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> If you think you are in pain, no matter the source of the pain, then you are in pain That sounds like a philosophy where thinking an experience is real is eq

• Maursault 5y ago
  > That sounds like a philosophy where thinking an experience is real is equivalent to it being real. Which sounds a lot like faith. Fascinating observation, as flawed as your reasoning is, because pain is not at all like, say, experiencing a bird flying past, which could be real, could be virtual, it could even be a dream that the individual can not determine is not real, but that does not make it real. Pain does not work this way, so the fallacy you've employed is false equivalence, because you are claiming that if I say "pain is unmistakeable whether it is phantom pain or conventional pain," you've conflated that specific example to a generalization where it no longer holds, that experiencing real x or dream x is equivalent, which is not necessarily true for anything but pain. Again, "if you think you are in pain, then you are in pain" is true, even if it can not be true for all things that could replace pain in that true statement, like if you think you are in Florida, then you are in Florida, which might not be true. But "if you think you are in pain then you are in pain" is always true in all cases, everywhere, always, and most people can immediately intuit this, because it is true. One must have deeply flawed reasoning if one expects anything else to be able to fit in place of pain as though the word were a variable. It is not. I made a specific claim and I made no other. You're making those new claims and arguing against your new claims, making it not only false equivalence, but also the venerable straw man.