Marvin Minsky who’s probably done as much studying of the mechanics of the mind as anyone on the planet has a theory that I find to be pretty accurate and useful about the nature of pain:
There is no pain without interpretation. For example, let’s say during sex your lover bites your nipple firmly. If you are so inclined, you may interpret the sensation as highly pleasurable. However, if you were sunbathing, and a wild animal ran up and bit you on the nipple with exactly the same force, you might find this highly unpleasant and a painful experience.
Both cases have the exact same stimulus in common. Only the circumstances are changed.
The stimulus only becomes pleasure or pain based on context. In the case of the bite, let’s say that it is firm enough that it causes an involuntary flinch reaction. It’s still pleasure or pain only depending on interpretation.
We, as human beings are capable of assigning importance to these stimuli and are able to interpret them, and call them pain or pleasure.
I’ve run ultra marathons, and suffered what most people would consider intolerable pain. Blisters on my feet have gotten so bad that my toenails fell off, and I thought I got shell caught in my sock. I didn’t realize it was a toenail until I took my sock off and found it and the blood.
Most of us have had experiences where we have been injured, but the circumstances were such that we didn’t feel or notice until later. The fact of the matter was that this pain was felt while it was occuring but other things were more important at the moment and there was no time to assign a context to it. It only became painful later when circumstances allowed a context to be assigned.
While your nerves work the same as anybody else’s what you actually feel as pleasure or pain may vary according to upbringing or experience. Take the case of indifference to cold often seen in animals and feral children. One has to learn to interpret cold as pain and care about it. You just aren’t made that way. In large part, you can train yourself and deliberately choose what is going to be painful and what is not.
I learned this when I got third degree burns on my hands. It was possible to kind of make yourself indifferent to the sensation. It was still there, but it wasn’t quite pain when you refused to assign it that context. It was a hard trick to do, and it was very hard not to assign it that context, and it didn’t always work. But there were times when I was able to pull it off. One does the same trick if one runs ultramarathons.
Pring says it this way:
Now what about those incidents in which some person seems to go beyond what we supposed were the normal bounds of endurance, strength, or tolerance of pain? We like to beleive this demonstrates that the force of will can overrule the physical laws that govern the world. But a person’s ability to persist in circumstances we hadn’t thought were tolerable need not indicate anything supernatural. Since our feelings of pain, depression, exhaustion, and discouragement are themselves mere products of our minds’ activities- and ones that are engineered to warn us before we reach our ultimate limits- we need no extraordinary power of mind over matter to overcome them. It is merely a matter of finding ways to rearrange our priorities.
In any case, what hurts- and even what is “felt” at all- may, in the end, be more dependent on culture than biology. Ask anyone who runs a marathon, or ask your favorite Amazon."
-pg 286
Amazons of course, are legendary for cutting of a breast to aid in shooting a bow.
So, in the case of a lobster, I think we can all agree that they experience a stimulus and they respond to it.
The real question is whether they then have the capability of assigning this stimulus the context of “pain”
Some stimulus may cause a lobster to respond by mating. Another may cause it to move away from excessively hot water. Are these different in quality? Is one good or bad, or are they both equivalent?
My belief is that they are equivalent. What we consider painful is just another sensation with its own programmed reaction. The lobster does not consider mating “pleasant” or being boiled “painful” any more than your computer interprets being shutdown as “painful” or running internet explorer as “pleasure.” The lobster simply does not have the sophistication to make the interpretation and assignation of context or importance.
I believe that is true because I know for a fact that we can alter the intepretation of sensations ourselves at will if we work at it and acquire the skill. We had to learn how to intepret sensations as “pain” in the first place. We can unlearn those interpretations as assign new ones. Or, as Pring says, we can prioritize them out of existence.
We, as a culture have made the assignation that “pain” is a bad thing. We think that we should avoid experiencing and avoid inflicting the experience on others. No other animals that I’m aware of share this conceit. The lion does not worry about the pain it is inflicting on the zebra when it kills it for a meal. It’s simply not important.
Running ultras had given me a relatively high tolerance for pain in all sorts of ways. I’m used to it, and it’s simply not that important to me. I find that I don’t seek to avoid it as much as I did before running. I don’t mind being uncomfortable or hungry, or cold as much as I did before ran so much.
The time when pain or discomfort becomes important is when it’s in a context that I interpret as “damage.” When I tore my rotator cuff I recognized this as a severe injury that would impact my ability to do things that I liked. It was not necessarily more severe a sensation than I might feel in my legs after running 50 miles. The former is important and painful, the latter is not.
So, it’s all about context. So, no. Lobsters do not experience “pain” as you or I think about it, or experience it. They’re not capable of making the context.
I do believe that a lobster can experience an extreme sensation, and assign it a high imprtance. It may not be pain per se, but my gut tells me that all things being equal it’s not nice to go inflicting extreme and important sensation on other beings if you don’t have to even if it’s not “pain.”
So, before I cook a lobster I put it on its back. There is a centerline, almost a seam down it’s underside. I put a knife in this seam with about two inches of blade in contact with the frontmost portion of the lobster. Than I slam my hand down on the back of the blade driving it clean through the head. The lobster twitches once, if that. Than I throw it in the pot.
That way, in case I’m wrong, the question is strictly academic.
