A favourite example of an experience that seems to resist reduction in terms of behaviour. Although pain obviously has behavioural consequences, being unpleasant, disruptive, and sometimes overwhelming, there is also something more than behaviour, something ‘that it is like’ to be in pain, and there is all the difference in the world between pain behaviour accompanied by pain and the same behaviour without pain. Theories identifying pain with neural events subserving it have been attacked (e.g. by Kripke) on the grounds that whilst a genuine metaphysical identity should be necessarily true, the association between pain and any such event would be contingent. See also mind-body problem, qualia.