Abstract

If martin and rosenberg were right, It ought to have been possible for higher animals to evolve neural mechanisms that evoke complex avoidance-Of-Tissue-Damage behavior "without" their experiencing pain. The alleged identity of mental event types like pain with unspecified brain state types thus can have no evolutionary explanation. It will not do to say that these brain state types may be discovered some day to have a distinguishing property x, Since x would still be a physical property and one could always ask why pain-Experience necessarily accompanies x-Propertied brain states, This being causally gratuitous to the behavior they would evoke without it "if" physicalism is true