Pain and time

Bill gives us another aporetic triad:

1) A wholly past (felt) pain is not nothing: it is real.
2) For (felt) pains, esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived.
3) Wholly past (felt) pains are not perceived.

Each of these propositions is extremely plausible if not self-evident, according to Bill.   Yet they result in contradiction.  So it would seem that there is something very problematic about our ordinary thinking about pains and other sensations that are stretched out in time, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Really?  I can't believe so.  Indeed, it's simple enough to relieve the contradiction whilst retaining the gist of these propositions by rewriting (1) as

1*)  A wholly past (felt) pain was not nothing: it was real. 

Here we are talking about a wholly past thing in the past tense---what I have been calling 'common sense presentism'.  The question becomes, Why does Bill want to talk about a past pain in the present tense?  Here is his justification for his (1):

To say that an item is wholly past is to say that it does not overlap the present. A felt or phenomenal pain is a pain exactly as it is experienced  from the first-person point of view of the one who endures it, with all and only the properties it appears to have from the point of view of the one who endures it.  It is not to be confused with the physical cause of the pain if there is one. Now yesterday's excruciating migraine headache, which is wholly past, is not nothing: it happened.

I have argued elsewhere that to say of a thing that has been and gone that it is 'wholly past'  is a manner of speaking that should not be taken as presently attributing the property 'wholly past' to it, so I shall let the first sentence pass.  We should note though that the 'is not nothing' in the last sentence can be conveyed equally well with 'was not nothing'.   Bill continues,

It is now an object of veridical memory. Since the memory is veridical, its intentional object cannot be unreal.  The pain  is also a subject of presently true past-tensed statements such as 'The pain was awful.' Given that veritas sequitur esse, that no true statement is about what is wholly unreal or nonexistent, yesterday's migraine pain cannot be unreal or nonexistent. The remembered wholly past pain is actual not merely possible; factual not fictional; real not imaginary.  Of course, it is not temporally present. But it is real nonetheless.  It is or exists. It is included in the ontological inventory.  To deny this is to deny the reality of the past. 

With the underlined sentences Bill departs from ordinary language---the 'datanic' we might say---and begins to speak in the terms of a theory.  A very misleading theory, in my view.  But in any case, if the 'intentional object' of today's memory is yesterday's pain, and the memory is veridical, then we can say that yesterday's pain could not have been unreal.  We don't require the present tense here.   So we can paraphrase what Bill says with

Since Bill's memory of yesterday's pain is veridical, the pain must have been real.

Bill no doubt also remembers the pain ceasing to exist.  The pain was awful and then it was gone.   So it's surprising that he makes a narrow interpretation of veritas sequitur esse.  Truly, the pain was awful.  So the pain could not have been unreal or non-existent while truly it was awful.  The pain was actual and was not merely possible.  The pain was factual and not fictional.  The pain was real and not imaginary.  Of course the pain has gone but it was real nevertheless.  This is not to deny the reality of the past.  And can't an inventory be a history?  The point of all this is to show that Bill can say what he wants to say in past-tensed ordinary language.

I conclude that Bill's justification for (1) rests on a narrow present-tensed understanding of VSE.  Later in the piece he says that one might reject (1) by rejecting this too.  He seems to be claiming that rejecting VSE requires a problematic Meinongian move:

...there are truths about beingless items and one can refer to such items.  Even though JFK has ceased to exist, he is still in some sense available to serve as an object of reference and a subject of true statements.

I'd agree that such a move, expressed this way, is probably not sustainable.   What on Earth is a 'beingless item'?  But why do we need some theoretical alternative to narrow VSE when it's a pre-theoretical given that we can make true statements about objects and events that no longer exist?  To back up (1) Bill needs to justify his counter-intuitive interpretation of VSE.