Dorkie is anthropomorphizing like a motherfucker, as it were. He knows better, too.
This is very unparsimonious.
I believe I can empathize with you for two reasons:
- There are biological similarities between us; and
- You respond to stimuli in ways similar to the ways I respond to the same stimuli.
To suggest that our biologically similar systems experience those stimuli in fundamentally different ways and respond to them in relevantly similar ways requires tossing Occam’s razor out the door. Do you disagree?
The same reasoning applies with the geriatric weasel.
Scumpup, I know better than to engage with you; you don’t here, or elsewhere, respond to what I say in an interesting or healthy way.
Chickens are a tricky example, and part of why I’m not a vegetarian. I fully agree that a chicken may not give a shit either way about dying; I’m highly skeptical that chickens possess any understanding of death at all. Shit, I’m skeptical chickens understand anything at all. Chickens be stupid.
But you’re asking me whether it’s possible that a chicken doesn’t give a shit either way about pain? That’s testable. Here’s the experiment, which sadly ethics won’t allow us to carry out:
- Buy a chicken.
- Flash a light, then poke it with a sharp stick.
- Do this ten times a day for a week, until you’ve taught the stupid creature to associate a flashed light with a sharp stick.
- Flash the light. WHAT DO YOU PREDICT WILL HAPPEN?
If the chicken doesn’t give a shit either way about pain, it probably will continue watching Donald Trump speeches or whatever it was doing. If it does give a shit about pain, it’ll probably squawk and try to get away.
You’re acting like this is all some sort of mystical metaphysical question, immune to basic empiricism. Poppycock. There are plenty of ways to conduct experiments that help us understand what the experiences are of other humans and of other nonhumans.
Humans are animals, which crap a lot. And pretty ok crap it is. The human digestive system is not all that efficient – especially on a vegetarian diet.
This is a total non sequitur, of course. Most organic farmers aren’t vegan. And not all vegans value organic agriculture.
Now, wait six days. Flash the light. The chicken looks at it stupidly.
They don’t have the brainpower to form long-term associations. Their brains are substantially different from ours in that way, at least.
I’ve worked with a debeaking/cauterizing rig on baby turkeys. They exhibit about two seconds of discomfort, and then nothing further. Your experiment, on them, would produce zero reaction. (But, to be sure, this is on little fuzzy unfledged hatchlings, not on full-grown Toms and Hens.)
I don’t know if there is any real scientific way to address “how animals feel pain.” But I do agree with you about sponges: sponges don’t have brains! The idea of a sponge “feeling pain” is nearly as absurd as the idea of a patch of moss “feeling pain.” We can identify “end points” of the spectrum: mammals, which we know do feel pain, and extremely primitive forms of living matter, which we can confidently say do not.
No doubt. I’m not claiming that we have brains relevantly similar in every way, and I agree with the rest of your post as well. What I’m arguing against here is a Black Box theory of animals, by which we can conclude nothing about their experiences; or even worse, a Descartian model, by which they, unblessed by the Creator with a soul, have no experiences.
well, there is some science. People have tried to objectively measure signs of stress and pain in animals using behavior, stress hormones, and even EEG signals. However, these only work on animals similar to us and we know so little about the experiences of plants, fish, bugs, and other living things that we are kind of stymied as to how to tell if the brussels sprout suffers when picked or the oyster is swallowed. For example:
http://www.ahwla.org.uk/site/tutorials/RP/RP07-Lab1.html
isn’t going to work on vegetables.
The trouble is, there isn’t any good way to figure out their experiences. It’s the whole “qualia” problem, made more complex because we don’t have the commonality of the human experience to rely upon. I have a pretty good idea what you would feel like if a mousetrap snapped on your thumb…because I’ve had a mousetrap snap on my thumb.
I’m willing to generalize this to mice. But, say, lizards? What does a lizard feel when it suffers an injury? There are huge chunks of brain a mouse has that a lizard doesn’t…
This is one of the big attractions of behaviorism. At least animals’ behaviors are objective. We can’t know what they’re feeling or thinking, but at least we can know what they are doing.
This is why your experiment of training a chicken to associate the flashing of a light with a painful stimulus makes very good sense. It can tell us whether the chicken can form that kind of association, how long it lasts, etc. But at that point, we’re kinda stuck.
Insects display “avoidance” behaviors. These include running away, hiding, moving randomly, etc. These resemble human pain behaviors…but are they pain behaviors for the insects?
I can’t think of any way to test this. (Brain scan techniques, maybe?)
[QUOTE=GaryM]
Didn’t God give man dominion over all the animals on earth?
Besides, they are delicious.
[/quote]
Point to GaryM:
Genesis 9:3 - Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.
I don’t know about dogs, but I have heard that cats eventually go blind on a vegetarian diet. That would lead to a greatly reduced chance of after-weaning survival in the wild. I will say that I once had neighbors who owned a blind cat; The car was loved and well cared for and hence was well-adjusted. He even memorized his way around the yard, and was smart enough to avoid areas where there were cars.
You can be the strongest person or the most brainy person in the world on vegetarian diet as well. No problems.
Except pigs. And lobsters, and clams, and shrimp. And birds of prey.
Almost every animal, once you get into the 47 Commandments in part II.
Christians get these back on the table in Acts 10.
Go blind and worse. Cats are obligate carnivores. They can’t synthesize several nutrients that are only found in animals, and their ability to digest plant matter at all is minimal.
Agreed. As I said before, it’s a continuum, where I’m very confident about my conclusions about other humans, and almost as confident about my conclusions about clouds of hydrogen gas, but in the middle I’m less confident.
This is why I think a combination of behaviorism and neurology is most helpful. When a being’s physical structure, AND its responses to stimuli, are relevantly similar to a human’s, it seems parsimonious to conclude that its experience of that stimulus is relevantly similar to a human’s.
To annoy people that try to act as if they are morally superior to me.
The meat-free dishes of my culture suck and are insufficiently nutritious to sustain life.
I prefer to avoid cultural appropriation as much as possible, and adopting another culture’s cuisine without accepting or appreciating their history and worldview is Western arrogance at its most blatant.
Ironically, my conscience is somewhat more assuaged by eating meat than not eating meat. After more than 2 or so days of not eating meat, most birds and non-pet mammals look tasty to me, and the urge to kill them is somewhat disturbing. Fish also look tasty, but they often look tasty even if I had recently eaten meat and I don’t empathize with them as much as with non-water animals.
That’s possibly the silliest reason I’ve ever heard for eating meat. If you’re satirizing PC attitudes, well done :).