 One of the main motivations behind the perceptual/representational views of pain in philosophy is the belief (or hope) that perception as a species of information gathering can be accounted for entirely in physicalistic terms. Of course, this is a controversial claim. There are many who think that perception involving as it does conscious phenomenal experience cannot be a purely physical  phenomenon.[20]  However, even these theorists may agree that it is a plausible theoretical strategy to pursue an understanding of pain and other intransitive bodily sensations in perceptual/representational terms. This strategy, if it works, minimizes the diversity of mental phenomena, and thus potentially offers the prospects of a more unified theory of mind. If this theory turns out to be in harmony with the rest of our sciences and their fundamental metaphysical and methodological assumptions, so much the better. Indeed, it was the plausibility of this strategy and the belief that we will eventually succeed in understanding perception in purely naturalistic terms that have prompted many philosophers to advance perceptual/representational theories of pain. Many in fact believe that philosophy has made some progress in the second half of the last century in developing the conceptual tools for a better and more naturalistic understanding of perception and the mind in general — e.g., the notion of a mental representation and its (broadly) computational processing.