Article: Be kind to your seafood

[Garson007]

"Suffering" sensory input? Sensory input is just action potentials, no different to action potentials felt when a tasty morsel is detected by the antennae of the lobster. The brain then somehow interprets that as information which is then meaningful and may trigger secondary actions such as fight or flight or whatever. But there is NO necessity that noxious or damage induced impulses need by "unpleasant". Seeing lobster activity does not tell you if they're unpleasant or not. Seeing human activity does because we can subjectively account for pain and we can be told by our fellow humans that they also feel unpleasant sensations when they're being burned.

People imagine animals feel pain the way they do, but that's a point requiring proof and can't merely be asserted.

Uh, right. I'm not equating suffering to what you are equating suffering to. Any input that results in panic/discomfort/reaction/etcetera is by my definition suffering. Almost all living creatures need it, otherwise they will die en mass.

I'm not equating human suffering to it at all - you, ironically, are.

 

[FlatspinZA]

I agree that beings do have some inherent mechanism that alerts them to less than ideal circumstances. But I would also suggest that there are filters associated with that too. We cannot react to every single stimuli, and do not even though our nervous systems are pretty sophisticated compared to other life forms. Ask any canary in a coal mine.

Taking your dog and its howls. The closer we are to another creature, the better our assumptions of suffering can be. That said, you do get differences in pain toleration between people, some folk don't suffer from a hangover like others may, some burn in the sun while other go a brown colour. A dog isn't too far off in terms of the complexity of its nervous system - its nose is way more sensitive as an example. Both you and the dog are mammals.

But a lobster is a crustacean. It exists in a different environment. There are way, way more differences between you and a lobster than there are between you and a dog.

I am not saying that lobsters don't suffer. But I do believe that whatever it is that they feel is not the same as what you or the dog would feel. Cutting one of your, or the dog's legs off, would not be an awful lot of fun for you - but that would be a minor irritation for the lobster, as an example. Short of it - I am sure the lobster would rather not be dropped into boiling water but does it experience it in the same way that you would? That I doubt.

I brought plants into the conversation, not because I don't believe that they respond to negative stimuli in a defensive manner. Rather because if we tried to consider the 'feelings' of everything we'd become immobilised.

This may be true, in much the same way as a lizard grows another tail - does this mean it doesn't hurt when it loses the original tail?

"Suffering" sensory input? Sensory input is just action potentials, no different to action potentials felt when a tasty morsel is detected by the antennae of the lobster. The brain then somehow interprets that as information which is then meaningful and may trigger secondary actions such as fight or flight or whatever. But there is NO necessity that noxious or damage induced impulses need by "unpleasant". Seeing lobster activity does not tell you if they're unpleasant or not. Seeing human activity does because we can subjectively account for pain and we can be told by our fellow humans that they also feel unpleasant sensations when they're being burned.

People imagine animals feel pain the way they do, but that's a point requiring proof and can't merely be asserted.

Logic says all creatures feel pain, as in the example of the tree reacting in sympathy with those surrounding it, so it's actually a moot point - you'd have to assume they feel something, or otherwise they wouldn't feel the need to act defensively when confronted by a predator. Whether the sensation is the same, because of our different nervous systems, is another question.

Well it's an assumption. There need not be pain or the same experience of pain or any experience at all. A creature need not even feel (interpret) anything, as pleasant or unpleasant, just have different behaviours or actions trigger in response to a given stimulus. This is the sort of way primitive reflexes work in mammals. They're done subconsciously at the level of the spinal cord. You're not even aware of them. But even more complex behaviours need not be triggered by pain. Likewise PAIN experienced by an animal is not the same as pain experienced by a human. We simply don't know how bad the pain is unless we feel it ourselves. What is the intesity or the quality of it and how is it perceived and what damage it causes to what.

For another example say when you take morphine, suddenly the UNPLEASANTNESS of the pain from the knife wound in your stomach disappears yet you still feel there is something there, it just doesn't bother you.



A creature need not be alerted at some intellectual level that serious danger is at hand. When you lose your balance your righting reflex kicks in. I don't think you feel any pain. It just kicks in and it's save millions of people from death each year by not falling and breaking their necks. A creature need not feel pain the way a philosophical zombie need not be thinking YET it behaves like it thinks. It may run from toxins and injuries and approach less dangerous conditions, but it need not feel discomfort, in fact a p-zombie does not feel discomfort but may act like it would.



What relevance is that? Are you saying the "sympathy" was an emotion the same way you experience sympathy? It's a poetic metaphor or just poor word choice.




But no-one is saying it is.

We were primitives at one point, and because of our mental capacity at the time we probably dealt with pain differently. That doesn't mean we didn't feel the pain.

My only argument here is, if we are so sure crustaceans don't feel pain, explain how they developed the survival instincts to survive billions of years? I mean, what other self-preservation instinct would cause them to fight for survival?

 

[Space_Chief]

Still not pain in any way. Pain would require a central nervous system which they simply do not have. Mammals do so I'm not quite sure why you'd say that animals feel pain differently? Mammals feel it in the same way that we do - a perception based on a central nervous system reaction...

Imagine if you lived in a black and white room your whole life and you studied from black and white books. You became the world's best neurophysiologist and you knew everything about the colour blue and its representation by the brain. You could tell what blue was made by photons of such a wavelength striking photo receptors, transmitted by the optic nerve, and so on. Yet you've never seen (experienced) the colour blue. Now imagine you left the black and white world and emerged to see the blue sky, you had previously known to be blue from books. Would you have learned something NEW?

I am in the camp that believes that YES, you'd have learned something new. You'd have first hand subjective experience of what blue actually feels like (or is) = the qualia for blue. You could not get this any other way. And someone else can't get it for you. In the same way we have no way of knowing, if the pain experienced by a dog with a thorn in his paw, is of the same nature or quality, not just intensity as the pain we may experience OR whether it bothers him and what he understands by it and so on.... with people who are rational we can at least communicate, and draw some conclusions. A dog? Well no. We can infer something is not right because its behaviour is different but we can't really say what it is the dog experiences.

 

[Garson007]

In any case, my original point was that self-awareness is not a requirement for suffering and neither is thinking about suffering. If you are uncertain, use this to convince yourself: Can a baby suffer? A baby has no self-awareness and cannot think about thinking.

 

[DJ...]

This may be true, in much the same way as a lizard grows another tail - does this mean it doesn't hurt when it loses the original tail?

Al vertebrates have a central nervous system, so lizards certainly feel pain, but the number of nerves at the end of their tail is minimal, so the pain would be (assuming here) like cutting your finger open a bit...

Logic says all creatures feel pain, as in the example of the tree reacting in sympathy with those surrounding it, so it's actually a moot point

WTF? Trees do not feel pain and they are not sentient either. Where do you get this notion that trees feel sympathy? :wtf:

And not all creatures feel pain. Micro-organisms certainly do not. In fact anything without a central nervous system won't feel pain. There are no nerves for them to perceive pain. There is no path for the pain message to be sent, and there is no area for it be received and processed. What you're spouting is hippie bullschit...

you'd have to assume they feel something, or otherwise they wouldn't feel the need to act defensively when confronted by a predator.

Are we talking about trees again? Or are we talking about the flight/fight response triggered in the primitive amygdala of the brain...?

We were primitives at one point, and because of our mental capacity at the time we probably dealt with pain differently. That doesn't mean we didn't feel the pain.

Mental acumen has weet jack to do with pain perception. If this were the case, people suffering from mental retardation would flinch at the wind...

My only argument here is, if we are so sure crustaceans don't feel pain, explain how they developed the survival instincts to survive billions of years? I mean, what other self-preservation instinct would cause them to fight for survival?

Because pain is not the be-all and end-all. There are cardiovascular responses, respiratory responses, and physiological problems attributed to being attacked. They don't necessarily link to pain though, or mean that pain is experienced. Rather they manifest in a physiological problem. Also, the amygdala is what controls our flight or fight response. It is the most primitive part of our brain, and most animals have a large amygdala, irrespective of whether they have a central nervous system. They are governed solely by flight or fight - no reasoning. So through the millions of years of responding in this manner, they develop techniques to hide, escape or attack. Evolution doesn't shape the way they do these things. Those with learned reactions will survive while the others are killed off. Thus those who hid survived and breed this trait into their offspring. No pain required.

You've probably never experienced a bomb blast, but if one were to go off near you, your flight or fight response would kick in. Not because you or your ancestors experienced it, but because it is a natural reaction for survival - fight or flight. Controlled by your amygdala, irrespective of the pain sensation...

 

[Space_Chief]

My only argument here is, if we are so sure crustaceans don't feel pain, explain how they developed the survival instincts to survive billions of years? I mean, what other self-preservation instinct would cause them to fight for survival?

I never said they don't feel pain. I'm saying we can't say that they feel pain and what it is like to be them and experience that thing we now call lobster pain.

Well it can all be driven by neural circuits and instinct. Animals which did not seek out food, died out, and left fewer progeny than animals which sought out food, or escape from predators, etc. These animals could be automata, or automata with some small degree of free will and reasoning capability. But to say they have to feel pain, or that pain has to be such and such, is beyond our knowing for we don't need pain to see a lobster flail its legs when dipped in hot water. It could be spasm, it could be an attempt to escape without a subjective "EINA" on the level of the creature's self.

 

[Garson007]

I am in the camp that believes that YES, you'd have learned something new. You'd have first hand subjective experience of what blue actually feels like (or is) = the qualia for blue. You could not get this any other way. And someone else can't get it for you. In the same way we have no way of knowing, if the pain experienced by a dog with a thorn in his paw, is of the same nature or quality, not just intensity as the pain we may experience OR whether it bothers him and what he understands by it and so on.... with people who are rational we can at least communicate, and draw some conclusions. A dog? Well no. We can infer something is not right because its behaviour is different but we can't really say what it is the dog experiences.

It's not about the personal experience. It's about the reaction. It doesn't matter how it feels, only that it does feel.

 

[DJ...]

Imagine if you lived in a black and white room your whole life and you studied from black and white books. You became the world's best neurophysiologist and you knew everything about the colour blue and its representation by the brain. You could tell what blue was made by photons of such a wavelength striking photo receptors, transmitted by the optic nerve, and so on. Yet you've never seen (experienced) the colour blue. Now imagine you left the black and white world and emerged to see the blue sky, you had previously known to be blue from books. Would you have learned something NEW?

I am in the camp that believes that YES, you'd have learned something new.

Of course you've learned something new. I can't argue with that...

In the same way we have no way of knowing, if the pain experienced by a dog with a thorn in his paw, is of the same nature or quality, not just intensity as the pain we may experience OR whether it bothers him and what he understands by it and so on.... with people who are rational we can at least communicate, and draw some conclusions. A dog? Well no. We can infer something is not right because its behaviour is different but we can't really say what it is the dog experiences.

Actually we can through MRI. We understand the pain response and how it works in mammals. We can determine whether the central nervous system is registering pain correctly. I'm not arguing the intensity of pain here. You simply said that there is no way we could know how pain is perceived. We understand the mechanisms and can measure them to an extent, but of course one can never state that the dog experienced pain at a 7 on a 10 scale. We can hypothesize. I really don't understand the point of arguing the merits of "one can never experience the pain a dog experiences because the dog experienced the pain and not you".

This seems to be the moot point here as it is, well, self bloody explanatory...

 

[The_Ogre]

Goddamn! You guys a serious on a Friday afternoon

 

[Space_Chief]

Actually we can through MRI. We understand the pain response and how it works in mammals. We can determine whether the central nervous system is registering pain correctly. I'm not arguing the intensity of pain here. You simply said that there is no way we could know how pain is perceived.

I don't mean the mechanism of pain perception in humans, I mean what each individual human himself/herself feels the pain AS. I am aware of the different pain fibers involved and modifications of perception at different levels, but we can't know ourselves what animals experience even though we can dissect their brains and run fMRI or PET scans on them.

We understand the mechanisms and can measure them to an extent, but of course one can never state that the dog experienced pain at a 7 on a 10 scale. We can hypothesize. I really don't understand the point of arguing the merits of "one can never experience the pain a dog experiences because the dog experienced the pain and not you".

Think about it. Since you agree that the neuroscientist learned something new about blue he could not have learned from second hand accounts depite understanding the physiology of blue, pondering on that I think is enough to realise what my point is.

 

[FlatspinZA]

Al vertebrates have a central nervous system, so lizards certainly feel pain, but the number of nerves at the end of their tail is minimal, so the pain would be (assuming here) like cutting your finger open a bit...

WTF? Trees do not feel pain and they are not sentient either. Where do you get this notion that trees feel sympathy? :wtf:

And not all creatures feel pain. Micro-organisms certainly do not. In fact anything without a central nervous system won't feel pain. There are no nerves for them to perceive pain. There is no path for the pain message to be sent, and there is no area for it be received and processed. What you're spouting is hippie bullschit...

Are we talking about trees again? Or are we talking about the flight/fight response triggered in the primitive amygdala of the brain...?

Mental acumen has weet jack to do with pain perception. If this were the case, people suffering from mental retardation would flinch at the wind...

Because pain is not the be-all and end-all. There are cardiovascular responses, respiratory responses, and physiological problems attributed to being attacked. They don't necessarily link to pain though, or mean that pain is experienced. Rather they manifest in a physiological problem. Also, the amygdala is what controls our flight or fight response. It is the most primitive part of our brain, and most animals have a large amygdala, irrespective of whether they have a central nervous system. They are governed solely by flight or fight - no reasoning. So through the millions of years of responding in this manner, they develop techniques to hide, escape or attack. Evolution doesn't shape the way they do these things. Those with learned reactions will survive while the others are killed off. Thus those who hid survived and breed this trait into their offspring. No pain required.

You've probably never experienced a bomb blast, but if one were to go off near you, your flight or fight response would kick in. Not because you or your ancestors experienced it, but because it is a natural reaction for survival - fight or flight. Controlled by your amygdala, irrespective of the pain sensation...

Explain the increase in Tannin that occurred naturally among the trees? Not sentient, maybe, but something is going on there.

It's not about the personal experience. It's about the reaction. It doesn't matter how it feels, only that it does feel.

+1

 

[Space_Chief]

It's not about the personal experience. It's about the reaction. It doesn't matter how it feels, only that it does feel.

What does it feel? You think it feels pain because you IMAGINE YOURSELF submerged in boiling water. You see it moving its legs but those could be nerve misfiring from the heat or a justified attempt to escape the dangerous stimulus, but it need not be unpleasant on the subjective level of the animal. We can falsify our hypothesis by noting that the animal is merely trying to get away. We have the full explanation. It's not getting away from "EINA" it's getting forced to get away because of the heat. There is no need to feel pain in this scenario. It's superfluous. And even if it feels some pain, maybe its no worse than a mosquito bite that you may experience. We simply can't know unless we become an identical lobster and sumberge ourselves in hot water.

 

[DJ...]

Think about it. Since you agree that the neuroscientist learned something new about blue he could not have learned from second hand accounts depite understanding the physiology of blue, pondering on that I think is enough to realise what my point is.

So your hypothesis is that we cannot hypothesise?

Or that we can't know the precise level of pain?

If 1, then :wtf:

If 2, then, well, yeah, so what?

 

[DJ...]

Explain the increase in Tannin that occurred naturally among the trees? Not sentient, maybe, but something is going on there.

From an actual study:

The implication is that there is a pool of tannin which can be readily mobilized by activation of specific enzymes sensitive to air borne materials released from damaged foliage.

Not "The trees are alive ZOMG!"

 

[Garson007]

What does it feel? You think it feels pain because you IMAGINE YOURSELF submerged in boiling water. You see it moving its legs but those could be nerve misfiring from the heat or a justified attempt to escape the dangerous stimulus, but it need not be unpleasant on the subjective level of the animal. We can falsify our hypothesis by noting that the animal is merely trying to get away. We have the full explanation. It's not getting away from "EINA" it's getting forced to get away because of the heat. There is no need to feel pain in this scenario. It's superfluous. And even if it feels some pain, maybe its no worse than a mosquito bite that you may experience. We simply can't know unless we become an identical lobster and sumberge ourselves in hot water.

I do not care how it feels, only that it reacts. I've already stated this.

Your entire argument is maybe too much into solipsism to really be of much use in this case.

 

[DJ...]

I do not care how it feels, only that it reacts. I've already stated this.

Trees for example react to the direction of the sunlight. Does this mean that no sunlight is hurting them?

 

[Garson007]

Trees for example react to the direction of the sunlight. Does this mean that no sunlight is hurting them?

Well, they would die without it. It's a reaction to stimuli. However their reaction is driven by the sunlight, not the lack of it (what would cause them harm) - which is not the same as this topic where the reaction is to bad stimuli.

 

[FlatspinZA]

What does it feel? You think it feels pain because you IMAGINE YOURSELF submerged in boiling water. You see it moving its legs but those could be nerve misfiring from the heat or a justified attempt to escape the dangerous stimulus, but it need not be unpleasant on the subjective level of the animal. We can falsify our hypothesis by noting that the animal is merely trying to get away. We have the full explanation. It's not getting away from "EINA" it's getting forced to get away because of the heat. There is no need to feel pain in this scenario. It's superfluous. And even if it feels some pain, maybe its no worse than a mosquito bite that you may experience. We simply can't know unless we become an identical lobster and sumberge ourselves in hot water.

I don't feel mosquito bites, but I do feel the pain afterwards?

From an actual study:



Not "The trees are alive ZOMG!"

So, trees can react? I didn't say they were 'alive', simply capable of reacting to circumstances, sentient, or not.

 

[DJ...]

React does not equal pain, or anything else. It simply means they react. Reaction isn't necessarily negative, so I'm really struggling to understand what it is either of you are getting at...

 

[ponder]

It's not about the personal experience. It's about the reaction. It doesn't matter how it feels, only that it does feel.

Is that you Saul Barnard?