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I have trouble believing that the common scientific consensus was that only terrestrial vertebrates feel pain. Isn't pain an essential evolutionary survival me

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.
  - Momquist 9y ago
    > The concept of pain is universal to any life form Plants respond to anesthetics, some can react to touch/electricity/heat with rapid movement(thigmonasty), they can sense when they are being damaged, some can even display short-term memory. But do they feel pain? They have no pain receptors. They have no nervous system. They can feel pressure/vibrations, and even respond to it, but that's it.
    - Valmar 9y ago
      Is a nervous system explicitly necessary to feel physical sensations? Why should we presume that a nervous system is necessary? They may have pain receptors that we haven't identified yet. Plants have consciousness... but it is quite different to animal consciousness, because their bodies are vastly different to our. I feel that we should presume consciousness, pain, emotions, etc, in all living beings, until most rigorously proven otherwise, because just because we may not understand non-human, non-mammalian or non-animal living beings as well as ourselves does not mean that they cannot experience whatever equivalents their consciousness, bodies or minds allow them to.
      - red75prime 9y ago
        What basis do we have to call presumable feeling associated with negative stimulus "pain" and not "tingling" or "shame" or "irresistible urge to move away"?
        Valmar 9y ago
        On what basis do we have to deny them being able to feel pain without having truly proven it or not?
        red75prime 9y ago
        Because word pain loses any meaning then. You can't prove that your toilet bowl doesn't feel pain when you violate its homeostasis by flushing.
- 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)?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

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.
- Momquist 9y ago
  > The concept of pain is universal to any life form Plants respond to anesthetics, some can react to touch/electricity/heat with rapid movement(thigmonasty), they can sense when they are being damaged, some can even display short-term memory. But do they feel pain? They have no pain receptors. They have no nervous system. They can feel pressure/vibrations, and even respond to it, but that's it.
  - Valmar 9y ago
    Is a nervous system explicitly necessary to feel physical sensations? Why should we presume that a nervous system is necessary? They may have pain receptors that we haven't identified yet. Plants have consciousness... but it is quite different to animal consciousness, because their bodies are vastly different to our. I feel that we should presume consciousness, pain, emotions, etc, in all living beings, until most rigorously proven otherwise, because just because we may not understand non-human, non-mammalian or non-animal living beings as well as ourselves does not mean that they cannot experience whatever equivalents their consciousness, bodies or minds allow them to.
    - red75prime 9y ago
      What basis do we have to call presumable feeling associated with negative stimulus "pain" and not "tingling" or "shame" or "irresistible urge to move away"?
      - Valmar 9y ago
        On what basis do we have to deny them being able to feel pain without having truly proven it or not?
        red75prime 9y ago
        Because word pain loses any meaning then. You can't prove that your toilet bowl doesn't feel pain when you violate its homeostasis by flushing.
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)?