6 ms·

Please define "feel". They experience structural damage - yes, same as every other living organism or plant if damaged. If I tear dandelion in half it will emit

by Yizahi 5y ago

Please define "feel". They experience structural damage - yes, same as every other living organism or plant if damaged. If I tear dandelion in half it will emit poisonous juice. Does it "feel" pain though? I think no. The "feel" part probably can happen only in the sufficiently large brain, and lobster most likely don't qualify.

mFixman 5y ago
Different sets of neurons fire for different people on the same stimulus. Does that mean you don't feel pain in the same way another person feels pain?
- Yizahi 5y ago
  That's an open question. But if we would assume that answer is "no", then all alive beings can "experience pain" because it' the same mechanism in all of them. Jellyfish can "feel the pain" if we will assume such answer, and I imagine a single boat travel cutting and tearing thousands of jellyfish will easily beat this whole lobster conundrum in the severity of the problem :) PS: I'm not advocating for cruel behavior against animals. It's just that some questions don't have an easy clear answer at all, especially scaled to the planet level.
- DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
  on point imo! does one need to feel pain in the same way for it to be classified as pain. pain is pain. one of the things that unites us as humans is our ability to feel it and empathize with another. if an animal can feel pain it doesn't matter if it is the same pain. Also I recall that Nirvana once sang "It's ok to eat fish because they don't have any feelings". For generations people thought that is true. Some in my family call themselves Pescaterean because they for some reason don't want to inflict pain on animals (that look like us). my point is pain is pain - the rest is just mental gymnastics that allow us to justify our own behavior.
Eelongate 5y ago
"Feeling pain" has never been a particularly intellectual experience to me. Pain isn't some sort of abstract thought, it's a raw sensation that the harmed flesh itself seems to feel. When I step on a lego I feel it and flinch away from it before I even realize it. I guess that sort of reflex is what you're calling "experience structural damage" but I say it feels like pain.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  Except we can suppress those nerves higher up and you'll never actually feel the pain. And you can trigger similar flinching reflexes with a focused tap to the right spot, which is clearly painless in every way. It's complicated.
  - Eelongate 5y ago
    It's not very complicated when you remember that seafood kitchens don't hire anesthesiologists to drug up crabs. Listen, I'm no vegan, I eat meat and I don't condemn others who do the same. But "X animal can't actually feel pain" is blatant cope and I don't go for that. If you can't stomach the reality of animals feeling pain, then stop eating them.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      > It's not very complicated when you remember that seafood kitchens don't hire anesthesiologists to drug up crabs. Look, I'm just saying that a flinch isn't proof of pain. I'm not saying they don't feel pain, but if you want to prove it then you need better evidence than a flinch. > "X animal can't actually feel pain" is blatant cope and I don't go for that. If you can't stomach the reality of animals feeling pain, then stop eating them. My policy is to go for a quick maximally-humane kill if you're not sure. But that doesn't mean every single animal definitely feels pain. So again, it's complicated. For example, naked mole rats famously don't feel many kinds of pain, and those are mammals!
patagonia 5y ago
If you wouldn’t be willing to “experience” the same set of experiences and pains via a similar subset of your sensory system and brain in exchange for the benefit of a meal that could have been cruelty free, then you shouldn’t. The burden of proof should not be on others to prove to you via rationalization/ intellectualization that it’s not a nightmare of an end to a sentient creature’s life experience.
- toolz 5y ago
  I find this line of thinking somewhat short sighted. Animals in the wild will almost certainly die more agonizing deaths than they would at the hands of humans. Would you rather a cannibal kill you with one cut to the throat or would you rather be killed by a polar bear that might even enjoy watching you writhe in pain for 10s of minutes before you ultimately pass out from either the excruciating pain or loss of blood. This isn't a moral argument for me, it's simply giving a fair comparison as to what the likely choices are for these animals. The choices are not pain from humans or some pain-free experience in nature. I will say that being boiled alive is likely one of the worst ways to go though - luckily there are nearly painless alternatives to killing lobster that many people employ.
  - afiori 5y ago
    I like to pose this as not empathy for the animal but empathy for ourselves* It is not nice to the kind of colture that inflict pain on an indutrial scale and we can empathise with the torture that is mutilation and being boiled alive, does not need to be about what an octupus feels during slaughter, it can be about how to approach the act itself. I believe that buddhism teaches to pay respect or thank the lifes that died to become your food (plant of animal); in this context the question on my mind would be whether you can honestly pay your respects to something you boiled alive because it would have tasted worse cooked another way. It feels disrespectful to the food. Slaughter is natural, we should find a way to be ok with how we do it. * I like to offer egotistical arguments for altruism, just my perspective
    - toolz 5y ago
TearsInTheRain 5y ago
Please let us know how large is large enough to feel pain. Is a bird brain large enough? A mouse? A dog?
- Yizahi 5y ago
  That depends on the precise definition of the word "feel" which I don't see in these comments so far.
  - AlecSchueler 5y ago
    You used the word feel in quote marks above. What was the definition you intended to imply there?
    - Yizahi 5y ago
      That's the problem - I don't know a strict and correct definition for it, not even close one. At minimum there are two polar possibilities - 1) any neuron firing due to damage is a "feeling of pain", or 2) only conscious brain can "feel pain". But there can be other definitions, multiple ones. First option is possible but not productive for the discussion because then almost everything can feel pain, including some single cell organisms I think. Second option is anthropocentric and at least at a glance looks incorrect. The thing is the word "feel" itself is anthropocentric, basically we make analogue with our understanding of pain and project it on other living organisms.
TaylorAlexander 5y ago
> The "feel" part probably can happen only in the sufficiently large brain, and lobster most likely don't qualify. This seems pretty arbitrary. As a vegan I draw the line at plants vs animals and while it is hard to live in industrialized society without harming animals, it’s easy for me to see how dropping a lobster in a pot will cause the animal to suffer. I’m doing just fine simply not eating them. Why do mental gymnastics to convince yourself dropping a lobster in a boiling pot doesn’t cause it to “feel” pain when you could just not do that? Lentils are so damn good.
- Yizahi 5y ago
  The thing is - lobsters are an easy problem. We can (theoretically) collectively decide that lobsters shouldn't be touched at all and nobody will be hurt (some fishers maybe?). But the same logic about "feeling" pain is applicable to practically anything as is demonstrated in the comments below. And then it becomes a humanity problem - can we kill living organisms for ANY reason? There is no easy, or even hard answer at all for this. And won't be in the nearest future, simply due to a sheer scope of the problem, number of different kinds of organisms and numbers of reasons they are being killed today.
  - akudha 5y ago
    Killing is one thing, Killing by boiling alive is on a whole another level of cruelty, like unit 731 level, nazi level cruelty. I don’t eat meat, so I don’t know why only lobsters are boiled alive and not other sea food. Whatever the reason, it is hard to justify. If we are going to kill something, the least we could do is kill it painlessly. At the beginning of COVID-19, some farm in the Midwest killed hundreds of pigs by steaming. Could you imagine the suffering?
    - NoGravitas 5y ago
      Yeah, ffs, just kill the lobster quickly right before you boil it, and stop whining about how not getting to boil it alive infringes "muh freedumbs". Instructions: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/how-to-kill-lobster-1.4491189 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/how-to-k...

by Yizahi 5y ago

mFixman 5y ago

Different sets of neurons fire for different people on the same stimulus. Does that mean you don't feel pain in the same way another person feels pain?

Yizahi 5y ago
That's an open question. But if we would assume that answer is "no", then all alive beings can "experience pain" because it' the same mechanism in all of them. Jellyfish can "feel the pain" if we will assume such answer, and I imagine a single boat travel cutting and tearing thousands of jellyfish will easily beat this whole lobster conundrum in the severity of the problem :) PS: I'm not advocating for cruel behavior against animals. It's just that some questions don't have an easy clear answer at all, especially scaled to the planet level.
DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
on point imo! does one need to feel pain in the same way for it to be classified as pain. pain is pain. one of the things that unites us as humans is our ability to feel it and empathize with another. if an animal can feel pain it doesn't matter if it is the same pain. Also I recall that Nirvana once sang "It's ok to eat fish because they don't have any feelings". For generations people thought that is true. Some in my family call themselves Pescaterean because they for some reason don't want to inflict pain on animals (that look like us). my point is pain is pain - the rest is just mental gymnastics that allow us to justify our own behavior.

Eelongate 5y ago

"Feeling pain" has never been a particularly intellectual experience to me. Pain isn't some sort of abstract thought, it's a raw sensation that the harmed flesh itself seems to feel. When I step on a lego I feel it and flinch away from it before I even realize it. I guess that sort of reflex is what you're calling "experience structural damage" but I say it feels like pain.

Dylan16807 5y ago
Except we can suppress those nerves higher up and you'll never actually feel the pain. And you can trigger similar flinching reflexes with a focused tap to the right spot, which is clearly painless in every way. It's complicated.
- Eelongate 5y ago
  It's not very complicated when you remember that seafood kitchens don't hire anesthesiologists to drug up crabs. Listen, I'm no vegan, I eat meat and I don't condemn others who do the same. But "X animal can't actually feel pain" is blatant cope and I don't go for that. If you can't stomach the reality of animals feeling pain, then stop eating them.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    > It's not very complicated when you remember that seafood kitchens don't hire anesthesiologists to drug up crabs. Look, I'm just saying that a flinch isn't proof of pain. I'm not saying they don't feel pain, but if you want to prove it then you need better evidence than a flinch. > "X animal can't actually feel pain" is blatant cope and I don't go for that. If you can't stomach the reality of animals feeling pain, then stop eating them. My policy is to go for a quick maximally-humane kill if you're not sure. But that doesn't mean every single animal definitely feels pain. So again, it's complicated. For example, naked mole rats famously don't feel many kinds of pain, and those are mammals!

patagonia 5y ago

If you wouldn’t be willing to “experience” the same set of experiences and pains via a similar subset of your sensory system and brain in exchange for the benefit of a meal that could have been cruelty free, then you shouldn’t. The burden of proof should not be on others to prove to you via rationalization/ intellectualization that it’s not a nightmare of an end to a sentient creature’s life experience.

toolz 5y ago
I find this line of thinking somewhat short sighted. Animals in the wild will almost certainly die more agonizing deaths than they would at the hands of humans. Would you rather a cannibal kill you with one cut to the throat or would you rather be killed by a polar bear that might even enjoy watching you writhe in pain for 10s of minutes before you ultimately pass out from either the excruciating pain or loss of blood. This isn't a moral argument for me, it's simply giving a fair comparison as to what the likely choices are for these animals. The choices are not pain from humans or some pain-free experience in nature. I will say that being boiled alive is likely one of the worst ways to go though - luckily there are nearly painless alternatives to killing lobster that many people employ.
- afiori 5y ago
  I like to pose this as not empathy for the animal but empathy for ourselves* It is not nice to the kind of colture that inflict pain on an indutrial scale and we can empathise with the torture that is mutilation and being boiled alive, does not need to be about what an octupus feels during slaughter, it can be about how to approach the act itself. I believe that buddhism teaches to pay respect or thank the lifes that died to become your food (plant of animal); in this context the question on my mind would be whether you can honestly pay your respects to something you boiled alive because it would have tasted worse cooked another way. It feels disrespectful to the food. Slaughter is natural, we should find a way to be ok with how we do it. * I like to offer egotistical arguments for altruism, just my perspective
  - toolz 5y ago

TearsInTheRain 5y ago

Please let us know how large is large enough to feel pain. Is a bird brain large enough? A mouse? A dog?

Yizahi 5y ago
That depends on the precise definition of the word "feel" which I don't see in these comments so far.
- AlecSchueler 5y ago
  You used the word feel in quote marks above. What was the definition you intended to imply there?
  - Yizahi 5y ago
    That's the problem - I don't know a strict and correct definition for it, not even close one. At minimum there are two polar possibilities - 1) any neuron firing due to damage is a "feeling of pain", or 2) only conscious brain can "feel pain". But there can be other definitions, multiple ones. First option is possible but not productive for the discussion because then almost everything can feel pain, including some single cell organisms I think. Second option is anthropocentric and at least at a glance looks incorrect. The thing is the word "feel" itself is anthropocentric, basically we make analogue with our understanding of pain and project it on other living organisms.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago

> The "feel" part probably can happen only in the sufficiently large brain, and lobster most likely don't qualify. This seems pretty arbitrary. As a vegan I draw the line at plants vs animals and while it is hard to live in industrialized society without harming animals, it’s easy for me to see how dropping a lobster in a pot will cause the animal to suffer. I’m doing just fine simply not eating them. Why do mental gymnastics to convince yourself dropping a lobster in a boiling pot doesn’t cause it to “feel” pain when you could just not do that? Lentils are so damn good.

Yizahi 5y ago
The thing is - lobsters are an easy problem. We can (theoretically) collectively decide that lobsters shouldn't be touched at all and nobody will be hurt (some fishers maybe?). But the same logic about "feeling" pain is applicable to practically anything as is demonstrated in the comments below. And then it becomes a humanity problem - can we kill living organisms for ANY reason? There is no easy, or even hard answer at all for this. And won't be in the nearest future, simply due to a sheer scope of the problem, number of different kinds of organisms and numbers of reasons they are being killed today.
- akudha 5y ago
  Killing is one thing, Killing by boiling alive is on a whole another level of cruelty, like unit 731 level, nazi level cruelty. I don’t eat meat, so I don’t know why only lobsters are boiled alive and not other sea food. Whatever the reason, it is hard to justify. If we are going to kill something, the least we could do is kill it painlessly. At the beginning of COVID-19, some farm in the Midwest killed hundreds of pigs by steaming. Could you imagine the suffering?
  - NoGravitas 5y ago
    Yeah, ffs, just kill the lobster quickly right before you boil it, and stop whining about how not getting to boil it alive infringes "muh freedumbs". Instructions: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/how-to-kill-lobster-1.4491189 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/how-to-k...