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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. W

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.
        Dylan16807 9y ago
        > The argument that the existence of negative stimuli disproves the ubiquity of pain It doesn't disprove it, it just demolishes that particular argument. > 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. That sounds like a good start to an argument, but "different" isn't to the point of "definitely pain". > For example, fish have been reasonably shown to feel pain by comparing their responses under painkillers to their natural responses. And that is also a good start to an argument, but "painkillers" have a lot of weird effects, so it needs more work. But neither of those is related to geezerjay's over-simplistic argument. > 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 I'm not sure exceptionalism is the right word, considering how broad the category of "clearly feels pain" is. But I'll remind you there are certain humans with a mutation that makes them unable to feel pain, while mostly leaving their other senses intact. And naked mole rats have a vastly different and muted pain response from their relatives. It's completely plausible to say that an animal might not experience pain.
- 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.

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.
        Dylan16807 9y ago
        > The argument that the existence of negative stimuli disproves the ubiquity of pain It doesn't disprove it, it just demolishes that particular argument. > 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. That sounds like a good start to an argument, but "different" isn't to the point of "definitely pain". > For example, fish have been reasonably shown to feel pain by comparing their responses under painkillers to their natural responses. And that is also a good start to an argument, but "painkillers" have a lot of weird effects, so it needs more work. But neither of those is related to geezerjay's over-simplistic argument. > 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 I'm not sure exceptionalism is the right word, considering how broad the category of "clearly feels pain" is. But I'll remind you there are certain humans with a mutation that makes them unable to feel pain, while mostly leaving their other senses intact. And naked mole rats have a vastly different and muted pain response from their relatives. It's completely plausible to say that an animal might not experience pain.
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.