In the reincarnation thread there was some talk about reincarnation being responsible for our suffering. Fair enough. I don’t agree with that, but what is your view on why suffering exists?
For me I have tried the philosophical arguments for suffering, thinking about God and benevolence and all that and I finally just settled on Occam’s Razor. We suffer because it is an effective method of controlling our behavior and evolution has selected this trait because of it. Multicellular life evolved about a billion years ago and I am assuming that over the generations it was discovered that life that felt suffering when something happened that threatened the biological, social or personal agenda of the organism that that organism was more likely to survive than one that didn’t suffer. After a few million generations you get what we have today. If you look at suffering and pain alot of it stems from things that threaten the integrity of our biological (physical pain), social (shame, humilation) or personal (loss, failure) identities. Pain motivates us to avoid failing in any of these areas. From what I have seen on documentaries humans and our ancestors didn’t really grieve for the dead until the neanderthals, so I’m assuming before that emotional pain on death wasn’t in our biological ability.
Anglers rest easy. Fish cannot feel pain, the largest study into piscine neurology has concluded…His report, published in the American journal Reviews of Fisheries Science, has concluded that awareness of pain depends on functions of specific regions of the cerebral cortex which fish do not possess.
Had our ancestors evolved in a situation where those of us who didn’t feel suffering were more likely to survive than those who did then we wouldn’t feel it today. But that wasn’t the case.
Suffering seems to be dependent on awareness, free will and an advanced nervous system. These are all pretty recent and isolated things on a universal scale. Most of the universe is devoid of life and advanced nervous systems are probably only 400 million years old or so, but I don’t know exactly how old they are.
I guess it is in our nature to try to find complex spiritual and metaphysical explanations for the big questions in life like why are we here, what is our purpose, what causes natural disasters, why do bad things happen to good people, etc. But at the end of the day the fact that we want metaphysical answers doesn’t mean the reasons are metaphysical.
I was with you up until the point where you said that grief didn’t exist up until neanderthals. I have never heard any evidence to support that (the only evidence I’ve heard relate to burying “rituals,” etc were relatively recent developments - but certainly nothing about grief). And in fact casual many species of mammal that have lost mates, etc. strongly argues the opposite.
As far as fish don’t feel pain. Be careful with studies that make broad claims like that. Especially when reading them second hand - journalists almost always butcher scientific studies when they get their hands on them, and I’m hard pressed to take them seriously on this. My guess is this scientist is describing a certain type or aspect of suffering that requires the neocortex, but making a probably claim that there are *definitely no other types of suffering or circuits involved * in all the animal kingdom is pretty bold and probably unsupportable. It may be that fish don’t feel pain the way we do, or feel all the permutations we do - but proving that they don’t suffer at all is an incredibly difficult claim to prove. At best, he could be able to say “we can’t assume they feel pain.” But that’s an entirely different statement.
I think you need to make a distinction between pain and suffering - the two are not the same. One can feel physical pain and yet not suffer. Likewise, one can experience suffering without experiencing any physical pain.
I suspect that prior to the neanderthals, our biological ancestors did indeed experience emotional pain, but didn’t have the neural capacity (yet) to relate that pain on a purely personal level. In other words, a clearly distinct “self” (as we undertand it today) probably didn’t exist then. They likely felt pain, but didn’t relate to it as “my pain” - a necessity for experiencing suffering.
I basically agree
True enough - a way around this is concentrate on the physical. The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism address the problem of suffering directly and the solution to it. Incidently, the Buddha himself tended to not dwell on the metaphysical, opting to concentrate on the here and now in dealing with the vagaries of everyday life.
From a metaphysical perspective, I think suffering gives meaning to our happiness, and life in general. Perhaps without suffering, we would not feel joy, or fully appreciate it. Maybe you need to know what suffering and isolation is before you can truly devote yourself to a god/spiritual being.
Plus suffering adds a whole new dimension to one’s character. We can all look back on some tough time in our life and think “Man, I wouldn’t want to have to go through that again. But it’s made me the person I am today”. The ability to endure pain is, in a way, a source of happiness.
I believe that quantum physicists would agree that time is not consecutive, but “all at once”; thus, reincarnation would not make sense, since all actions are simultaneous. Pain and suffering cannot be to redeem ourselves as the sin and the redemption are occuring all at once. so, we’ll have to look for another reason for suffering. And for that we would have to begin our argument with some assumptions that are outside of conventional religious belief. However, it would require using the right side of the brain as well as intuition; impossible in this primitive culture.
I would take a more biological approach. As we evolved, we learned to feel pain because it was an important survival trait. People born without the ability to feel pain (and there are some) often lead short lives. I just read a story of a girl with this affliction, who died at age 29 due to numerous infections and complications from untreated bone fractures she didn’t even know she had.
As our minds evolved and we developed ever more complex social interactions, we learned to feel suffering for the same reason. I would suggest that a person born without the ability to understand suffering probably wouldn’t last long in the tribe, and therefore wouldn’t be as likely to survive to procreate as someone who was more attuned to suffering.
You can find simple versions of this emotion in other social animals, such as dogs and wolves. They will whimper when in pain, to alert the pack of their suffering. The whole dominance behaviour of the pack may be a related trait - a finely tuned sense of where one’s status is among pack-mates, and feelings of anxiety when things aren’t right.
So we suffer because the ability to suffer helps us survive. We respond to others’ suffering because doing so helps the group survive.
As for fish not feeling pain - that makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Living in a liquid medium where the creature is not in constant contact with hard/sharp/dangerous objects, the ‘pain gene’ wouldn’t be of significant advantage.
I’m having a very hard time getting on board with the idea that animals don’t suffer. Can any of you define what aspect of suffering you think is unique to humans with a little more precision? Or how you’re defining suffering? To me, suffering is a more general term than pain, not a more specific term. Pain to me is a subset of suffering, not the other way around.
That is my view. Without emotional suffering it would be like everyone was on PCP or drunk all the time. When people are high on drugs and alcohol they lose their sense of shame and do very stupid things.
I don’t like it but it seems to be the reason we suffer, it helps us maintain our biological, social and personal integrity.
I assumed grief was tied into burial rituals, and I remember seeing on documentaries that before neanderthals people just left their dead to be eaten by animals.
I’m probably wrong about the fish thing.
I’m guessing you’ve never been near a reef. Anything that moves needs some means of preventing it from moving in such a way that will injure it. If fish don’t feel pain you need to posit some other mechanism.
Reasonable people can differ on the interpretation, I suppose, but the burials are usually offered as evidence to mark when the first conception of mortality and possibly ideas of an afterlife came about - not when grief was first felt. I don’t want to get into a debate on the nature of consciousness in animals, but many animals seem to clearly - or as clear as you can be without being able to ask - pine when they lose mates, parents or children. They may not feel it in precisely the same way as humans, but we don’t really know in what way it’s different.
Quite simply put, suffering requires cognition. It’s not sufficient to simply respond to a stimulus. I can easily construct a computer animation that will yell, or writhe around or respond in any other way if a I stick a pin into a my keyboard. That doesn’t mean that an algorithm can actually suffer or fell pain. The algorithm isn’t even cognisant of the pin being stuck in the keyboard.
Precisely the same is true of most animals. Despite an ability to respond to unpleasant stimuli they are not actually capable of suffering. Humans and ‘higher’ animals can suffer because we are self-aware. We can appreciate what pain is, we can anticipate that it will project into the future, we can judge the flow-on effects, we can anticipate the pain stopping and we can take steps to alleviate it. A computer algorithm can’t do those things, nor can a washing machine, nor can most animals.
Talking about a flatworm suffering make about as much sense as speaking of a toaster suffering. We are discussing a machine with very limited ability to respond to stimuli, not about a machine with any awareness of the stimuli.
In evolutionary terms there is absolutely no pointing feeling pain until you have both the software and the hardware to do something with it. It makes sense for a human to feel pain when they cut themselves because they can physically do something about it beyond simply moving away or curling up in a ball. They can also learn from the pain in an abstract manner. Fish, worms and so forth can not do those things so there is no evolutionary advantage in them feeling pain. A simple automatic response to damaging stimuli will produce exactly the same results and won’t waste resources. As a result most animals don’t feel pain and don’t suffer and more than they suffer form self-doubt.
James D. Rose
The Neurobehavioral Nature of Fishes and the Question of Awareness and Pain
Reviews in Fisheries Science
Volume 10, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 1-38.
Abstract
This review examines the neurobehavioral nature of fishes and addresses the question of whether fishes are capable of experiencing pain and suffering. The detrimental effects of anthropomorphic thinking and the importance of an evolutionary perspective for understanding the neurobehavioral differences between fishes and humans are discussed. The differences in central nervous system structure that underlie basic neurobehavioral differences between fishes and humans are described. The literature on the neural basis of consciousness and of pain is reviewed, showing that: (1) behavioral responses to noxious stimuli are separate from the psychological experience of pain, (2) awareness of pain in humans depends on functions of specific regions of cerebral cortex, and (3) fishes lack these essential brain regions or any functional equivalent, making it untenable that they can experience pain. Because the experience of fear, similar to pain, depends on cerebral cortical structures that are absent from fish brains, it is concluded that awareness of fear is impossible for fishes. Although it is implausible that fishes can experience pain or emotions, they display robust, nonconscious, neuroendocrine, and physiological stress responses to noxious stimuli. Thus, avoidance of potentially injurious stress responses is an important issue in considerations about the welfare of fishes.
A simple reflex arc is “a means of preventing it from moving in such a way that will injure it”. Ever ahd the doctor test your reflexes by tapping on your knee? Did you feel any pain when you moved? Of course you didn’t, that’s because the movement, which is intended to prevent injury from falling, doesn’t even involve the brain.
There are also numerous other failsafes in the human body that do involve the brain that we are equally unaware of and are equally non-painful. To experience one of them take a deep breath, now keep on inhaling. Why’d you stop before you tore your lungs away from your chest wall? You didn’t feel any pain? You stopped because your lungs have a failsafe that prevents you from overinflating the lungs even though your could physically do so. Yet you don’t feel anything at all. One neuron simply suppresses the other. Nothing whatsoever to do with pain.
The idea that an organism needs to be able to feel pain to avoid injury makes no sense even with cursory thought. There are literally hundreds of mechanisms by which movement can be arranged to prevent injury that don’t involve pain.
This is a joke right? You can’t post an animal rights web page as though it is credible evidence in GD.
Some unicellular creatures experience aversion: they will move away from saline water, for example.
I suspect pain is fairly widespread: no creature wants its limbs bitten off. Suffering may be a different matter: it’s designed to signal pain to the group and hence retrieve appropriate aid. While it is possible to simulate suffering, the most persuasive means would be to… actually suffer.
On another note, the Buddha made it his mission to alleviate suffering (as opposed to pain). I’m of the opinion that the socially-driven processes described above can be short-circuited or at least offset. To the Buddha, suffering was tied up with loss, and loss implies a sense of attachment. Tone down the sense of attachment, and less suffering will occur.
Within some Christian traditions, suffering isn’t intrinsically bad: it can ennoble. At times suffering can be a test according to this point of view.
In my experience, anything that will help separate you mentally from your immediate unpleasant situation will alleviate.
Respectfully, I think this discussion could do with a better limit on what exactly “suffering” is, as we seem to be convoluting two separate ideas of in the various responses.
One notion of suffering is the bearing of physical pain. As to why we feel pain, I think the evolutionary ideas presented on this thread are very appropriate. But there is another notion of suffering tied to the bearing of distress, the mental equivalent of physical pain. For myself, this is a more metaphysical question–distress by definition requires a mentality capable of things such as anticipation, conjecture, and memory–but I can’t quite rule out the ability to suffer distress as a possible evolutionary advantage. Fear, for example, can be induced without pain in both people and animals, and I think there are sound evolutionary advantages to feeling afraid. Does then a person or animal in fear for a substantial period of time suffer distress? The question, I think, hinges on whether fear comes as the result of a stimulus (i.e it’s a Pavlovian response), or if it is the result of conjecture about a situation/scenario.
Laying that thornier question aside, I think I’d (arbitrarily) limit distress as the necessary side-effect of our evolved comprehension , sort-of the dark side of being intelligent enough to figure things out (e.g. we can conjecture new ways to feed ourselves, but this skill also allows us to conjecture new ways we might be harmed). Suffering then is a necessary evil, much like the idea that the evolutionary advantage of speech brings with it the disadvantage that–because of the position of our voice box–we are the only primates who can choke on food.
Straw men and unprovoked needling. Must be a post from Blake.
So I guess I have to repeat what I said. I *never * said fish *need * to feel pain. My reply was in response to a post which basically argued that fish don’t feel pain since they can’t hurt themselves no matter what they do. I was pointing out the obvious - that fact can hurt themselves and that all organisms that move need some mechanism to prevent them from doing so, if not pain then something else.
So to be crystal sparkling clear: I am not making the positive claim that fish feel pain. What I *am * doing is cautioning against the premature conclusion that an organism *doesn’t * feel pain based on basically, crappy logic. The argument that fish can’t hurt themselves and therefore don’t feel pain is deeply flawed, for example.
Your arguments don’t support the conclusion that fish don’t feel pain either. To wit: Showing that a) behavior *can * be controlled without pain and b) areas unique to humans are activated when humans feel pain, is not enough. The limited conclusion you should make based on these facts is simply: “other organisms don’t *necessarily * feel pain.”
You had one other argument, which if true, *would * be valid evidence. That is that feeling pain wouldn’t provide an adaptive benefit to fish. Unfortunately to back that up you just say that they can’t do anything much about the stimulus, whereas we can. That’s a pretty casual assumption don’t you think? LEARNING is something a fish can do. In fact learning is perhaps the primary benefit of being conscious of pain. If a fish can learn that x stimulus is painful, and avoids it in the future, then they can “do something about it.” In fact the article in the Royal Proceedings cited below makes just the argument that fish do in fact learn from painful stimuli.
Excuse me, yours came from a fisheries journal - you don’t think they have an agenda?
Here’s Wesley’s researchers cited on the BBC. Here’s who they say did the study:
Do you really want to do dueling journals on this one?
Hear hear. I’d like the OP to maybe clarify the type of suffering he has in mind with as much specificity as possible.
Pointless ad hominems and weaseling. Must be a post from uglybeech.
No, you did imply that you couldn’t imagine a system other than pain that would control movement. It was your total inability to manage that simple task that I was responidng to.
No, my reference does that for me. I;ll rely on the nerurophysiologists to carry that burden.
No, I already covered this. An organism doesn’t need to be able to sense pain at all in order to learn. Pain is only uselful in leraning if the organism is capable of abstract reasoning, something fish are not cpable of as far as anyone can tell. If we are simply discussing aversion learning then there is no need whatosever for pain to be involved.
No, they don’t. They say that the responses observed “similar to the kind of motion seen in stressed higher vertebrates like mammals.” What the article actually warns against is drawing “conclusions about the ability of fish to feel pain, a psychological experience for which they literally do not have the brains”
Fish certainly learn from stimuli, that isn’t exactly news. That is not evidence of pain in any way. As my refernce stated quoite cleraly and as your own refernce agress fish iterally do not have the brains to feel pain.
:rolleyes: Yes, a peer reviewed scientific journal is has an agenda.
Yes, I do. I want to se the actual journal article, not some bowedlerised tabloid version served up for the masses.
No I didn’t. You can’t read. This is twice. The first time might have been a context problem (i.e. you took it out of context), but after I clarified there’s no explanation other than your deliberate misreading.
No that’s the national angling alliance advisor used as a counterpoint by the BBC. Not the Edinburgh researchers. Nor the article itself. And yes peer reviewed journals have agendas. A fisheries journal most certainly.
I’m not going to spend a nanosecond more of my life trying to argue this or anything else with you. You’re one of those people that the more effort one spends trying to clarify, the more you’ll spend deliberately misinterpreting - pretty much everything.