BPS SIG Meetings

The Special Interest Groups (SIGs) of the Society may, from time to time, hold meetings which will be of particular interest to the members of its Group. These meetings are open to members and non members of the Society, unless otherwise stated.

Please see below for details of forthcoming SIG meetings.

Philosophy & Ethics Society SIG Annual Meeting 2008 - Suffering and Science
23rd to 26th June
Launde Abbey, Leicestershire

At the 2007 meeting of the SIG we examined the contributions of the world’s religions to the understanding of suffering. It might be said that although we learnt how people could use religion to give suffering enough meaning to enable them cope with it and to answer their question “why me?”, the philosophical question “why is there suffering?” seemed to remain as impenetrable a mystery as ever, and indeed perhaps even more difficult in a theistic context. There was an assumption however that a scientific world view would regard suffering simply as an inescapable function of a complex nervous system which has evolved in a potentially hostile environment; science might be supremely good at answering “how” questions but was simply irrelevant to “why “ questions which are seen as the domain of religion. But for many people religion is meaningless; they say very firmly that “man come of age” must learn to do without God or religion at all, and for them only science can provide answers that will pass the test of logic and satisfy the desire for proof.
So this year we will try to discover if science, in particular the science of the brain and conciousness, can provide at least some answers to the question of why people suffer which go further than simply saying suffering just is – something we just have to live with. Most importantly, answers which may be helpful to those who look to us for explanations that will help them accept their pain and may help us accept our frequent inability to
relieve it.

Amanda Williams, Clinical Psychologist at St. Thomas’s Hospital and Input will talk about
evolutionary perspectives on pain, such as the communication of pain to elicit help from others, drawing on the literature on empathy, altruism, mirror neurons and the reading of emotion faces.

Katja Wiech, Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Oxford Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain, will use the example of a study using fMRI to investigate the psychological and neural mechanismsunderlying the influence of religious belief on pain to illustrate the contribution of brain research in elucidating the brain-mind conundrum in the context of suffering.

Blay Whitby, Lecturer in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sussex will talk on the relationship of first-person and third-person perspectives on pain; attempting to extract some practical advice for practitioners from recent philosophical approaches and current neuroscientific work.

Alex Cahanna, Pain Consultant in Geneva and Professor-elect, Bonica Pain Division in Seattle, will argue that in place of the Cartesian stance of explaining our experience as a result of our own mind (or brain), we should adopt the teaching of Emmanuel Levinas regarding the “face” (i.e. the way we construct the Other in our consciousness) and the presentation of the Other to ourselves, which always exceeds all idea of the Other in ourselves so that any time we take a person into our mind we reduce him/her from what he/she really is . This resonates with empathy, mirror neurons and modern cognitive neuroscience, puts the patient and his narrative into the centre, and helps us study the essence of pain from a first-person point of view.

For more information and to download a booking form, please click here.