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Why wouldn't they feel pain? It's such a superior attitude to even consider that only humans could feel pain. It's also obvious that any complex organism fee

Why wouldn't they feel pain? It's such a superior attitude to even consider that only humans could feel pain. It's also obvious that any complex organism feels pain... It the most basic evolutionary protection mechanism. Anything that didn't feel pain would soon be evolved out.

red75prime 7y ago
Using the word "pain" as such, you conflate behavior related to negative stimuli, nociceptors' signals processing, and subjective feelings. Only the first one can drive evolution.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
I think there's confusion of terms. It's obvious that a lot of living things can feel "pain", as in stimuli and response; it's less obvious which living things are capable of experiencing suffering, and it's even less obvious to which point we can (or should) reasonably care - e.g. it's ridiculously hard (bordering on impossible) to live a life in which you don't hurt insects.
godelski 7y ago
No one is saying only humans. Clearly dogs feel pain. The question is about a nervous system and response. Defining pain is difficult, just as defining life.
- fiblye 7y ago
  You'd think this, but no, it's very recent that people accepted animals feel actual pain. I mean, even now there are people saying that sure, crustaceans get hurt and respond negatively to harmful stimulus, but it's not really pain because their nervous system is different or they lack some specific body component or don't respond to one specific test that's designed such that only mammals can pass. And to risk sounding crazy, people didn't believe babies felt pain. Only within the past few decades did humanity realize the obvious fact that, no shit, of course babies feel pain. [1] [1]: https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/07/28/when-babies-felt-pain/Lhk2OKonfR4m3TaNjJWV7M/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/07/28/when-babies-fel...
autokad 7y ago
they have known insects felt pain for a while, this was whether they felt pain after the injury 'healed'. its semi relevant to me because I accidentally stepped on a bug (weevil) yesterday and felt bad about it. I hoped that it might not feel pain after the step, but that that hope was in vain.
2muchcoffeeman 7y ago
Even the featured article puts pain in quotes and is like, “for simplicity, we’ll call it ‘pain’” So actually it’s not obvious that animals perceive the world as we do. Maybe you can only generalise our experience to warm blooded vertebrates.
- vixen99 7y ago
  No, animals don't perceive the world as we do but it's not stretching things at all to say that they do (have to!) register some of the basic realities of life such as warmth, cold, pain (i.e., 'this is bad - something's not right and needs to be sorted') and absence of pain. The nuts and bolts of this are bound to be similar or identical given that we share a lot of basic biochemistry with all life forms. For example the citric acid cycle (a fundamental engine for energy production) operates together with its associated pathways universally in plants and animals.
- kranner 7y ago
  Given the similarities between us and other animals, it should make more sense to have to disprove that they don't feel pain, rather than having to prove that they do, i.e., that they must feel pain should be the default assumption in the absence of data.
  - raverbashing 7y ago
    Which similarities? Insects have a much, much simpler nervous system. They don't even have a spinal chord, and they have an exoskeleton. I think maybe only cnidarians have a simpler (or similarly complex) nervous system. Pain on a chordate might be comparable to pain in humans, with some exceptions like the Octopus (maybe) but that's about it.
    - kranner 7y ago
      But we don't know that insects absolutely couldn't experience pain, in the same way that we're certain a brick couldn't (unless one is a panpsychist). At least they have a nervous system.
prennert 7y ago
It's not about can only humans feel pain and other animals not. It's more: do some animals do not feel pain. I don't think many would argue dogs or even mice do not feel pain. I am not a biologist, but from working in labs that do research with model organisms (like drosophila) what I understood is that there is little evolutionary advantage of being able to feel pain if you cannot heal it anyway. Also if there are no nerves in some regions feeling of pain is unlikely. I remember that someone told me that experiments show that drosophila with servered legs don't change their way of walking, and do not limp as animals do that feel pain. So the notion got adopted that they cannot feel pain and experiments on them are ethically save as they do not suffer.
org3432 7y ago
They used to think black people don't feel pain too, it would be good to do a long term study to determine if they feel pain since they clearly can't determine if others do.
- brighter2morrow 7y ago
  >They used to think black people don't feel pain too, Who thought this? White people?
  - zimpenfish 7y ago
    https://www.history.com/news/the-father-of-modern-gynecology-performed-shocking-experiments-on-slaves https://www.history.com/news/the-father-of-modern-gynecology... > While some doctors didn’t trust anesthesia, Sims’s decision to not use it—or any other numbing technique—was based on his misguided belief that black people didn’t experience pain like white people did. See also https://www.pnas.org/content/113/16/4296.full https://www.pnas.org/content/113/16/4296.full > These findings suggest that individuals with at least some medical training hold and may use false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites to inform medical judgments
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      I don't really understand this contention in the second link: >Today, many laypeople, scientists, and scholars continue to believe that the black body is biologically and fundamentally different from the white body and that race is a fixed marker of group membership, rooted in biology (26⇓–28). // Okay, I'd fit there. I've never heard the concept of different pain tolerance (only across the sexes), but black and 'coloured' people are clearly morphological distinct in a way that suggests genetic differences ... are they saying light and darked skinned people are genetically and biologically identical? That doesn't correspond at all with things like sickle-cell disease / malaria insensitivity which are reported to be found more in people with a long ancestry in sub-saharan Africa. FWIW suffering from pain signals appears at least in part social and learned -- toddlers can often be tricked in to not finding something painful. I certainly don't feel the identical physical stimulus of nettle stings in the age way as my older children. The v toddler doesn't know it's supposed to hurt and carries on, the older child seems to be hurt with very little damage because they anticipate the pain. I feel the pain as I've always done (maybe my reception of pain stimulus is weakened?) but can easily ignore it because I know a few nettle stings isn't really anything to bother with. Personally I'd expect almost everything to show some variation with "race", and also with geographical heritage, and also with societal tradition in groups you assosiate with. (Eg maybe diet affects pain perception and historical cultural background affects die, maybe?) The idea that we're all identical is silly. I see where the desire to say that comes from: but ignoring reality doesn't get us further forward because it doesn't fit reality.
scotty79 7y ago
Why wouldn't they be concious? They probably are concious in some form but their pain might be so much simpler than ours as their conciousness is. They lack a lot of hardware to expeirience what we expeirience. The risk of using a word like 'pain' is because it's a very sharply defined word for most people. While in fact expeiriencing pain evolved and your pain might be very different than fish pain or insect pain or nematode pain.
hackinthebochs 7y ago
>Why wouldn't they feel pain? If they don't require a conscious experience of pain to thrive in their environmental niche, then we can reasonably assume they wouldn't have it. It's a good reason why we don't expect plants to experience pain. >Anything that didn't feel pain would soon be evolved out. You have to distinguish between nociception and a conscious experience of pain. Nociception is required for just about any multicellular organism. But the experience of suffering due to noxious stimuli only serves a purpose in the context of conscious planning of behavior.

red75prime 7y ago

Using the word "pain" as such, you conflate behavior related to negative stimuli, nociceptors' signals processing, and subjective feelings. Only the first one can drive evolution.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

I think there's confusion of terms. It's obvious that a lot of living things can feel "pain", as in stimuli and response; it's less obvious which living things are capable of experiencing suffering, and it's even less obvious to which point we can (or should) reasonably care - e.g. it's ridiculously hard (bordering on impossible) to live a life in which you don't hurt insects.

godelski 7y ago

No one is saying only humans. Clearly dogs feel pain. The question is about a nervous system and response. Defining pain is difficult, just as defining life.

fiblye 7y ago
You'd think this, but no, it's very recent that people accepted animals feel actual pain. I mean, even now there are people saying that sure, crustaceans get hurt and respond negatively to harmful stimulus, but it's not really pain because their nervous system is different or they lack some specific body component or don't respond to one specific test that's designed such that only mammals can pass. And to risk sounding crazy, people didn't believe babies felt pain. Only within the past few decades did humanity realize the obvious fact that, no shit, of course babies feel pain. [1] [1]: https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/07/28/when-babies-felt-pain/Lhk2OKonfR4m3TaNjJWV7M/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/07/28/when-babies-fel...

autokad 7y ago

they have known insects felt pain for a while, this was whether they felt pain after the injury 'healed'. its semi relevant to me because I accidentally stepped on a bug (weevil) yesterday and felt bad about it. I hoped that it might not feel pain after the step, but that that hope was in vain.

2muchcoffeeman 7y ago

Even the featured article puts pain in quotes and is like, “for simplicity, we’ll call it ‘pain’” So actually it’s not obvious that animals perceive the world as we do. Maybe you can only generalise our experience to warm blooded vertebrates.

vixen99 7y ago
No, animals don't perceive the world as we do but it's not stretching things at all to say that they do (have to!) register some of the basic realities of life such as warmth, cold, pain (i.e., 'this is bad - something's not right and needs to be sorted') and absence of pain. The nuts and bolts of this are bound to be similar or identical given that we share a lot of basic biochemistry with all life forms. For example the citric acid cycle (a fundamental engine for energy production) operates together with its associated pathways universally in plants and animals.
kranner 7y ago
Given the similarities between us and other animals, it should make more sense to have to disprove that they don't feel pain, rather than having to prove that they do, i.e., that they must feel pain should be the default assumption in the absence of data.
- raverbashing 7y ago
  Which similarities? Insects have a much, much simpler nervous system. They don't even have a spinal chord, and they have an exoskeleton. I think maybe only cnidarians have a simpler (or similarly complex) nervous system. Pain on a chordate might be comparable to pain in humans, with some exceptions like the Octopus (maybe) but that's about it.
  - kranner 7y ago
    But we don't know that insects absolutely couldn't experience pain, in the same way that we're certain a brick couldn't (unless one is a panpsychist). At least they have a nervous system.

prennert 7y ago

It's not about can only humans feel pain and other animals not. It's more: do some animals do not feel pain. I don't think many would argue dogs or even mice do not feel pain. I am not a biologist, but from working in labs that do research with model organisms (like drosophila) what I understood is that there is little evolutionary advantage of being able to feel pain if you cannot heal it anyway. Also if there are no nerves in some regions feeling of pain is unlikely. I remember that someone told me that experiments show that drosophila with servered legs don't change their way of walking, and do not limp as animals do that feel pain. So the notion got adopted that they cannot feel pain and experiments on them are ethically save as they do not suffer.

org3432 7y ago

They used to think black people don't feel pain too, it would be good to do a long term study to determine if they feel pain since they clearly can't determine if others do.

brighter2morrow 7y ago
>They used to think black people don't feel pain too, Who thought this? White people?
- zimpenfish 7y ago
  https://www.history.com/news/the-father-of-modern-gynecology-performed-shocking-experiments-on-slaves https://www.history.com/news/the-father-of-modern-gynecology... > While some doctors didn’t trust anesthesia, Sims’s decision to not use it—or any other numbing technique—was based on his misguided belief that black people didn’t experience pain like white people did. See also https://www.pnas.org/content/113/16/4296.full https://www.pnas.org/content/113/16/4296.full > These findings suggest that individuals with at least some medical training hold and may use false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites to inform medical judgments
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    I don't really understand this contention in the second link: >Today, many laypeople, scientists, and scholars continue to believe that the black body is biologically and fundamentally different from the white body and that race is a fixed marker of group membership, rooted in biology (26⇓–28). // Okay, I'd fit there. I've never heard the concept of different pain tolerance (only across the sexes), but black and 'coloured' people are clearly morphological distinct in a way that suggests genetic differences ... are they saying light and darked skinned people are genetically and biologically identical? That doesn't correspond at all with things like sickle-cell disease / malaria insensitivity which are reported to be found more in people with a long ancestry in sub-saharan Africa. FWIW suffering from pain signals appears at least in part social and learned -- toddlers can often be tricked in to not finding something painful. I certainly don't feel the identical physical stimulus of nettle stings in the age way as my older children. The v toddler doesn't know it's supposed to hurt and carries on, the older child seems to be hurt with very little damage because they anticipate the pain. I feel the pain as I've always done (maybe my reception of pain stimulus is weakened?) but can easily ignore it because I know a few nettle stings isn't really anything to bother with. Personally I'd expect almost everything to show some variation with "race", and also with geographical heritage, and also with societal tradition in groups you assosiate with. (Eg maybe diet affects pain perception and historical cultural background affects die, maybe?) The idea that we're all identical is silly. I see where the desire to say that comes from: but ignoring reality doesn't get us further forward because it doesn't fit reality.

scotty79 7y ago

Why wouldn't they be concious? They probably are concious in some form but their pain might be so much simpler than ours as their conciousness is. They lack a lot of hardware to expeirience what we expeirience. The risk of using a word like 'pain' is because it's a very sharply defined word for most people. While in fact expeiriencing pain evolved and your pain might be very different than fish pain or insect pain or nematode pain.

hackinthebochs 7y ago

>Why wouldn't they feel pain? If they don't require a conscious experience of pain to thrive in their environmental niche, then we can reasonably assume they wouldn't have it. It's a good reason why we don't expect plants to experience pain. >Anything that didn't feel pain would soon be evolved out. You have to distinguish between nociception and a conscious experience of pain. Nociception is required for just about any multicellular organism. But the experience of suffering due to noxious stimuli only serves a purpose in the context of conscious planning of behavior.