Fixing Pain
Question: What exactly is wrong with something like this as a (physical-cum-indexical) conceptual analysis of "pain" (in my idiolect)?
the state I am in now
One obvious problem is that it's too unspecific: pain is not the only state I am currently in. But that's not the only problem. What else?
Is it a priori that I feel pain now? Or does my knowledge that I feel pain depend on empirical information? Could it turn out that I don't feel pain? Could it have turned out?
What's important here is whether all worlds considered as actual contain in their center somebody -- not necessarily me -- who shares my (current) evidential situation.
[Update (15 h later): Dave Chalmers reminds me that I know by empirical introspection that I am in pain. Well, it was quite late last night. I think I was misled not so much by Kripke's assumption (in his argument for dualism) that what I imagine contains me with all my actual evidence, but more by a slightly wrong picture of how to evaluate thought experiments: My picture was that to find out whether a sentence S is verified by a certain situation (considered as actual) described by D, I have to hypothetically conditionalize my beliefs on D -- assigning D a probability close to 1 --, and then see whether I would agree to S. This usually delivers the correct results, but not in the case of pain, where my previous belief that I am in pain already has a credence of roughly 1. I'm not sure how the picture should be improved.]