Micheal, the link between specific brain regions and encoding pain affect is pretty complicated and controversial, as mentioned in the original article. So I would first note that even if we don't know exactly what specific brain regions are doing, there's still a lot of evidence (including several lines of evidence cited in the Price article you mention) for a sensory/affective dissociation.
That said, the brain regions most commonly linked to the affective dimension of pain are the anterior cingulate cortex (with some ... (read more)
Since you mention pain several times, one pretty significant gap in this discussion is consideration of the dissociation between the sensory and affective components of pain experience. The reported intensity of pain is correlated with the reported unpleasantness of pain, but the two components can be pushed in opposite directions (for example, reported pain intensity can remain constant while pain unpleasantness is increased or decreased). The affective component of pain is presumably what matters morally, and valance is definitionally p... (read more)
This is super interesting...thanks Max!
I haven't read the books so I assume they deal with this there, but what about cases of blindsight, where people self-report that they don't see objects in certain parts of their visual field but nevertheless are able to respond above chance on forced choice tasks and even make appropriate grasping motions for objects in that area of the visual field? Wouldn't those, if true, be cases where we have maps of our surrounding environment that guide behaviour but nevertheless are not phenomenally conscious?... (read more)
Jason, thanks for the response! I'd definitely be interested in talking more some time...I'm a bit of a novice on this forum so let me know the best way to set something up.
As a first pass at your questions, my chapter The Unpleasantness of Pain for Humans and Other Animals gets at some of them.
I think for (1), it depends on how strongly you mean "comes apart." If we just mean varying one dimension while the other stays constant, or varying one dimension more than the other, there are a huge number of instances where this occurs. If, howe... (read more)