Are pains necessarily unpleasant?

Abstract

Pain sensations seem necessarily unpleasant or even awful. But the author argues that they aren’t. Pain sensations are the sensations which accompany certain of our perceptions of bodily damage, namely those produced by our nociceptors. Unpleasantness or awfulness is not an inherent phenomenal quality of these sensations. Rather it is a separate mental state, a state of dislike, probably associated with these sensations through learning or evolution, but in any case only contingently connected with them. If pain sensations are only contingently unpleasant, it should be possible to disassociate the unpleasantness from the pain. Several empirical studies are described which suggest that this actually happens in certain cases.