process or something like a computer program that the perceptions are deposited into, etc. The general structure tends to remain the same.

I find it interesting to watch how people try to explain consciousness. I think everybody has an explanation on hand.

Not quite. The expression "bridge locus" is just a way of referring to the arrival of "sensation" within "self". That was what I was talking about with the business of "self" and "pain": the bridge locus for a pain is the particular pattern of neuronal activity which has to be incorporated into "self" in order for "self" to have that pain. If the bridge locus is in "self", we have a person in pain; if the bridge locus isn't in "self", we have a person without pain.

None of the above. You may safely discard such fancies.

Many of us have several.

Grant Hutchison

Ever see a cartoon where a character shakes his head and a funny noise sounds? That's what I did when I read this. I realize I'm being borderline rude here but... but... but... I'm flabbergasted.

__________________
The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

The Brain Science Podcast

I totally agree with what Grant said here. Without digging into the research mentioned in that article I can only believe that the claims they made are extremely irresponsible. How can you measure one neuron's activity and claim that it is somehow responsible for storing a complex invariant representation. I wish I had time to dig into their research, unfortunately it'll have to wait. However, I relish the thought of tearing the claims they made to shreds if they haven't done more than measured single neurons without a concurrent fMRI.

On the other hand, they are a TEAM of NEUROSCIENTISTS at UCLA and the California Institute of Technology and I can only assume that I am a driveling idiot by comparison. Surely these people must be able to back up those claims or I grossly misunderstood what they meant.

__________________
The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

The Brain Science Podcast

It's a debating tactic; an attempt to cast doubt on an idea you don't like. You represent it as being so bizarre that it leads you to entertain ridiculous ideas.
Tricky to carry off, though. People sometimes get the impression that you just don't understand the idea you're attempting to undermine.

Grant Hutchison

Well, what scientists write and what journalists report are two different things. Here's what Quiroga et al. wrote:It's not exactly a claim that the firing of the "Halle Berry neurone" is both necessary and sufficient for the perception of Halle Berry.

Grant Hutchison

Here is what I read. See the 6th footnote from:

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~noe/HurleyNoe.pdf

"Teller and Pugh (1983) introduced the term “b