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Everything you will ever experience is all in your head. No snark intended. This is a potent insight in pain science.

lisper 11y ago
It's not all in your head. If I hit you on the head with a sledgehammer, the pain you will feel will in some sense be "all in your head." But the sledgehammer, which is not in your head (unless I hit you really, really hard!), still had something to do with it.
- DanBC 11y ago
  But some people esperience pain without the external cause. No sledge hammers, no cancer, no disease, but pain is present.
  - lisper 11y ago
    Yes, of course, but so what? It is still not true that "Everything you will ever experience is all in your head."
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - bcook 11y ago
      It is correct, from my perspective. Pain is just the interpretation of signals from sensory organs. Our brain could just as easily interpret it as something else or disregard it.
      - lisper 11y ago
        Not really. Try this experiment: hit yourself on the head with a sledgehammer and then try to "interpret" the pain as something else (eating chocolate, say) or just "disregard" it. You'll find it's not so easy. In fact, you already know that I'm right about this. You are in fact so convinced that I am right that you will not try this experiment. How do I know this? Because millions of years of evolution has hard-wired this understanding of pain into your brain. Anyone who doesn't have this understanding hard-wired into their brains tends not to survive because they end up doing stupid things like hitting themselves on the head with sledgehammers just to see what will happen. In fact, there are a very few people who can't feel pain. It's a very serious problem. They have to be extremely careful because they can easily sustain life-threatening injuries and not realize it.
        DanBC 11y ago
        But you're being a bit dogmatic. We use psychological techniques to reduce pain in, for example, cancer patients. You're reducing pain to some reaction to the physical world, but we see that some people have pain with no physical stimulus; and we some people who can reduce their pain even though there are physical stimuli present. When you properly control a study on pain meds you see such a strong placebo response that it's hard to justify using the meds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10351230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10351230 http://www.nature.com/news/strong-placebo-response-thwarts-painkiller-trials-1.18511 http://www.nature.com/news/strong-placebo-response-thwarts-p...
        lisper 11y ago
        All true. That doesn't change the fact that some (in fact, much) subjective experience arises from external stimulus, and so it is not correct to say that everything you experience is all in your head. Some of what you experience is all in your head (dreams, psychosomatic conditions, hallucinations), and the rest is a combination of in your head and not in your head. (Obviously, any phenomenon that is entirely outside of your head is not part of your experience.)
        bcook 11y ago
        Indeed, prove that your entire life experience is not delusions and hallucinations. The mind is capable of false reality and deep delusions, unless you think you are more capable and aware than your brain... You think that you have experienced things beyond your own brain, but that is just your brain telling you that. There is probably entire fields of study focused on logically proving that reality is real... We have very little chance of evolving this conversation into something more than ego-fueled arguing. :)
        lisper 11y ago
        No, you're wrong about that. The ability to do science provides overwhelming evidence that solipsism is false. For an extended treatment, read David Deutsch's "The Fabric of Reality" chapter 3.
- austinjp 11y ago
  It's odd, I know, but entirely factual. All sensation, all your experience of anything ever is a processing output of your brain. Certainly if you hit my hand with a sledgehammer i will scream about my hand hurting. But what has happened? Nerves depolarise, synapses communicate, a pattern of activity emerges in my brain. And as the conscious entity experiencing that pattern, i experience pain. If my spinal cord is severed (and i survive otherwise intact) those signals never reach my brain, and i experience no pain. No physical pain as a direct result of your actions, anyway. I may still be annoyed :) Your experience is 100% dependant on and exclusive to your brain, sledgehammer or no.
  - lisper 11y ago
    Yes, your subjective experience has its locus in your brain, but that is not at all the same thing as "Everything you will ever experience is all in your head." There is an external reality that is separate from your brain. Some of the things you experience (like getting hit on the head with a sledgehammer) involve processes that operate in this external reality, and others (like dreams or psychosomatic pain) don't. This is a salient and useful distinction which "Everything you will ever experience is all in your head" only serves to obscure.
    - austinjp 11y ago
      Okay so this may feel like splitting hairs, but... You're talking about input, I'm talking about output. Experience is influenced (to varying extent) on sensory input, but they're not the same thing. Sensory input of course influences experience, I'm not going to deny a sledgehammer to the hand. While you feel that the distinctions drawn above serve only to obscure things, in fact the reverse may be true. The Cartesian perspective that "output is nothing but a response to input" has been pretty much discarded in modern research into pain, neurology, consciousness, psychiatry, and so on. So i don't deny the role of sensory input. I'm just pointing out that input is distinct from output; they're not the same thing.
      - ZeroFries 11y ago
        There is no clear line which makes a sensation external or internally based. It's a messy abstraction, but there's some meaning behind it, because things can at least be relatively sorted by how external or internally based they are. For example, you may see a spider which 99.99% of sighted individuals would also see and agree there was a spider there, or you can hallucinate one, where only you would agree about a spider being present. Clearly the first is MORE externally based than the latter.

It's not all in your head. If I hit you on the head with a sledgehammer, the pain you will feel will in some sense be "all in your head." But the sledgehammer, which is not in your head (unless I hit you really, really hard!), still had something to do with it.

DanBC 11y ago
But some people esperience pain without the external cause. No sledge hammers, no cancer, no disease, but pain is present.
- lisper 11y ago
  Yes, of course, but so what? It is still not true that "Everything you will ever experience is all in your head."
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - bcook 11y ago
    It is correct, from my perspective. Pain is just the interpretation of signals from sensory organs. Our brain could just as easily interpret it as something else or disregard it.
    - lisper 11y ago
      Not really. Try this experiment: hit yourself on the head with a sledgehammer and then try to "interpret" the pain as something else (eating chocolate, say) or just "disregard" it. You'll find it's not so easy. In fact, you already know that I'm right about this. You are in fact so convinced that I am right that you will not try this experiment. How do I know this? Because millions of years of evolution has hard-wired this understanding of pain into your brain. Anyone who doesn't have this understanding hard-wired into their brains tends not to survive because they end up doing stupid things like hitting themselves on the head with sledgehammers just to see what will happen. In fact, there are a very few people who can't feel pain. It's a very serious problem. They have to be extremely careful because they can easily sustain life-threatening injuries and not realize it.
      - DanBC 11y ago
        But you're being a bit dogmatic. We use psychological techniques to reduce pain in, for example, cancer patients. You're reducing pain to some reaction to the physical world, but we see that some people have pain with no physical stimulus; and we some people who can reduce their pain even though there are physical stimuli present. When you properly control a study on pain meds you see such a strong placebo response that it's hard to justify using the meds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10351230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10351230 http://www.nature.com/news/strong-placebo-response-thwarts-painkiller-trials-1.18511 http://www.nature.com/news/strong-placebo-response-thwarts-p...
        lisper 11y ago
        All true. That doesn't change the fact that some (in fact, much) subjective experience arises from external stimulus, and so it is not correct to say that everything you experience is all in your head. Some of what you experience is all in your head (dreams, psychosomatic conditions, hallucinations), and the rest is a combination of in your head and not in your head. (Obviously, any phenomenon that is entirely outside of your head is not part of your experience.)
        bcook 11y ago
        Indeed, prove that your entire life experience is not delusions and hallucinations. The mind is capable of false reality and deep delusions, unless you think you are more capable and aware than your brain... You think that you have experienced things beyond your own brain, but that is just your brain telling you that. There is probably entire fields of study focused on logically proving that reality is real... We have very little chance of evolving this conversation into something more than ego-fueled arguing. :)
        lisper 11y ago
        No, you're wrong about that. The ability to do science provides overwhelming evidence that solipsism is false. For an extended treatment, read David Deutsch's "The Fabric of Reality" chapter 3.
austinjp 11y ago
It's odd, I know, but entirely factual. All sensation, all your experience of anything ever is a processing output of your brain. Certainly if you hit my hand with a sledgehammer i will scream about my hand hurting. But what has happened? Nerves depolarise, synapses communicate, a pattern of activity emerges in my brain. And as the conscious entity experiencing that pattern, i experience pain. If my spinal cord is severed (and i survive otherwise intact) those signals never reach my brain, and i experience no pain. No physical pain as a direct result of your actions, anyway. I may still be annoyed :) Your experience is 100% dependant on and exclusive to your brain, sledgehammer or no.
- lisper 11y ago
  Yes, your subjective experience has its locus in your brain, but that is not at all the same thing as "Everything you will ever experience is all in your head." There is an external reality that is separate from your brain. Some of the things you experience (like getting hit on the head with a sledgehammer) involve processes that operate in this external reality, and others (like dreams or psychosomatic pain) don't. This is a salient and useful distinction which "Everything you will ever experience is all in your head" only serves to obscure.
  - austinjp 11y ago
    Okay so this may feel like splitting hairs, but... You're talking about input, I'm talking about output. Experience is influenced (to varying extent) on sensory input, but they're not the same thing. Sensory input of course influences experience, I'm not going to deny a sledgehammer to the hand. While you feel that the distinctions drawn above serve only to obscure things, in fact the reverse may be true. The Cartesian perspective that "output is nothing but a response to input" has been pretty much discarded in modern research into pain, neurology, consciousness, psychiatry, and so on. So i don't deny the role of sensory input. I'm just pointing out that input is distinct from output; they're not the same thing.
    - ZeroFries 11y ago
      There is no clear line which makes a sensation external or internally based. It's a messy abstraction, but there's some meaning behind it, because things can at least be relatively sorted by how external or internally based they are. For example, you may see a spider which 99.99% of sighted individuals would also see and agree there was a spider there, or you can hallucinate one, where only you would agree about a spider being present. Clearly the first is MORE externally based than the latter.