16 ms·

Fish Feel Pain

108 points by anarbadalov 9y ago

hathym 9y ago
Nothing compared to duck pain in France.
em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
I have trouble believing that the common scientific consensus was that only terrestrial vertebrates feel pain. Isn't pain an essential evolutionary survival mechanism? Probably is one of the first feeling evolution produced along with pleasure (for eating and sex).
- deleted 9y ago
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- coldtea 9y ago
  I'd say it's not about consensus but about proving it.
- red75prime 9y ago
  Negative stimulus reaction and pain are different things. We know we feel pain. We can guess that organisms with similar brain architectures are feeling pain. We can guess that chemotaxis don't induce anything like our pleasure and pain in bacteria. Ants keep doing their job even after fatal damage. If they feel something, it is not anything like our pain. So it is not obvious that our feeling of pain is universal.
  - geezerjay 9y ago
    The concept of pain is universal to any life form as it's a very basic survival tool. The ability to detect and sense light is also widespread and doesn't become something else just because an organism handles it slightly differently.
    - Dylan16807 9y ago
      Are you arguing against the idea of non-pain negative stimuli? Because I can prove that wrong by poking you in the side of the head. The difference in reaction between pain and non-pain is often slight, but whether it's cruel to subject you to two minutes of it is affected a lot more.
      - richmarr 9y ago
        'I can poke you in the side of the head, therefore fish don't feel pain' Is that your argument?
        foldr 9y ago
        No, the point is that there are all kinds of negative stimuli that are not actually painful.
        richmarr 9y ago
        If it's not a counter to the parent commenter's suggestion that the ability to feel pain is widespread then I don't see the relevance of this line of discussion.
        Dylan16807 9y ago
        As far as I can tell, geezerjay's argument is that pain is universal because response to negative stimuli is universal. "and doesn't become something else just because an organism handles it slightly differently" This argument only works if pain and negative stimuli are the same thing. And they trivially are not. My argument is not "fish don't feel pain". My argument is "proving fish dislike something is not enough to prove they feel pain".
        richmarr 9y ago
        The argument that the existence of negative stimuli disproves the ubiquity of pain only holds if "response" is a single atomic thing, which it isn't. Animals don't respond in the same way to being prodded in the head as they do to being, say... eaten alive, so the existence of other forms of negative stimuli doesn't prevent you learning about pain responses. For example, fish have been reasonably shown to feel pain by comparing their responses under painkillers to their natural responses. Personally I don't think our experience of pain is universal, it'll be different with each combination of neurological and biochemical apparatus, but to me the idea that pain must somehow be proved rather than assumed in higher order is somewhat disturbing and indicitive of our continuing hunger for exceptionalism.
  - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
    I agree with what you are saying here, and there is a deeper philosophical question of how do we know how others animals (as well as other people) experience the world since we can't directly experience someone else's experiences. However, I'm criticizing the article because it suggests that previously the scientific consensus was that terrestrial vertebrates did feel pain while fish did not. I seriously doubt such a consensus existed...
    - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
      ...and part of my doubt is that I don't think there is a provable way to know that other animals experience pain to begin with.
      - enugu 9y ago
        Is there a provable way which applies to other humans? We are either generalizing from personal experience or using biological explanations to postulate a connection between behaviour and sentient feelings. So, when a street dog whimpers and runs away as someone bends down to pick a stone, or when it jumps eagerly to eat some food, we deduce pain and pleasure.
        em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
        Good point. It is all deduction, and I guess that is what science is about: deduction, not proof. Regardless of whether or not an entity X experiences pain, we can still objectively state that entity X responds negatively towards stimuli associated with the feeling of pain in ourselves.
      - cornyNetHandle 9y ago
        There isn't a provable way to know if other animals even exist, including yourself for anyone else, let alone if they experience pain. Positive proofs are tricky things and we don't have very many of them outside mathematics.
        9y ago
  - barrkel 9y ago
    > Negative stimulus reaction and pain are different things That seems like the distinction between reliably identifying the colour red, and the qualia of red. I don't know that they are different things in any way we can understand.
    - Valmar 9y ago
      To a colour-blind person who cannot perceive a difference between green and red, there is no distinction. There is no difference between identifying the colour "red" and the qualia of it, because we must directly know the latter to do the former. It cannot be described, understood nor appreciated without first having the direct experience.
    - red75prime 9y ago
      No. It is a distinction between a color-filtered photo-sensor attached to a contraption which raises flag "Red" and a mammal.
      - barrkel 9y ago
        Is that a distinction with a difference? What I mean is: unless you have some privileged information about where consciousness and qualia come from, how can you tell whether or not measurement machinery perceive qualia? (I've thought about this for a long time myself, and I don't know where to draw the line, so I drew it differently: everything is "conscious"; i.e. panpsychism.)
        red75prime 9y ago
        When a system contains its own representation which describes the system as the intellectual agent pursuing some goals and feeling some feels. Otherwise all the agency and supposed consciousness comes from outside of the system (e.g. from out empathy) and is not an inherent part of the system.
  - Valmar 9y ago
    > Negative stimulus reaction and pain are different things. How are they different? Pain is a negative stimulus response that allows us to know whether something is causing damage to our body. > We know we feel pain. We can guess that organisms with similar brain architectures are feeling pain. How does feeling pain have anything to do with a brain's architecture? It has more to do with nerves... block a nerve's functioning, and you don't feel pain. Also, pain can be psychosomatic. > Ants keep doing their job even after fatal damage. If they feel something, it is not anything like our pain. Have you seen ants writhe around after being crushed or dismembered? They definitely feel pain. > So it is not obvious that our feeling of pain is universal. Depends on your definition of pain, doesn't it?
    - red75prime 9y ago
      > How are they different? Direct link from a receptor to an effector is sufficient for negative stimulus reaction. But it is not sufficient for pain. Rapid withdrawal of a limb from a hot object happens before we feel pain.
      - Valmar 9y ago
        > Rapid withdrawal of a limb from a hot object happens before we feel pain. I always feel pain in that instant. I feel the pain before I can even consciously react to it, because of the shock from it. Unless of course the nerves are shocked enough to prevent the pain from being felt immediately.
        red75prime 9y ago
        You can't, unless you are interneuron in your spinal column, but then you'd have trouble posting here.
        Dylan16807 9y ago
        The brain fakes the timing of things. Constantly. Heat/burning sensations use the slowest type of nerve fiber, only moving at .5 to 2 meters per second. While the primary actors related to movement are at 100 meters per second.
  - pessimizer 9y ago
    > We know we feel pain. I know I feel pain. I don't know anything about your experience of pain.
  - xg15 9y ago
    Yes, but then you run then you run into the usual philosophical dead-end of discussing qualia: How can you be sure your coworker is capable of feeling pain and not just negative stimuli, etc. You can (and should) argue with brain structures - however, this can lead you into the trap of assuming that less is going on than actually is. People mistakenly assumed that birds are incapable of reasoning and cognition because they don't have anything resembling a cerebral cortex. Today we know they do have brain structures for reasoning - they are just organized completely different than in our brains. However even that does not apply to fish - the main argument of the article was that the majority of research actually did find the same brain structures in fish that would handle pain in humans, along with matching neuronal activation patterns and matching behaviors. So I think if the level of evidence is as the article describes, the old adage applies: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck.
    - red75prime 9y ago
      > If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. The situation here is more like: if it looks like duck and created/evolved for attracting ducks, it's probably a duck or a duck decoy. While evolutionary value of pain response is clear, evolutionary value of suffering is not.
      - xg15 9y ago
        I could think of plenty of reasons how it increases likelihood if survival, but that's beside the point. There is apparently a lot of evidence that the neural activities that underly the experience of pain in humans happen in much the same way in fish. No matter why this is so, it makes the hypothesis that fish do feel pain more reasonable than the opposite.
        red75prime 9y ago
        > I could think of plenty of reasons how it increases likelihood if survival Do those reasons remain equally plausible for K- and r-selected species? > it makes the hypothesis that fish do feel pain more reasonable than the opposite. Yes, conditional probability of fish feeling pain given the existence of similar brain activity patterns is higher than otherwise. It doesn't mean that further research can't lower that probability. Like finding more similarities of fish brain processes with brain processes of people who don't feel pain.
- taneq 9y ago
  It's just one of those convenient things that people choose to believe because it lets them do things they wouldn't otherwise conscionably be able to do. Much like in the past, we've declared that "animals don't have souls / feel pain" (so it's OK to kill and eat them), "fish don't feel pain" (so fishing for fun is OK despite obviously being horrible for the fish), "black people are inferior" (so it's OK to enslave them), "babies don't feel pain" (so it's OK to operate on them without anesthetic), etc. The thing doesn't have to be true, it just has to sound close enough and people will latch onto it to justify their behaviour.
  - Valmar 9y ago
    This sums up the whole debate debate in a nutshell.
    - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
      what about mosquitoes, parasites, amoebas, bacteria?
      - Valmar 9y ago
        Can it be proven that they don't feel pain?
        em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
        No. Then what about sponges, plants, or rocks for that matter? Can't prove that they don't feel pain.
        mojomark 9y ago
        Listen. You cannot definitively prove that fish experience or don't experience pain anymore than you can definitively prove that OJ Simpson murdered his ex-wife. However, you can build a body of evidence to support a conclusion. You can build up so much evidence that it seems impossible to refute, but even then, there will still be a tiny probability that the conclusion is false. That's what science experiments are all about. It's about probability; evidence pointing to a probable truth. How one interprets the evidence is certainly up for debate. Humans are walking experimenters. As we go about our lives, we collect evidence that we use to draw the most probable conclusions about the world we live in. For example, I've concluded that the my coffee mug will not spontaneously begin to levitate on my desk because all of the evidence I've collected in my life (years spent watching the mug and other similar objects that never started to levitate on their own, learning about gravity in school) tells me that it's extremely improbable my cup will not remain planted on my desk unless someone/something touches it. However, it's a truism that there is an unfathomably extreme small probability my cup will begin to levitate. We build scientific experiments to collect evidence about things we don't commonly, or wouldn't naturally, experience. For example, in the 1960's, this existence of the Higgs boson was conjectured. The probability of its existence was good, because the math pointed to it, but it was not extremely high probability. We can't 'see' such a particle directly, so humanity built meticulously controlled experimental set-ups to extend our senses and weed out noise that could otherwise obscure the evidence pointing to the 'truth'. Today, we are 99.999999999% sure the higgs boson exist [1], but that's still not 100%. It will never be 100%. That said, if you wish to dispute the conclusions of the author's hypothesis regarding whether or not fish experience pain, then I suggest you do it in terms of the interpretation of the experimental results with citations and evidence to back up your ideas. On HN, I expect a higher caliber of critical thinking. Otherwise, I may as well be reading comments on Yahoo! clickbait. 1. https://phys.org/news/2012-12-cms-atlas-higgs-like-particle-sigma.html https://phys.org/news/2012-12-cms-atlas-higgs-like-particle-...
- 2bitencryption 9y ago
  well, now the question is philosophical, isn't it? what is pain? if it's a negative reaction to a stimulus, then I'm training a neural network right now that's in a hell of a lot of pain. pain must be a human term for what the sensation of negative stimulus means to us. when a dog is in pain, we are upset, because the way a dog expresses pain is similar to how we do, too. we can't say the same for fish, or plants... etc.
  - swombat 9y ago
    You could say that we’re upset when a dog feels pain not because the dog feels pain (though it does) but because we ourselves feel (sympathetic) pain from looking at the dog in pain, or even just from imagining a dog in pain.
    - Vinnl 9y ago
      Have you ever seen fish in pain? IIRC it's hard not to feel sympathetic looking at a fish in pain - though then again I guess hobbyist fishermen manage to.
      - supreme_sublime 9y ago
        As someone who has done a decent amount of fishing. I honestly can't say I've ever seen a fish give me any kinds of pain queues or looks besides a blank stare. A lot of the time, even when you are trying to get a hook out that they swallowed, they don't writhe, or move, but at seemingly random times, that are probably times when they sense they have a good chance of wriggling free of my grip. I've also done a lot of hunting. I would say that birds and deer have been much more sympathetic and you are much more aware of the affect you are having on them. I've definitely seen deer wounded, afraid, and in pain. As a hunter that's one of the most disappointing things to happen and it makes you feel like a failure.
        Vinnl 9y ago
        Hmm, perhaps there's a difference in magnitude, and a hook maybe isn't that bad? The images I seem to recall were, I think, from larger scale fishing, where fish that were mostly bycatch were writhing on the dry, or fish that were cut open were writhing.
- richmarr 9y ago
  I think the belief that animals don't feel pain started with Descartes (or was at least popularised by him) because we're "conscious" and they're "not". Since then we've been slowly reverting that belief but probably for reasons of cognitive dissonance the onus has been on proving that each type of animal is capable of feeling pain, rather than the other way around. Personally I think the onus should be to prove that animals don't feel pain, as that seems like the more contentious statement... not that it sounds like a field of experimentation I'd be unambiguously happy about.
  - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
    Still, I wonder how it can be proved that a particular animal does not feel pain. Seems about as impossible as proving a particular animal does feel pain.
    - richmarr 9y ago
      I agree with you, we only have proxies like behaviour and neurological responses.
- totalZero 9y ago
  Although science shows fish do feel something quite like pain, and it can be dulled with drugs as in humans, there are nontrivial biological differences between that sensation and mammalian pain. So I suppose it depends on one's definition for "pain." The evidence for pain in fish: the use of morphine as an analgesic, 2003. http://www.appliedanimalbehaviour.com/article/s0168-1591(03)00113-8/pdf http://www.appliedanimalbehaviour.com/article/s0168-1591(03)... Do fishes have nociceptors? Evidence for the evolution of a vertebrate sensory system, 2003. http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/270/1520/1115 http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/270/1520/1115 Thermonociception in fish: Effects of two different doses of morphine on thermal threshold and post-test behaviour in goldfish, 2009. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168159109001051 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016815910... Can fish really feel pain?, 2012. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/faf.12010/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/faf.12010/abstrac...
- jakubp 9y ago
  It should be the basic assumption that other vertebrates do feel pain unless proven otherwise. Same with thoughts, consciousness, etc. It's similar to frequently repeated claims that only humans are conscious, but dogs, cats, cows, horses, etc. (let alone non-mammals) are not. That only humans have true and advanced emotions, thoughts, imagination, planning, abstraction, etc. I think apes and monkeys have convinced some already that it's not the case, but it really doesn't take much more than observing a dog over a few weeks to see how incredibly smart, emotionally subtle, plan-based, communication-based (between species!) etc. they are.
  - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
    out of curiosity, why would the default presumption be that other vertebrates feel pain, have thoughts, are conscious, while the default presumption in most other sciences is that something is not true unless evidence is provided positively.
    - StavrosK 9y ago
      Because of the moral implications otherwise, and because the evidence is "humans feel pain, animals are very similar to humans, therefore it's overwhelmingly probable that they feel pain too". It's not as if we're wondering if rocks feel pain.
      - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
        ok, but how similar exactly? Insects are animals...do insects feel pain?
        StavrosK 9y ago
        That's a reasonable assumption, until we can prove they don't.
        em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
        So where and how can you draw the line. Ameobas? Sponges? The first brains (which appears in worms 500 million years ago)?
kristianov 9y ago
Food is death. Existence is pain. Life is suffering.
- inDigiNeous 9y ago
  All goes around in circles. The more suffering we cause, the more suffering we feel. I wish people would understand this, when regarding eating animals.
  - cageface 9y ago
    Exactly. This is something I've only started to appreciate since I stopped eating meat. We're as much a cog in the machine of the industrial agriculture as the animals we eat are. It's has everything to do with maximizing profits and nothing to do with the health and welfare of any of the animals in the system, including us.
    - inDigiNeous 9y ago
      Agreed. This thinking spreads, if we do this to another lifeform, we sure as heck are ready to do it to our fellow humans, the abstraction is just a bit different.
  - pessimizer 9y ago
    What will you eat when we find out that plants feel pain, they just don't look as much like us when they feel it as a pig does?
    - cageface 9y ago
      Even if that were true it takes about 7kg of plants to make 1kg of meat, so eating plants is still causing a lot less suffering.
    - inDigiNeous 9y ago
      Ok this is the most oldest argument people throw around. Let's just agree to look at this argument for a while and dissect couple of things: a plant doesn't run away when you catch it. A pig does. A plant has a nature of giving, radiating, making oxygen and providing for it's environment. A pig is a gatherer and hunter, and one of the more intelligent animals out there. When you try to catch a pig, it runs away, it squeals for it's life. Anyway it's not about this fact even though it's important, more what's fucked up in our current system is the systematic enslavement of feeling, thinking animals from their birth, in these huge killing camps they call farms these days. If it was even natural, like it used to be more, that the animals lived a life that they could enjoy. How would you feel being bred just for kept in a cage and then systematically killed, with no feeling, no warmness in your life ever ?
xyproto 9y ago
The things they put those fish through in order to figure out that: yes, they can actually feel pain. Guess it's for the greater good of fish everywhere.
danieltillett 9y ago
Of course they do else they would not avoid things that damage them physically. Even amoebas "feel" pain. The important thing is not if something feels pain, but where we draw the line in regards if an animal's pain is more important than our pleasure. It does not take much human pleasure to make a few hundred million ameoba suffer, while it had better be pretty large to make a chimp suffer [1]. 1. I am using pleasure here as shorthand for anything desired or beneficial for humans.
- misja111 9y ago
  I don't see any rational ground to make the suffering of an amoeba a million times less relevant than the suffering of a single chimp. Of course there is the irrational ground that chimps look similar to us and therefore we find it unpleasant to think about the fact that they are suffering. So in the end it is all about our pleasure and nothing else. The tradeoff is between the amount our pleasure we get and for which it is unavoidable that the animal suffers, against the amount of our pleasure it costs because we feel sympathy for this particular animal race.
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - robinduckett 9y ago
    It wouldn't matter, if amoebas were microscopic copies of chimps, it would still be fairly easy for us to make millions of them suffer just by stepping on them with boots on, would it not be significantly harder to cause the suffering of a chimp without significant personal injury or forethought, considering your average chimp is a wild animal?
  - danieltillett 9y ago
    There is none, but that doesn't change that we need to make this decision. Your body kills millions on amoeba every day just to stay alive. Ultimately the tradeoff between human pleasure and animal suffering is arbitrary and set by society and personal preference. The only reason I chose chimps is I rather like them so it would take a lot for me to hurt one. Equally, I don't like Bullrouts [1] (having been poisoned by one) and I would not be upset if they were all to die a slow and painful death. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullrout https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullrout
wiz21c 9y ago
Could we agree once for all that we are predators in a food pyramid and that this naturally implies that we kill to eat. Now, as a sentient species, we might try to kill in a more acceptable way (for the victim), but that won't change much to the result : we kill.
- cageface 9y ago
  Humans are omnivores with a physiology primarily geared towards eating & digesting plants. We can eat animals but we absolutely don't need to to live a long, healthy life. So it's really a matter of how much you value your own pleasure & taste over another creature's suffering.
  - leadingthenet 9y ago
    There’s still a significant difference between eating meat less often and abstaining from meat and other animal products completely, isn’t there?
    - cageface 9y ago
      Yeah sure. The suffering you cause is proportional to how much meat you eat. If quitting it entirely is too big a step for you then try scaling it back. Even a single meat-free day a week is a good place to start. You may find you don't miss it as much as you think you will.
      - Valmar 9y ago
        > The suffering you cause is proportional to how much meat you eat. Oh really? Sounds like ideology more than fact. Are you really insinuating that plants don't feel pain? Because they certainly do. Look up Cleve Backster's research on plants.
        cageface 9y ago
        It takes 7-10 kg of plants to produce one kg of meat, so you're causing that much more suffering even if you are willing to claim that plants suffer as much as we do from pain.
bjoli 9y ago
I have thought a bit about what we put some fish species through.before eating them. Sure, they probably don't experience pain the same way animals closer to us do, but dragging them for a very long time with hooks in their mouths/throats and then suffocating them to death just never seemed right to me.
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saiya-jin 9y ago
why is anybody surprised? if any complex organism has nervous system, this can transfer all kinds of information including pain. it's a clear evolutionary advantage. we have it, so do other living organisms in one way or another. I wouldn't be surprised if ie ants had some very similar highly unpleasant feedback from their injuries to drive them away from cause of it. are we really that dumb that if we don't hear human voice scream in horror, then we consider that all is good?
justanotherjoe 9y ago
> Moreover, the notion that fish do not have the cerebral complexity to feel pain is decidedly antiquated. Scientists agree that most, if not all, vertebrates (as well as some invertebrates) are conscious and that a cerebral cortex as swollen as our own is not a prerequisite for a subjective experience of the world Do scientists (some? most? few?) really agree that all animals are conscious? Or is the writer just interpolating? Would really like the writer to back this one up...
- mannykannot 9y ago
  The issue is inescapably tied up with how you define consciousness. Note that it is not generally considered to be synonymous with self-consciousness.
baumbart 9y ago
As humans we are evolved to have more compassion the more similar a being is to us, and less compassion the more different it is from ourselves. Human ethics is often selfish (pun not intended) in the sense that it is based on what feels bad for US when doing it. In my opinion, there is nothing objectively "good" or "bad", there is only harmony or disharmony in nature. Pain indicates critical disharmony with the ideal state of any being. Same applies to plants! Do you think plants feel pain? They certainly do, but "pain" means something entirely different for them. What about planet earth and its ozone levels? The real question we have to ask ourselves is, how much are we responsible for increasing the harmony in the world around us, vs. focusing on our own expansion in terms of technology, luxury and total population.
gadders 9y ago
The article mostly focuses on commercial fishing, but I wonder what this will mean for people that fish for pleasure? I do mostly fly fishing where (in the UK at least on stocked reservoirs) the catch is killed and (presumably) eaten. I guess in those circumstances it will be treated similar to hunting mammals. For coarse/catch and release fishing, I'm less sure of the impact. I doubt if anyone will stop, but maybe it will mean mandatory barbless hooks and stronger lines so the fish can be reeled in faster and don't need to be played for so long to tire them out.
- kawsper 9y ago
  If you can get past the obnoxious music, you can consider vishing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhE9IIc_FTk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhE9IIc_FTk
  - gadders 9y ago
    I may be missing the point there as I skimmed the video, but you don't actually end up catching any fish as far as I can see. It looks like you're just tossing food at them. Feel free to whoosh me if this is satire flying over my head.
MaxBarraclough 9y ago
Here's the mentioned "Can fish really feel pain?" paper by James D Rose et al. https://www.agrar.hu-berlin.de/de/institut/departments/daoe/quagrec/dntw/jp_bfm/publ_html/roseetal-fishfish-online-2012.pdf https://www.agrar.hu-berlin.de/de/institut/departments/daoe/...
Tharkun 9y ago
Relevant quote: "We weep for a bird's cry, but not for a fish's blood. Blessed are those with a voice." - Mamoru Oshii
tremendulo 9y ago
There's a difference between pain and suffering. e.g. a human on an opiate drug can feel pain signals but not be bothered about them. Yet he can still suffer from the knowledge of his impending death. We can measure pain signals in animals; we can reasonably guess that most species don't know that they're eventually going to die. More than that we don't know yet. Perhaps when we understand better how the mind works (e.g. by developing AGI) we'll be able to understand animals better too.
mannykannot 9y ago
I read an article not so long ago (unfortunately, I do not recall where) mentioning the studies of a doctor who was able to open some minimal channel of communication with patients under a certain form of anesthesia, through which they were able to answer 'yes' when asked if they felt pain. After the procedure, they had no recollection of pain (or of being questioned, IIRC.) This fairly clearly does not generalize to all forms of anesthesia, as some (including local ones) do block either pain sensors or the signals from them. I am offering this merely as a datum, as I am not sure what to make of it.
pillowkusis 9y ago
The tricky bit about consciousness is that nobody can find a useful way to measure or define it. So we end up chasing our tails talking about if fish feel “pain”, that is, they suffer, and yet have no tools or criteria that would help us know. Let’s imagine that, actually, deer don’t have any form of consciousness and cannot suffer. Imagine a deer critically injured in a hunt — nose flaring, eyes open wide, struggling to stand up, screaming maybe. This feels like a reasonable way for an animal to respond, backed by evolutionary reasons, even if its a mindless automaton. Now imagine we magically imbue that deer with a consciousness in this situation. What measurably changes about their behavior? They still scream, try to run, struggle to survive — I can’t think of any way the situation would be different. Conscious or not, the deer behaves the same. Thus, the claim “deers have consciousness” is non-falsifiable — the claim does not provide any way to be disproven, since there is no difference in measurable characteristics if the claim is true or false. One day, we might have a way to quantify consciousness. For the time being we are not even close. Claims that are non-falsifiable are not really worthy of scientific inquiry. My personal conclusion, then, is that the question of consciousness is not a useful one. Any animal measurably displaying pain is in pain, in every useful form of the word, and we have a moral obligation to prevent it. Fish included.
- uoaei 9y ago
  You have rediscovered the "philosophical zombie" problem.[0] Dr. Giulio Tononi[1] has developed an apparatus for calculating what he calls "integrated information"[2] which seems so far from limited experiments to be a good corrolary to the presence of consciousness in biological systems. It's currently computationally intractable for the human brain at full resolution but heuristics are being developed to minimize that problem. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie [1] http://centerforsleepandconsciousness.med.wisc.edu/people/tononi.html http://centerforsleepandconsciousness.med.wisc.edu/people/to... [2] http://integratedinformationtheory.org/ http://integratedinformationtheory.org/
  - pillowkusis 9y ago
    I was sure that I had come across something but didn't know what to google! Thanks for the links.

108 points by anarbadalov 9y ago

Nothing compared to duck pain in France.

I have trouble believing that the common scientific consensus was that only terrestrial vertebrates feel pain. Isn't pain an essential evolutionary survival mechanism? Probably is one of the first feeling evolution produced along with pleasure (for eating and sex).

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coldtea 9y ago
I'd say it's not about consensus but about proving it.
red75prime 9y ago
Negative stimulus reaction and pain are different things. We know we feel pain. We can guess that organisms with similar brain architectures are feeling pain. We can guess that chemotaxis don't induce anything like our pleasure and pain in bacteria. Ants keep doing their job even after fatal damage. If they feel something, it is not anything like our pain. So it is not obvious that our feeling of pain is universal.
- geezerjay 9y ago
  The concept of pain is universal to any life form as it's a very basic survival tool. The ability to detect and sense light is also widespread and doesn't become something else just because an organism handles it slightly differently.
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    Are you arguing against the idea of non-pain negative stimuli? Because I can prove that wrong by poking you in the side of the head. The difference in reaction between pain and non-pain is often slight, but whether it's cruel to subject you to two minutes of it is affected a lot more.
    - richmarr 9y ago
      'I can poke you in the side of the head, therefore fish don't feel pain' Is that your argument?
      - foldr 9y ago
        No, the point is that there are all kinds of negative stimuli that are not actually painful.
        richmarr 9y ago
        If it's not a counter to the parent commenter's suggestion that the ability to feel pain is widespread then I don't see the relevance of this line of discussion.
        Dylan16807 9y ago
        As far as I can tell, geezerjay's argument is that pain is universal because response to negative stimuli is universal. "and doesn't become something else just because an organism handles it slightly differently" This argument only works if pain and negative stimuli are the same thing. And they trivially are not. My argument is not "fish don't feel pain". My argument is "proving fish dislike something is not enough to prove they feel pain".
        richmarr 9y ago
        The argument that the existence of negative stimuli disproves the ubiquity of pain only holds if "response" is a single atomic thing, which it isn't. Animals don't respond in the same way to being prodded in the head as they do to being, say... eaten alive, so the existence of other forms of negative stimuli doesn't prevent you learning about pain responses. For example, fish have been reasonably shown to feel pain by comparing their responses under painkillers to their natural responses. Personally I don't think our experience of pain is universal, it'll be different with each combination of neurological and biochemical apparatus, but to me the idea that pain must somehow be proved rather than assumed in higher order is somewhat disturbing and indicitive of our continuing hunger for exceptionalism.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
  I agree with what you are saying here, and there is a deeper philosophical question of how do we know how others animals (as well as other people) experience the world since we can't directly experience someone else's experiences. However, I'm criticizing the article because it suggests that previously the scientific consensus was that terrestrial vertebrates did feel pain while fish did not. I seriously doubt such a consensus existed...
  - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
    ...and part of my doubt is that I don't think there is a provable way to know that other animals experience pain to begin with.
    - enugu 9y ago
      Is there a provable way which applies to other humans? We are either generalizing from personal experience or using biological explanations to postulate a connection between behaviour and sentient feelings. So, when a street dog whimpers and runs away as someone bends down to pick a stone, or when it jumps eagerly to eat some food, we deduce pain and pleasure.
      - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
        Good point. It is all deduction, and I guess that is what science is about: deduction, not proof. Regardless of whether or not an entity X experiences pain, we can still objectively state that entity X responds negatively towards stimuli associated with the feeling of pain in ourselves.
    - cornyNetHandle 9y ago
      There isn't a provable way to know if other animals even exist, including yourself for anyone else, let alone if they experience pain. Positive proofs are tricky things and we don't have very many of them outside mathematics.
      - 9y ago
- barrkel 9y ago
  > Negative stimulus reaction and pain are different things That seems like the distinction between reliably identifying the colour red, and the qualia of red. I don't know that they are different things in any way we can understand.
  - Valmar 9y ago
    To a colour-blind person who cannot perceive a difference between green and red, there is no distinction. There is no difference between identifying the colour "red" and the qualia of it, because we must directly know the latter to do the former. It cannot be described, understood nor appreciated without first having the direct experience.
  - red75prime 9y ago
    No. It is a distinction between a color-filtered photo-sensor attached to a contraption which raises flag "Red" and a mammal.
    - barrkel 9y ago
      Is that a distinction with a difference? What I mean is: unless you have some privileged information about where consciousness and qualia come from, how can you tell whether or not measurement machinery perceive qualia? (I've thought about this for a long time myself, and I don't know where to draw the line, so I drew it differently: everything is "conscious"; i.e. panpsychism.)
      - red75prime 9y ago
        When a system contains its own representation which describes the system as the intellectual agent pursuing some goals and feeling some feels. Otherwise all the agency and supposed consciousness comes from outside of the system (e.g. from out empathy) and is not an inherent part of the system.
- Valmar 9y ago
  > Negative stimulus reaction and pain are different things. How are they different? Pain is a negative stimulus response that allows us to know whether something is causing damage to our body. > We know we feel pain. We can guess that organisms with similar brain architectures are feeling pain. How does feeling pain have anything to do with a brain's architecture? It has more to do with nerves... block a nerve's functioning, and you don't feel pain. Also, pain can be psychosomatic. > Ants keep doing their job even after fatal damage. If they feel something, it is not anything like our pain. Have you seen ants writhe around after being crushed or dismembered? They definitely feel pain. > So it is not obvious that our feeling of pain is universal. Depends on your definition of pain, doesn't it?
  - red75prime 9y ago
    > How are they different? Direct link from a receptor to an effector is sufficient for negative stimulus reaction. But it is not sufficient for pain. Rapid withdrawal of a limb from a hot object happens before we feel pain.
    - Valmar 9y ago
      > Rapid withdrawal of a limb from a hot object happens before we feel pain. I always feel pain in that instant. I feel the pain before I can even consciously react to it, because of the shock from it. Unless of course the nerves are shocked enough to prevent the pain from being felt immediately.
      - red75prime 9y ago
        You can't, unless you are interneuron in your spinal column, but then you'd have trouble posting here.
      - Dylan16807 9y ago
        The brain fakes the timing of things. Constantly. Heat/burning sensations use the slowest type of nerve fiber, only moving at .5 to 2 meters per second. While the primary actors related to movement are at 100 meters per second.
- pessimizer 9y ago
  > We know we feel pain. I know I feel pain. I don't know anything about your experience of pain.
- xg15 9y ago
  Yes, but then you run then you run into the usual philosophical dead-end of discussing qualia: How can you be sure your coworker is capable of feeling pain and not just negative stimuli, etc. You can (and should) argue with brain structures - however, this can lead you into the trap of assuming that less is going on than actually is. People mistakenly assumed that birds are incapable of reasoning and cognition because they don't have anything resembling a cerebral cortex. Today we know they do have brain structures for reasoning - they are just organized completely different than in our brains. However even that does not apply to fish - the main argument of the article was that the majority of research actually did find the same brain structures in fish that would handle pain in humans, along with matching neuronal activation patterns and matching behaviors. So I think if the level of evidence is as the article describes, the old adage applies: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck.
  - red75prime 9y ago
    > If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. The situation here is more like: if it looks like duck and created/evolved for attracting ducks, it's probably a duck or a duck decoy. While evolutionary value of pain response is clear, evolutionary value of suffering is not.
    - xg15 9y ago
      I could think of plenty of reasons how it increases likelihood if survival, but that's beside the point. There is apparently a lot of evidence that the neural activities that underly the experience of pain in humans happen in much the same way in fish. No matter why this is so, it makes the hypothesis that fish do feel pain more reasonable than the opposite.
      - red75prime 9y ago
        > I could think of plenty of reasons how it increases likelihood if survival Do those reasons remain equally plausible for K- and r-selected species? > it makes the hypothesis that fish do feel pain more reasonable than the opposite. Yes, conditional probability of fish feeling pain given the existence of similar brain activity patterns is higher than otherwise. It doesn't mean that further research can't lower that probability. Like finding more similarities of fish brain processes with brain processes of people who don't feel pain.
taneq 9y ago
It's just one of those convenient things that people choose to believe because it lets them do things they wouldn't otherwise conscionably be able to do. Much like in the past, we've declared that "animals don't have souls / feel pain" (so it's OK to kill and eat them), "fish don't feel pain" (so fishing for fun is OK despite obviously being horrible for the fish), "black people are inferior" (so it's OK to enslave them), "babies don't feel pain" (so it's OK to operate on them without anesthetic), etc. The thing doesn't have to be true, it just has to sound close enough and people will latch onto it to justify their behaviour.
- Valmar 9y ago
  This sums up the whole debate debate in a nutshell.
  - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
    what about mosquitoes, parasites, amoebas, bacteria?
    - Valmar 9y ago
      Can it be proven that they don't feel pain?
      - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
        No. Then what about sponges, plants, or rocks for that matter? Can't prove that they don't feel pain.
        mojomark 9y ago
        Listen. You cannot definitively prove that fish experience or don't experience pain anymore than you can definitively prove that OJ Simpson murdered his ex-wife. However, you can build a body of evidence to support a conclusion. You can build up so much evidence that it seems impossible to refute, but even then, there will still be a tiny probability that the conclusion is false. That's what science experiments are all about. It's about probability; evidence pointing to a probable truth. How one interprets the evidence is certainly up for debate. Humans are walking experimenters. As we go about our lives, we collect evidence that we use to draw the most probable conclusions about the world we live in. For example, I've concluded that the my coffee mug will not spontaneously begin to levitate on my desk because all of the evidence I've collected in my life (years spent watching the mug and other similar objects that never started to levitate on their own, learning about gravity in school) tells me that it's extremely improbable my cup will not remain planted on my desk unless someone/something touches it. However, it's a truism that there is an unfathomably extreme small probability my cup will begin to levitate. We build scientific experiments to collect evidence about things we don't commonly, or wouldn't naturally, experience. For example, in the 1960's, this existence of the Higgs boson was conjectured. The probability of its existence was good, because the math pointed to it, but it was not extremely high probability. We can't 'see' such a particle directly, so humanity built meticulously controlled experimental set-ups to extend our senses and weed out noise that could otherwise obscure the evidence pointing to the 'truth'. Today, we are 99.999999999% sure the higgs boson exist [1], but that's still not 100%. It will never be 100%. That said, if you wish to dispute the conclusions of the author's hypothesis regarding whether or not fish experience pain, then I suggest you do it in terms of the interpretation of the experimental results with citations and evidence to back up your ideas. On HN, I expect a higher caliber of critical thinking. Otherwise, I may as well be reading comments on Yahoo! clickbait. 1. https://phys.org/news/2012-12-cms-atlas-higgs-like-particle-sigma.html https://phys.org/news/2012-12-cms-atlas-higgs-like-particle-...
2bitencryption 9y ago
well, now the question is philosophical, isn't it? what is pain? if it's a negative reaction to a stimulus, then I'm training a neural network right now that's in a hell of a lot of pain. pain must be a human term for what the sensation of negative stimulus means to us. when a dog is in pain, we are upset, because the way a dog expresses pain is similar to how we do, too. we can't say the same for fish, or plants... etc.
- swombat 9y ago
  You could say that we’re upset when a dog feels pain not because the dog feels pain (though it does) but because we ourselves feel (sympathetic) pain from looking at the dog in pain, or even just from imagining a dog in pain.
  - Vinnl 9y ago
    Have you ever seen fish in pain? IIRC it's hard not to feel sympathetic looking at a fish in pain - though then again I guess hobbyist fishermen manage to.
    - supreme_sublime 9y ago
      As someone who has done a decent amount of fishing. I honestly can't say I've ever seen a fish give me any kinds of pain queues or looks besides a blank stare. A lot of the time, even when you are trying to get a hook out that they swallowed, they don't writhe, or move, but at seemingly random times, that are probably times when they sense they have a good chance of wriggling free of my grip. I've also done a lot of hunting. I would say that birds and deer have been much more sympathetic and you are much more aware of the affect you are having on them. I've definitely seen deer wounded, afraid, and in pain. As a hunter that's one of the most disappointing things to happen and it makes you feel like a failure.
      - Vinnl 9y ago
        Hmm, perhaps there's a difference in magnitude, and a hook maybe isn't that bad? The images I seem to recall were, I think, from larger scale fishing, where fish that were mostly bycatch were writhing on the dry, or fish that were cut open were writhing.
richmarr 9y ago
I think the belief that animals don't feel pain started with Descartes (or was at least popularised by him) because we're "conscious" and they're "not". Since then we've been slowly reverting that belief but probably for reasons of cognitive dissonance the onus has been on proving that each type of animal is capable of feeling pain, rather than the other way around. Personally I think the onus should be to prove that animals don't feel pain, as that seems like the more contentious statement... not that it sounds like a field of experimentation I'd be unambiguously happy about.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
  Still, I wonder how it can be proved that a particular animal does not feel pain. Seems about as impossible as proving a particular animal does feel pain.
  - richmarr 9y ago
    I agree with you, we only have proxies like behaviour and neurological responses.
totalZero 9y ago
Although science shows fish do feel something quite like pain, and it can be dulled with drugs as in humans, there are nontrivial biological differences between that sensation and mammalian pain. So I suppose it depends on one's definition for "pain." The evidence for pain in fish: the use of morphine as an analgesic, 2003. http://www.appliedanimalbehaviour.com/article/s0168-1591(03)00113-8/pdf http://www.appliedanimalbehaviour.com/article/s0168-1591(03)... Do fishes have nociceptors? Evidence for the evolution of a vertebrate sensory system, 2003. http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/270/1520/1115 http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/270/1520/1115 Thermonociception in fish: Effects of two different doses of morphine on thermal threshold and post-test behaviour in goldfish, 2009. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168159109001051 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016815910... Can fish really feel pain?, 2012. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/faf.12010/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/faf.12010/abstrac...
jakubp 9y ago
It should be the basic assumption that other vertebrates do feel pain unless proven otherwise. Same with thoughts, consciousness, etc. It's similar to frequently repeated claims that only humans are conscious, but dogs, cats, cows, horses, etc. (let alone non-mammals) are not. That only humans have true and advanced emotions, thoughts, imagination, planning, abstraction, etc. I think apes and monkeys have convinced some already that it's not the case, but it really doesn't take much more than observing a dog over a few weeks to see how incredibly smart, emotionally subtle, plan-based, communication-based (between species!) etc. they are.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
  out of curiosity, why would the default presumption be that other vertebrates feel pain, have thoughts, are conscious, while the default presumption in most other sciences is that something is not true unless evidence is provided positively.
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    Because of the moral implications otherwise, and because the evidence is "humans feel pain, animals are very similar to humans, therefore it's overwhelmingly probable that they feel pain too". It's not as if we're wondering if rocks feel pain.
    - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
      ok, but how similar exactly? Insects are animals...do insects feel pain?
      - StavrosK 9y ago
        That's a reasonable assumption, until we can prove they don't.
        em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
        So where and how can you draw the line. Ameobas? Sponges? The first brains (which appears in worms 500 million years ago)?

kristianov 9y ago

Food is death. Existence is pain. Life is suffering.

inDigiNeous 9y ago
All goes around in circles. The more suffering we cause, the more suffering we feel. I wish people would understand this, when regarding eating animals.
- cageface 9y ago
  Exactly. This is something I've only started to appreciate since I stopped eating meat. We're as much a cog in the machine of the industrial agriculture as the animals we eat are. It's has everything to do with maximizing profits and nothing to do with the health and welfare of any of the animals in the system, including us.
  - inDigiNeous 9y ago
    Agreed. This thinking spreads, if we do this to another lifeform, we sure as heck are ready to do it to our fellow humans, the abstraction is just a bit different.
- pessimizer 9y ago
  What will you eat when we find out that plants feel pain, they just don't look as much like us when they feel it as a pig does?
  - cageface 9y ago
    Even if that were true it takes about 7kg of plants to make 1kg of meat, so eating plants is still causing a lot less suffering.
  - inDigiNeous 9y ago
    Ok this is the most oldest argument people throw around. Let's just agree to look at this argument for a while and dissect couple of things: a plant doesn't run away when you catch it. A pig does. A plant has a nature of giving, radiating, making oxygen and providing for it's environment. A pig is a gatherer and hunter, and one of the more intelligent animals out there. When you try to catch a pig, it runs away, it squeals for it's life. Anyway it's not about this fact even though it's important, more what's fucked up in our current system is the systematic enslavement of feeling, thinking animals from their birth, in these huge killing camps they call farms these days. If it was even natural, like it used to be more, that the animals lived a life that they could enjoy. How would you feel being bred just for kept in a cage and then systematically killed, with no feeling, no warmness in your life ever ?

xyproto 9y ago

The things they put those fish through in order to figure out that: yes, they can actually feel pain. Guess it's for the greater good of fish everywhere.

danieltillett 9y ago

Of course they do else they would not avoid things that damage them physically. Even amoebas "feel" pain. The important thing is not if something feels pain, but where we draw the line in regards if an animal's pain is more important than our pleasure. It does not take much human pleasure to make a few hundred million ameoba suffer, while it had better be pretty large to make a chimp suffer [1]. 1. I am using pleasure here as shorthand for anything desired or beneficial for humans.

misja111 9y ago
I don't see any rational ground to make the suffering of an amoeba a million times less relevant than the suffering of a single chimp. Of course there is the irrational ground that chimps look similar to us and therefore we find it unpleasant to think about the fact that they are suffering. So in the end it is all about our pleasure and nothing else. The tradeoff is between the amount our pleasure we get and for which it is unavoidable that the animal suffers, against the amount of our pleasure it costs because we feel sympathy for this particular animal race.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- robinduckett 9y ago
  It wouldn't matter, if amoebas were microscopic copies of chimps, it would still be fairly easy for us to make millions of them suffer just by stepping on them with boots on, would it not be significantly harder to cause the suffering of a chimp without significant personal injury or forethought, considering your average chimp is a wild animal?
- danieltillett 9y ago
  There is none, but that doesn't change that we need to make this decision. Your body kills millions on amoeba every day just to stay alive. Ultimately the tradeoff between human pleasure and animal suffering is arbitrary and set by society and personal preference. The only reason I chose chimps is I rather like them so it would take a lot for me to hurt one. Equally, I don't like Bullrouts [1] (having been poisoned by one) and I would not be upset if they were all to die a slow and painful death. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullrout https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullrout

wiz21c 9y ago

Could we agree once for all that we are predators in a food pyramid and that this naturally implies that we kill to eat. Now, as a sentient species, we might try to kill in a more acceptable way (for the victim), but that won't change much to the result : we kill.

cageface 9y ago
Humans are omnivores with a physiology primarily geared towards eating & digesting plants. We can eat animals but we absolutely don't need to to live a long, healthy life. So it's really a matter of how much you value your own pleasure & taste over another creature's suffering.
- leadingthenet 9y ago
  There’s still a significant difference between eating meat less often and abstaining from meat and other animal products completely, isn’t there?
  - cageface 9y ago
    Yeah sure. The suffering you cause is proportional to how much meat you eat. If quitting it entirely is too big a step for you then try scaling it back. Even a single meat-free day a week is a good place to start. You may find you don't miss it as much as you think you will.
    - Valmar 9y ago
      > The suffering you cause is proportional to how much meat you eat. Oh really? Sounds like ideology more than fact. Are you really insinuating that plants don't feel pain? Because they certainly do. Look up Cleve Backster's research on plants.
      - cageface 9y ago
        It takes 7-10 kg of plants to produce one kg of meat, so you're causing that much more suffering even if you are willing to claim that plants suffer as much as we do from pain.

bjoli 9y ago

I have thought a bit about what we put some fish species through.before eating them. Sure, they probably don't experience pain the same way animals closer to us do, but dragging them for a very long time with hooks in their mouths/throats and then suffocating them to death just never seemed right to me.

deleted 9y ago

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saiya-jin 9y ago

why is anybody surprised? if any complex organism has nervous system, this can transfer all kinds of information including pain. it's a clear evolutionary advantage. we have it, so do other living organisms in one way or another. I wouldn't be surprised if ie ants had some very similar highly unpleasant feedback from their injuries to drive them away from cause of it. are we really that dumb that if we don't hear human voice scream in horror, then we consider that all is good?

justanotherjoe 9y ago

> Moreover, the notion that fish do not have the cerebral complexity to feel pain is decidedly antiquated. Scientists agree that most, if not all, vertebrates (as well as some invertebrates) are conscious and that a cerebral cortex as swollen as our own is not a prerequisite for a subjective experience of the world Do scientists (some? most? few?) really agree that all animals are conscious? Or is the writer just interpolating? Would really like the writer to back this one up...

mannykannot 9y ago
The issue is inescapably tied up with how you define consciousness. Note that it is not generally considered to be synonymous with self-consciousness.

baumbart 9y ago

As humans we are evolved to have more compassion the more similar a being is to us, and less compassion the more different it is from ourselves. Human ethics is often selfish (pun not intended) in the sense that it is based on what feels bad for US when doing it. In my opinion, there is nothing objectively "good" or "bad", there is only harmony or disharmony in nature. Pain indicates critical disharmony with the ideal state of any being. Same applies to plants! Do you think plants feel pain? They certainly do, but "pain" means something entirely different for them. What about planet earth and its ozone levels? The real question we have to ask ourselves is, how much are we responsible for increasing the harmony in the world around us, vs. focusing on our own expansion in terms of technology, luxury and total population.

gadders 9y ago

The article mostly focuses on commercial fishing, but I wonder what this will mean for people that fish for pleasure? I do mostly fly fishing where (in the UK at least on stocked reservoirs) the catch is killed and (presumably) eaten. I guess in those circumstances it will be treated similar to hunting mammals. For coarse/catch and release fishing, I'm less sure of the impact. I doubt if anyone will stop, but maybe it will mean mandatory barbless hooks and stronger lines so the fish can be reeled in faster and don't need to be played for so long to tire them out.

kawsper 9y ago
If you can get past the obnoxious music, you can consider vishing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhE9IIc_FTk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhE9IIc_FTk
- gadders 9y ago
  I may be missing the point there as I skimmed the video, but you don't actually end up catching any fish as far as I can see. It looks like you're just tossing food at them. Feel free to whoosh me if this is satire flying over my head.

MaxBarraclough 9y ago

Here's the mentioned "Can fish really feel pain?" paper by James D Rose et al. https://www.agrar.hu-berlin.de/de/institut/departments/daoe/quagrec/dntw/jp_bfm/publ_html/roseetal-fishfish-online-2012.pdf https://www.agrar.hu-berlin.de/de/institut/departments/daoe/...

Tharkun 9y ago

Relevant quote: "We weep for a bird's cry, but not for a fish's blood. Blessed are those with a voice." - Mamoru Oshii

tremendulo 9y ago

There's a difference between pain and suffering. e.g. a human on an opiate drug can feel pain signals but not be bothered about them. Yet he can still suffer from the knowledge of his impending death. We can measure pain signals in animals; we can reasonably guess that most species don't know that they're eventually going to die. More than that we don't know yet. Perhaps when we understand better how the mind works (e.g. by developing AGI) we'll be able to understand animals better too.

mannykannot 9y ago

I read an article not so long ago (unfortunately, I do not recall where) mentioning the studies of a doctor who was able to open some minimal channel of communication with patients under a certain form of anesthesia, through which they were able to answer 'yes' when asked if they felt pain. After the procedure, they had no recollection of pain (or of being questioned, IIRC.) This fairly clearly does not generalize to all forms of anesthesia, as some (including local ones) do block either pain sensors or the signals from them. I am offering this merely as a datum, as I am not sure what to make of it.

pillowkusis 9y ago

The tricky bit about consciousness is that nobody can find a useful way to measure or define it. So we end up chasing our tails talking about if fish feel “pain”, that is, they suffer, and yet have no tools or criteria that would help us know. Let’s imagine that, actually, deer don’t have any form of consciousness and cannot suffer. Imagine a deer critically injured in a hunt — nose flaring, eyes open wide, struggling to stand up, screaming maybe. This feels like a reasonable way for an animal to respond, backed by evolutionary reasons, even if its a mindless automaton. Now imagine we magically imbue that deer with a consciousness in this situation. What measurably changes about their behavior? They still scream, try to run, struggle to survive — I can’t think of any way the situation would be different. Conscious or not, the deer behaves the same. Thus, the claim “deers have consciousness” is non-falsifiable — the claim does not provide any way to be disproven, since there is no difference in measurable characteristics if the claim is true or false. One day, we might have a way to quantify consciousness. For the time being we are not even close. Claims that are non-falsifiable are not really worthy of scientific inquiry. My personal conclusion, then, is that the question of consciousness is not a useful one. Any animal measurably displaying pain is in pain, in every useful form of the word, and we have a moral obligation to prevent it. Fish included.

uoaei 9y ago
You have rediscovered the "philosophical zombie" problem.[0] Dr. Giulio Tononi[1] has developed an apparatus for calculating what he calls "integrated information"[2] which seems so far from limited experiments to be a good corrolary to the presence of consciousness in biological systems. It's currently computationally intractable for the human brain at full resolution but heuristics are being developed to minimize that problem. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie [1] http://centerforsleepandconsciousness.med.wisc.edu/people/tononi.html http://centerforsleepandconsciousness.med.wisc.edu/people/to... [2] http://integratedinformationtheory.org/ http://integratedinformationtheory.org/
- pillowkusis 9y ago
  I was sure that I had come across something but didn't know what to google! Thanks for the links.