 If we take the weaker claim to the effect that feeling pain involves sensory perception but that this doesn’t exhaust its nature mostly due to its affective dimension, we may still preserve a naturalistic view of pain by giving a functionalist (or, psychofunctionalist) account of its affective aspect. According to this proposal, even though the sensory-discriminative aspect of pain can perhaps be handled  representationally,[21]  the affective aspect reduces to the way in which the sensory-discriminative information is processed, not for analysis to extract information about the proximal or distal properties of the stimuli, but rather for its significance for learning as well as the effector or motor systems, to set learning and motivational parameters for action on the basis of stimuli’s informational content. There is in fact strong supporting evidence for such a thesis in the evolutionary stories of different organisms at different developmental hierarchies. The neuroscientific evidence about the affective brain seems also to support this idea in  general.[22]