I don’t think they “hurt” it’s more a reflex
and we aren’t talking about deer or dogs
Gaspode:
Perhaps… but it wasn’t meant to be an analogy. It was meant to be an example.
I remain unconvinced. I point out that I said “writhing” not “twitching”, which are distinctly different behaviors. Granted that once the poison has had time to “settle in” the neurotoxins cause uncontrolled twitching, but the writhing I’m talking about occurs with instantaneous chemical contact and looks like the creature is definitely seeking avoidance, curling up, rolling over, agressive grooming, etc… Also, I have witnessed a hornet sting itself to death after being sprayed. There was nothing uncontrolled about it’s actions - it was very deliberate.
Mirage wrote:
Interesting theory. My counter theory is that it takes consciousness to to give it a name, but not to experience. I suppose that it may boil down to one’s definition of pain; is pain an emotion or a reflex?
[Terminator 2]
“Does it hurt when you get shot?”
“I sense injuries, the information could be called pain.”
[/Terminator 2]
I first must dedicate a hefty :rolleyes: at the use of the word “speciesism.” Now that I got that out of the way, there really is no way that we can tell if animals react to pain out of that awful feeling as we do or if they are intinctively responding to stimulus. The only way someone could know with certainty is to have experience being an animal (you might find such a person dwelling in “the pit”). Most people would guess that animals are wishing they had a curse-word they could shout, but we really have no way of knowing. I’ve seen bacteria in a petri dish move towards a food source. Gee, are they feeling hungry or simply responding instinctively to stimulus. Imagine having no feeling in your hand and leaning against a stove, when you hear the telltale sizzle, you’d still yank your hand away or if a little voice in your head said “your hand is burning.” Animals do avoid things that give them shocks, but is that a fear of pain or an instinct towards self preservation? No one can honestly answer that without seeming overly sympathetic or callous, depending on their answer. The fact is that no one knows, and no one ever will know until we invent an animal thought translator so when a cow touches an electric fence we literally hear her shout “son of a bitch!”
For that matter, I can’t be sure that other people react to pain out of that awful feeling as I do. I can just observe their reactions when something “painful” happens. If the animal reacts to the pain, though, and has a nervous system and pain receptors in the brain, we can assume it feels pain. Remember, pain isn’t a complex emotional response…it’s a stimulus, and my body, a dog’s body, a snake’s body, will act to remove that stimulus.
Ultimately, until technology does allow us to probe the mind of other animals to understand their thoughts, we are left with an inherently philosophical question. Meaning, we know that the physiological receptors are there, there are some other aspects we know are there, but we can’t know if the animal experiences the information the same way we do - namely, as pain.
In some ways, Mangetout has it right: we are asking if we can be sure that another animal experiences the same stimuli(whether it’s a color or a painful sensation) the same way as us.
One way to look at it would be the Turing test: If the animal exhibits behaviors that are aligned with sensing pain (the examples of salt on a slug or tomndebb’s poor iguana)does it matter much beyond that?
There have been responses to those examples that assert that those animals may be sensing something different (e.g., pesitcides being neurotoxins that induce twitching more than cause pain; the iguana that burned its own skin) but, bottom line, when animals exhibit certain behaviors, it appears to be more than just antropomorphizing their reactions…if an animal reacts to a unique color, does it matter whether it perceives that color the same as us or whether it is able to uniquely identify it and react to it?
This is straying into GD territory, but to me there is a difference between pain and suffering. Perhaps there is a purely biological reaction to an injury, etc., that is the same between humans and other animals. The difference, though, is the human interpretation beyond the simple pain. We blame ourselves or others, realize that this isn’t how life should feel, get angry or depressed as a result; we suffer. While I wouldn’t get off on torturing animals, I also believe that they don’t suffer. They feel pain, remember the source and avoid it because instinctively it is an indication of a threat, but they don’t suffer because they don’t have that level of consciousness.
I believe the same levels of “feeling” apply to sexual pleasure and social interactions as well.
I know this is probably offensive to folks who see all living things as equivalent, but I have to believe humans are somehow different.
We’re using the world ‘feel’ describing the effect that pain has on us. In order to feel you must be aware, otherwise you’re just reacting. And awareness requires a consiousness, maybe not in our hommo-sapein-sapien ‘cogito ergo sum’ kind of self-awareness, but at least a reflective, awareness-driven decision making process. ‘Feeling’ is the way that emotions relate to awareness, it is our feedback loop.
Now that the Turing test has been brought up, I must point out that, while it’s philosophically intriguing, care must be used in it’s application of we run the risk of excessive anthropomorphizing. Many different forms of life exhibit similar behaviors to us. That’s because those behaviours are logically simple responses to correct decision-making from limited sensory information. Fear, anger, satisfaction, all animals express them, but not all of them ‘feel’ them.
Flies reproduce like crazy given a little bit of decaying organic matter, in fact many of their behaviors involving mate selection and fornication closely resemble ours. Does that mean that flies can fall in love? No, it’s the opposite. Our ‘love’ and ‘hate’ are complex social behavioural system patterned after the same simple ideas that flies and earlier creatures originated millions of years ago.
Flies and birds both have wings, does that mean that a fly has feathers?
This whole conciousness/awareness argument makes no sense
to me.
First, I agree that to experience pain (maybe we’re getting
hung up on the word ‘feel’), I don’t need to think about the
fact that I exist. I just get a very urgent message to do
something about that damned door that’s attacking my toe.
I would argue, if we’re going to speculate, that dumber
animals need the stimuli all the more intense to make sure
they get the message to do something about it.
And however much we can’t ‘know’ that animals experience
pain, we also can’t assume they don’t. So the confident
assertion that they don’t is ridiculous.
In my mind, saying that animals don’t experience pain because
we’re anthropomorphizing when watching a lizard write about is
absurd - why draw the line there? I can’t ever ‘know’ that
a dog’s in pain either - shy is vocalizing the magic line?
To get philosophical, and remove the word ‘anthropomorphize,’
I can’t ‘know’ that you’re in pain either. You may react the
same way I do when I’m in pain, but I don’t know if you’re
experiencing really the same thing I am.
that they don’t is ridic
So as not to drive this thread into a GD, I’m going to concede that I can’t draw the line either. Most animals exhibit behaviors which we would consider to be a pain response, so if you wanted to look at it that way, most animals feel pain.
The intention of my earlier posts was to point out the difference between responding to pain and ‘feeling’ pain. Bird communicate, however we wouldn’t say that they ‘talk’. Talking is an advanced form of comunication, the way that feeling pain is an advanced form of stimulus conditioning.
As IANABiologist, I have to concede that my position is speculatory, I just feel the need to jump in when I see people trying to psychologically indentify with creatures which share very little in common with our neurological makeup. While I can believe that a dog or a horse is aware of pain in much the same way that we are, I would be hard pressed to say that a bug twitching when I step on it is anything more than an advanced neurological reactionary response.
My two cents.
Since we all evolved from the same progenitor. I think it’s reasonable to assume (with caveats of course) that similar reactions to a stimulus are accompanied by a similar internal experience. Since the pain response can be assumed to have been beneficial at a very early stage in our evolution, and continues to be, it would have been maintained through all the lines that followed. Following from that, it seems reasonable to me that virtually all species with even a semblance of a brain would be capable of feeling pain.
Regarding the behaviorist approach, pain responses are extraordinarily complex behaviors that have a high degree of similarity across species. It’s not just a matter of pull away and go on about your business. I submit that a conditioned response, even a genetically inherited one would not be a very good mwechanism to accomplish this kind of behavior for the remarkable variety of stimuli that can induce a pain response. In the interests of simplicity, a feeling of pain works well, why evolve some remarkably elaborate mechanism to accomplish what it can already do quite well?
Do all creatures feel the same thing we do? Probably not, but I’d bet it’s pretty similar. For some creatures, the pain sensation may be more intense than ours, less so for others.
As for the argument that we can’t be sure, well, I can’t really be sure that anybody other than myself feels pain, but based on the evidence available, it seems reasonable to conclude that they do. Likewise, I assume that most other creatures feel it too.