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Full Idea
Our phenomenal experience of pain has components - it is a complex, consisting (perhaps) of urges, desires, impulses, and beliefs, probably occurring at quite different levels of institutional abstraction.
Gist of Idea
Pain is composed of urges, desires, impulses etc, at different levels of abstraction
Source
William Lycan (Consciousness [1987], 5.5)
Book Ref
Lycan,William G.: 'Consciousness' [MIT 1995], p.62
A Reaction
This seems to be true, and offers the reductionist a strategy for making inroads into the supposed irreducable and fundamental nature of qualia. What's it like to be a complex hierarchically structured multi-functional organism?