[Paul]

Hi Don. Thanks for replying.

I wasn’t thinking about pain but it is a very good example of something we feel we need to measure but can’t objectively. There are so many examples I’ve run into like using the Beck Depression Inventory for tracking the efficacy of anti-depressant drugs or therapy for example.

I am really interested in anomalous experience and worked on a lot of research with people with psychosis back in the day. I don’t think it is really deniable that all of human experience is almost indistinguishable from hallucination. We tolerate dreaming on a daily basis, myself and a lot of musical people I know (and possibly literally everyone) can experience hearing self-generated music without stimulus. What really seems to distinguish psychotic experience is that it is distressing to the individual- hearing a voice speaking to you might of course be a delightful spiritual experience of course.

I wonder what Sjahari would make of this from the perspective of evaluating our collective tendency to counterfactual? Are the experiences evaluated identical in nature or are there pre-existing emotional components that ‘colour’ the interpretation? If the latter, I imagine this would strongly influence the self-report of pain you were discussing Don.