Nothing to do with philosophy but with existence of fixed points. Are you familiar with the mathematical notion of a fixed point (think y-combinator) and fixed

Nothing to do with philosophy but with existence of fixed points. Are you familiar with the mathematical notion of a fixed point (think y-combinator) and fixed point theorems ? The gist of it is that if there is a continuous mapping from a set to itself with the property that the mapped points are closer than the original points there must exist a point that maps to itself. Now if the pain location mapping is smooth and a contraction (not implausible because number of cells in the brain is smaller than the number of cells in the entire body), there would be a neuron in the brain that would have been self aware in the sense that its pain mapping would have mapped to itself. Note it is possible to avoid having a fixed point for a mapping from a set itself (consider a permutation of numbers 1..n so that no number is in its own place). It is just an intriguing notion -- is a fixed point, self aware neuron possible