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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
> 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.
> It doesn't disprove it, it just demolishes that particular argument.
geezerjay made the point that the ability to experience pain is a useful survival trait, so we should expect it to be widespread.
Filling in some gaps in your argument (please correct me if I get them wrong), you're arguing that there are other negative stimuli that could have equivalent usefulness and therefore pain itself is not beneficial for optimising survival. Any equivalent stimulus would do.
Since there's no way to tell what anyone feels, the entire subjective experience of pain can only be defined by looking at analogous physiology and response. We can look at things like whether a species has nociception, whether their nociception system interacts with their central nervous system, whether they respond to painkillers, how they make choices about negative stimuli, adaptive avoidance, etc.
To have the same survival value, your 'negative stimuli' must be indistinguishable from pain. They have to be because you imply they illicit the same response in the same situation, and (barring species that are clearly missing key parts of nociception) the response is all we can look at.
Your argument seems to rest on redefining the (admittedly vague) biological understanding of pain to mean a unspecified subset of 'things that are indistiguishable from pain'... which I don't buy as being anything other than an existential conundrum and in my opinion doesn't seem like a basis to call geezerjay's comment "over-simplistic".
> geezerjay made the point that the ability to experience pain is a useful survival trait, so we should expect it to be widespread.
While also conflating "pain" with any negative reaction at all as a "basic survival tool".
> Filling in some gaps in your argument (please correct me if I get them wrong), you're arguing that there are other negative stimuli that could have equivalent usefulness and therefore pain itself is not beneficial for optimising survival. Any equivalent stimulus would do.
I wouldn't say "equivalent". But I would say "sufficient".
So go ahead and throw out all your argument based on them being indistinguishable. They are distinguishable, but it can be hard to distinguish them in something that doesn't talk.
Keep in mind that we already know from daily experience that multiple kinds of negative stimuli exist, and only some of them are painful. Suppose that having more types requires more complexity, more metabolic energy. In that case, in simpler organisms, it could easily be true that pain improves survival but the cost is greater than the benefit. And then pain would get evolutionarily selected against despite being useful.
And that assumes that pain is better than not-pain to start with. Maybe pain is a kludge. A lot of deaths have been caused because pain got too overwhelming for someone to continue to escape/fight.
> We can look at things like whether a species has nociception, whether their nociception system interacts with their central nervous system, whether they respond to painkillers, how they make choices about negative stimuli, adaptive avoidance, etc.
Yes, this is a good starting point. They key is acknowledging that there are multiple ways to get reactions, and pain is only one of them, so we have to have finesse in figuring out whether or not pain is involved.
I think you've overstated the extent to which this argument "demolishes" geezerjay's.
You're right, there could exist a tier of organisms that do have centrally nervous nociception etc. but don't feel "pain", depending on which set of criteria you use to define what is and isn't pain (you didn't say which of the competing sets of criteria you subscribe to).
As far as I see it, geezerjay put forward a reasonable argument and this adds a possible (but so far unsupported) nuance.
Again, there are humans that feel some types of negative stimuli but not pain. It's not theoretical!
It doesn't matter what my exact definition is for pain as long as we can agree that there is a difference.
(We can agree that soft pokes to the head don't hurt, right?)
And because there is a difference, it's not nuance to say "You can show that avoidance of stimuli is nearly universal, but that's not good enough to show pain". Without that equivalence, the argument is half-finished or less.
> 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.
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.
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"?
It is not an argument. It is a statement. OK. What about short DNA fragments in a solution of DNA replicase. They are built from DNA, they are replicating, in a few billions years they can evolve, they aren't much more complex than a toilet bowl, undergrad molecular biology student can create them by billions.
Whether or not plants feel pain is largely irrelevant. Humans have to eat plants, it’s not possible to make food (yet) without plants being in the chain. Even if plants feel pain, that makes it ok to eat them (unless we’re advocating mass suicide).
Eating animals is trickier. You’re eating processed plants, so you’re still harming plants by eating them, but you’re harming an order of magnitude more plants (due to the inefficient conversion from plant to meat), and you’re harming animals as well. There’s therefore a very strong argument to be made that eating meat is immoral.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> How are they different? Pain is a negative stimulus response that allows us to know whether something is causing damage to our body.
The difference is between the unpleasant, subjective experience (qualia) and the electrical signals indicating physical damage.
A car has sensors that detect physical damage, yet it doesn't feel pain in the way that humans do. The question is, where on that spectrum bacteria, ants, and fish lie.
> Have you seen ants writhe around after being crushed or dismembered? They definitely feel pain.
Have you seen a car deploy its airbags and notify emergency services after a crash? And yet, they definitely don't feel pain. Visible reaction to a negative stimulus is neither a sufficient nor a necessary precondition for someone or something to feel pain.
Living beings are not mere machines, so the comparison makes little sense. All living beings have some form of consciousness, and so, are able to feel some form of discomfort, of which pain is the most extreme.
I look at the common elements that living beings have, compared to plain matter.
Animals have consciousness and can feel pain. Animal and plant bodies are both comprised of many differentiated cells. Both have DNA. Bacteria are singular cells, and have DNA...
Plants have been demonstrated to have short-term memory, recognize family and neighbouring plants, and so on. So... it is extremely likely that plants, bacteria, fungi, and perhaps even amoebas, also have consciousness, feel emotions and feel pain. Maybe not in the way we think about emotions and pain, but in whatever way they do, which is entirely mysterious to us, being animals with animal-consciousness and instincts. We cannot understand what it is like to be a plant, bacterium, fungus or amoeba... it is far too alien to our animal-mind.
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.
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.
> 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.
> Do those reasons remain equally plausible for K- and r-selected species?
What do parenting strategies have to do with any of this? (If I understand wikipedia correctly)
> 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.
That can always happen, with any kind of research. I don't see how this gives any reason to assume today that fish don't feel pain.
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.
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.
If they are so simple and small that their runtime complexity with regard to manipulating matter is close to 0-- then when you kill them, they die so quick their reaction is only enough to output a bit of data. I for one feel like its moot to debate whether we would feel pain if a giant sliced our head off at the speed of sound. Thats just death-- a fast death with no sensory systems fast enough to notice.
Now if youd like to debate about whether death by itself, painless death, is amoral, that would be interesting and relevant to these critters..
I always found "catch and release" fishing to be a very misguided and hypocritical activity.
I don't see eating meat as particularly immoral (this will likely change in the coming decades, as substitutes get better), but factory farming is pretty evil. Hunting and fishing help you avoid that.
If you hunt for prey, then eat the poor thing, perhaps after contemplating on its life a little. If you do not, then you're literally torturing an animal for no reason other than entertainment, while deluding yourself that you're taking the moral high ground.
This is similar to people who get outraged at hunters, but don't think twice about eating factory farmed meat daily.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
You should try actually reading the article, which gives several different examples of interesting behavioral experiments to infer the conscious decision of certain fish to avoid painful experiences (without requiring the fish to tell us on a scale of 1 to 10 'how much it hurts' in fishspeak).
The article stimulated the fish in ways that humans feel pain and then observed the behavior of the fish. All that tells us is that the fish merely prefer avoiding those stimuli.
If you want to continue that argument along, head down Solipsism. You are the only conscious being. Everyone else is just performing actions but they arent truly conscious. They say they feel pain, they avoid it. But they could just be like the fish. This is the story of YOU. You are the main char. The rest? They are automotons, cause and effect. You only know that you feel. Everyone else is merely an external cue..deceiving you in some respect...but really, the fact is, you cant tell. Neither can we. Thats the game of brains in a box. Life...
I'm not sure where this presumption is used, but I much prefer the general idea of falsifiability (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability), where you make a hypothesis and then try to disprove it. If you can't disprove it, then maybe the hypothesis is true. However, in this particular case you can make either hypothesis: other animals do feel pain (etc.) or other animals do not feel pain, so I don't think either approach moves you forward on its own.
Just like humans are generally all alike (with few exceptions, such as size, food preferences or favorite pop song - we really are extremely similar to one another in almost every aspect of our life), so are animals much more like humans than many people think, and for me the default hypothesis is that they are indeed similar.
Then we try to disprove it. How can I prove that animals do not feel pain? Well I can try a few things:
- Maybe they don't run from harm?
- Maybe they don't fight when attacked?
- Maybe they don't dodge hits?
- Maybe they don't care about predators?
- Maybe they don't have nervous system at all which we believe to be the basis for pain? (also based on an observation of people whose damaged nervous system made them not feel pain)
Turns out, all those things are broadly true about animals, so it's hard to prove they don't feel pain. So maybe they do?
If you try with thoughts, consciousness, abstraction, planning, communication, emotion, detecting emotion of others of the same species or other species, etc. you will quickly find that:
- for some animals it seems quite certain they do all that
- for some it's unclear how much they can do
- for some it's almost certain they don't do any of that not just because they don't have the type of brain area which in humans is responsible for this, but also because there is nothing in their behavior, senses etc. that even resembles that kind of function.
I don't need to prove that my dog feels pain. Assuming he doesn't, why does he bark, bite, squeal etc. when something hurts it?
> "Assuming he doesn't, why does he bark, bite, squeal etc. when something hurts it?"
Because that is an evolutionary successful thing to do. The barking and squealing communicates to other dogs that there is danger, and the biting is simple self-preservation.
Although there are numerous definitions of pain, almost all involve two key components. First, nociception is required. Second is some emotional factor.
I don't care whether an animal thinks about the pain or emotes about it. You wouldn't put pedo porn on a disk because its bad karma. Just the fact that it exists is grotesque. So why put torture into the mind of a biological disk in the form of doge? The universe gives us so much.. greed is where heinous acts come from. Airing on the side of harmony doesn't cause later strife. Why take chances like cheap profiteers?
You can't prove positively that other humans feel pain. The best you can do is say that they look, when they are in the situations in which you would feel pain, similar to the way you look when you feel pain.
The less other people or things look like themselves, the more they are judged not to feel pain or any sort of inner state in the same way. There's never any evidence preceding the judgment; what precedes the judgment is a material dependence on that person or animal being treated in a way that would cause us pain, and the judgment is a result of demanding evidence for that pain that we wouldn't demand to prove that our neighbor felt pain.
Other things that at some time according to the scientific consensus didn't feel pain? Babies and black people.
At the time of Huxley and Darwin, your question would mostly get the response that the presumption is wrong. These days we know that the foundational biochemistry out of which these qualia arise is the same give or take a few pathways and therefore tend to doubt that humans are especial in these characteristics.
> 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.
Your question is foiled by semantics. The truth is the truth, regardless of phrasing of the hypothesis.
For example, if my hypothesis is that fish do feel pain, I pre-establish experiment criteria, which if witnessed during testing would support the conclusion that the hypothesis is true; fish do feel pain. Similarly, if I start with the hypothesis that fish do not feel pain, establish my criteria and witness the empirical results passing said criteria, then the results support that the hypothesis is true (fish do not feel pain).
So, it doesn't matter how the hypothesis is phrased, what matters is the test criteria and the empirical results against that criteria. You can arrive at the same conclusion either way.
If you want to contest something, contest the criteria the researcher uses to base their conclusion. However, it gets more difficult to refute results when multiple experiments using a variety of different techniques & criteria all tend to point to the same truth.
You aren't trying to "prove" a hypothesis, you are trying to prescribe to others how they should live their lives by telling them the assumptions they should hold. Without any kind of proof for that.
First, I didn't say anything about 'proving a hypothesis'. Instead, I described testing a hypothesis.
State a hypothesis, test, evaluate the results and draw a conclusion.
What you do with the results of the conclusions is up to you. I personally enjoy fishing, on the other hand, reading this article will give me pause WRT fishing as a sport in the future.
I do think the article has a slant and agenda, but it's an article about i terpreting/applying the results, not a scientific paper. The issue I have with the question presented is that it supposes that the experiments were conducted with some sort of bias. My point is that a properly designed experiment will test a hypothesis and yield evidence that points to some discernable truth. There is nothing different going on here that is any different from other experiments.
I totally agree, yet the established and 'informed' take on this is to disregard any such observations of emotion and other complex behavior in animals as anthropomorphism.
> In science, the use of anthropomorphic language that suggests animals have intentions and emotions has traditionally been deprecated as indicating a lack of objectivity. Biologists have been warned to avoid assumptions that animals share any of the same mental, social, and emotional capacities of humans, and to rely instead on strictly observable evidence. In 1927 Ivan Pavlov wrote that animals should be considered "without any need to resort to fantastic speculations as to the existence of any possible subjective states". More recently, The Oxford companion to animal behaviour (1987) advised that "one is well advised to study the behaviour rather than attempting to get at any underlying emotion".
After years of casually observing stray cats, for example, I would nearly bet my life that they experience complex emotions like love, embarrassment, and depression, but I know better than to draw that conclusion around my biologist and zookeeper friends. While the scientific motivation makes sense somewhat, I think it's pretty clearly a feel-good default notion that allows us humans to keep eating, experimenting on, and otherwise subjugating animals for our own purposes (not that I'm not guilty of some of these).
All goes around in circles. The more suffering we cause, the more suffering we feel. I wish people would understand this, when regarding eating animals.
Exactly. This is something I've only started to appreciate since I stopped eating meat. We're as much a cog in the machine of the industrial agriculture as the animals we eat are. It's has everything to do with maximizing profits and nothing to do with the health and welfare of any of the animals in the system, including us.
Agreed. This thinking spreads, if we do this to another lifeform, we sure as heck are ready to do it to our fellow humans, the abstraction is just a bit different.
Ok this is the most oldest argument people throw around. Let's just agree to look at this argument for a while and dissect couple of things: a plant doesn't run away when you catch it. A pig does.
A plant has a nature of giving, radiating, making oxygen and providing for it's environment. A pig is a gatherer and hunter, and one of the more intelligent animals out there. When you try to catch a pig, it runs away, it squeals for it's life.
Anyway it's not about this fact even though it's important, more what's fucked up in our current system is the systematic enslavement of feeling, thinking animals from their birth, in these huge killing camps they call farms these days. If it was even natural, like it used to be more, that the animals lived a life that they could enjoy. How would you feel being bred just for kept in a cage and then systematically killed, with no feeling, no warmness in your life ever ?
Plants aren't capable of running away. I really don't see this as much of an argument. Then again, I don't know if I agree that "plants feel pain" either.
I'm not necessarily a huge fan of factory farming, but if people want to be able to buy meat at any time, I don't really know much of a way around it. Though ranching still exists, there are plenty of ranches with heads of cattle that graze freely and eventually are taken to slaughterhouses.
If we did end factory farming, it wouldn't be as simple as just releasing these animals into the wild either. If we did they would very likely die of starvation. So we're talking about a generation of cattle/chickens that would basically need to be killed off so we didn't mess up the environment with a massive population explosion it couldn't handle.
On top of all of that, you are acting as if these animals are capable of the kind of thought that you and I are. They can think about their future, what their eventual fate is. This is fallacious. While animals may show signs of intelligence, there is no evidence of any kind of consciousness similar to ours.
This can even be evidenced through humans. People used to think that deaf people were mentally retarded in some way. Hence "deaf and dumb", however a lot of them were simply missing language. Language is extremely important as it not only allows for group cohesion, it also makes inner dialogue possible. While animals may have some basic kind of communicative capabilities, it is nothing on the level of humans. So without some kind of language, even if they're theoretically capable of cognitive thought, they can't have the same kind of existence as us.
Have you ever watched an animal in the eyes? Can you not see consciousness there ? This is the same as thinking that animals don't have feelings. What about dogs, have you not seen dogs doing kind things ?
Killing an generation of animals for food is much better than raising hundreds or thousands of generations in captivity for the times to come.
Of course they do else they would not avoid things that damage them physically. Even amoebas "feel" pain.
The important thing is not if something feels pain, but where we draw the line in regards if an animal's pain is more important than our pleasure. It does not take much human pleasure to make a few hundred million ameoba suffer, while it had better be pretty large to make a chimp suffer [1].
1. I am using pleasure here as shorthand for anything desired or beneficial for humans.
I don't see any rational ground to make the suffering of an amoeba a million times less relevant than the suffering of a single chimp.
Of course there is the irrational ground that chimps look similar to us and therefore we find it unpleasant to think about the fact that they are suffering.
So in the end it is all about our pleasure and nothing else. The tradeoff is between the amount our pleasure we get and for which it is unavoidable that the animal suffers, against the amount of our pleasure it costs because we feel sympathy for this particular animal race.
It wouldn't matter, if amoebas were microscopic copies of chimps, it would still be fairly easy for us to make millions of them suffer just by stepping on them with boots on, would it not be significantly harder to cause the suffering of a chimp without significant personal injury or forethought, considering your average chimp is a wild animal?
There is none, but that doesn't change that we need to make this decision. Your body kills millions on amoeba every day just to stay alive. Ultimately the tradeoff between human pleasure and animal suffering is arbitrary and set by society and personal preference.
The only reason I chose chimps is I rather like them so it would take a lot for me to hurt one. Equally, I don't like Bullrouts [1] (having been poisoned by one) and I would not be upset if they were all to die a slow and painful death.
The reality is: we can make an educated guess. Even though consciousness is not understood, it seems to require complex brain functions.
I think the important part here is making a clear distinction between reactions to noxious stimuli and the actual conscious experience of pain. That is where the discussion is.
The fact that something reacts to noxious stimuli (like amooebas sometimes do) is not a reason enough for moral consideration.
Could we agree once for all that we are predators in a food pyramid and that this naturally implies that we kill to eat. Now, as a sentient species, we might try to kill in a more acceptable way (for the victim), but that won't change much to the result : we kill.
Humans are omnivores with a physiology primarily geared towards eating & digesting plants. We can eat animals but we absolutely don't need to to live a long, healthy life. So it's really a matter of how much you value your own pleasure & taste over another creature's suffering.
Yeah sure. The suffering you cause is proportional to how much meat you eat. If quitting it entirely is too big a step for you then try scaling it back. Even a single meat-free day a week is a good place to start. You may find you don't miss it as much as you think you will.
It takes 7-10 kg of plants to produce one kg of meat, so you're causing that much more suffering even if you are willing to claim that plants suffer as much as we do from pain.
Then we just need to feed the animals their natural diets instead of the abnormal, unnatural diet of grains and soyabeans that most factory-farmed animals are currently fattened on.
If we do that then we can all eat meat about once a week. And anyway the ratio of plants eaten to meat produced would be about the same so no gain there.
All kinds of creatures will suffer and die even without us eating them. The fields, which were used to grow food for cattle, will became populated with wildlife.
The choice is between suffering for predators survival or for our pleasure. Note that predators don't always listen to humane treatment of animals proposals, so the amount of suffering could increase. But it will not be our fault, so it's OK, right?
The very brief suffering of an animal in the wild at the hands of a predator is nothing compared to the entire lifetime of unrelenting cruelty, suffering and unnatural confinement we offer them. There just really is no comparison at all. If you think there is then go educate yourself about what really goes on in factory farms.
Agreed but about 99% of the meat we eat in the US comes from factory farms. So unless you only ever eat meat that you are sure comes from humanely treated animals, which pretty much means never ever eating in restaurants, you won't be eating much meat.
Producing meat in this way also can't come close to supporting even current global demands for meat so it's not really a solution.
I'm certain a system could be devised to allow enough pasture-raised cattle, chickens and pigs to be raised in happy, healthy conditions until slaughtered for food. It would take more resources, but it would be worth it. It might also support the plant ecosystems more, because soyabean and grain monocultures won't be needed.
However, the current Capitalist system's greed will ensure that this doesn't happen, because of the junk/fast food industry and their advertizing.
Without junk/fast food's demands, the amount of meat required to sate the global population may actually shrink, because with proper education, food addiction may vanish, meaning we'll only need to eat what we actually need for nutrition and not for addiction's sake.
There is no way we can feed the entire population the amount of meat that Americans eat every day even with industrial farming practices, so there's no chance at all we can do it with sustainable, humane practices. The only way it would work is if people ate WAY less meat per person than Americans currently do:
I think hunting out of necessity to survive is justified. Hunting for sport or pleasure seems cruel to me but I will say I have a lot more respect for people that kill & butcher their own meat than people that buy it in a pretty shrink wrapped container in the supermarket and do their best to not think about what it really is.
>This is why it is far more ethical to eat animals who have been raised in conditions that allow them to thrive happily and wholesomely.
I used to think that, but it's not a defensible point of view if you examine it a little more critically. Animals like pigs (or rather, their very very recent wild ancestors) have needs and behaviours that simply aren't useful to agriculture, and they can't possibly life fulfilling lives (not to mention that they should also be living for about 15 years rather than under a year).
The least we can do is to not eat them. It took me a long time to accept that, but that's how it is.
> Animals like pigs (or rather, their very very recent wild ancestors) have needs and behaviours that simply aren't useful to agriculture, and they can't possibly life fulfilling lives (not to mention that they should also be living for about 15 years rather than under a year).
Why does it have to be about usefulness? They can live happy lives close enough to how they might live in the wild, at least until they're killed, if for food, no?
And neither do we absolutely need to eat plants to live a long, healthy life. Case in point? The traditional Eskimo diet that consisted majorly of fats, offal and meat. They lived long healthy lives only shortened due to the extreme coldness of their environment.
I’m not the least bit religious at this point in my life, but it reminds of a verse from the Bhagavad Gita, which I came across as a kid: “jivo jivasya jivanam” which roughly translates to - life thrives on other life forms.
Although that is true, we do value the character of independence of a conscious existence. That argument would never hold regarding the killing of humans for food.
When trying to properly answer the question "Is is acceptable to kill a human being for food, (caeteris paribus)", it is impossible, in the process, to avoid the recognition of the right to self-determination, and I find it difficult not to anchor that right to the perception of self, and to an independent sense of existence.
So it's not just that we will have to kill in order to eat, eventually: it's that sometimes that involves the destruction of a being that can, in some particular way, experience its own existence, which would make that killing ethically unacceptable.
If we value our own right to existence, how transmissible is that right? To what extent are non-human mammals, and vertebrates in general, etc, entitled to it?
Maybe humane killing is still wrong, for some animals.
Personally, I could not avoid considering the implications of the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in adjusting my behaviour, and not only in terms of my diet.
Human is a terrible source of food, just like any omnivore or carnivore is. This is because carnivores are unable to excrete most of the heavy metals they acquire over the years. As such, they become toxic to ingest. Even people who only eat seafood are susceptible to Mercury poisoning for this very reason.
And dare I say this is the reason societies evolved in a way to avoid cannibalism of aged people.
Practically? What does that even mean? Of course there are moral questions regarding the practice of cannibalism! Cannibalism still existed as a traditional practice in the twentieth century, so it is a moral question. And ethically speaking, there are many things to say about it.
The reason I brought it up is because I think it sets a line when discussing the right to kill for food: there are cases in which no harm comes of it, and other cases in which the practice would be highly objectionable.
I am making the case that in order for you to claim a moral high ground against an actor, the actor needs to benefit from the action they do. In this case, they don't. If you start a human carcass diet, you poison yourself. Your body reacts to it in terrible ways. Clear enough?
It seems to me that you are confusing utility with morality. The fact that eating human flesh might not be good for us (which, being a questionable claim, let's take for granted for the sake of this discussion) is beside the point. The question is not "is it good for us in a dietary perspective?" but "even if it were good, would it be acceptable?".
A consequence of what you are saying is that it is impossible to claim a higher ground against a murderer if the murderer doesn't benefit from the murder or if an accuser can't make a case for it.
Besides, benefits are relative most of the time: you say there isn't one, but someone else may just as well argue there is.
But if you absolutely need a benefit, so be it: imagine someone eating human flesh simply to satiate one's appetite for it. It would still be a morally questionable practice because of other values put into question.
Anyway, this was a thread about fish feeling pain, so I insist: maybe there are many species we should treat in a different way, independently of whether they feel pain or not. Some scientists have reclaimed the statute of non-human personhood for great apes and cetaceans, for example. So killing them painlessly still raises questions.
The whole point of the article was about humane slaughter methods for fish.
It wasn't about if it's right or wrong to kill fish; it was about studies suggesting that fish feel pain at a level that is more than just reflex and so, where possible, we should slaughter fish more humanely than suffocation.
Killing animals isnt new, but what has changed recently is that we have built large scale factories which greatly increase suffering. So, the least that we can do is to ensure that suffering(like dunking birds in hot water) is reduced.
I have thought a bit about what we put some fish species through.before eating them. Sure, they probably don't experience pain the same way animals closer to us do, but dragging them for a very long time with hooks in their mouths/throats and then suffocating them to death just never seemed right to me.
why is anybody surprised? if any complex organism has nervous system, this can transfer all kinds of information including pain.
it's a clear evolutionary advantage. we have it, so do other living organisms in one way or another. I wouldn't be surprised if ie ants had some very similar highly unpleasant feedback from their injuries to drive them away from cause of it.
are we really that dumb that if we don't hear human voice scream in horror, then we consider that all is good?
> Moreover, the notion that fish do not have the cerebral complexity to feel pain is decidedly antiquated. Scientists agree that most, if not all, vertebrates (as well as some invertebrates) are conscious and that a cerebral cortex as swollen as our own is not a prerequisite for a subjective experience of the world
Do scientists (some? most? few?) really agree that all animals are conscious? Or is the writer just interpolating? Would really like the writer to back this one up...
As humans we are evolved to have more compassion the more similar a being is to us, and less compassion the more different it is from ourselves. Human ethics is often selfish (pun not intended) in the sense that it is based on what feels bad for US when doing it. In my opinion, there is nothing objectively "good" or "bad", there is only harmony or disharmony in nature.
Pain indicates critical disharmony with the ideal state of any being. Same applies to plants! Do you think plants feel pain? They certainly do, but "pain" means something entirely different for them. What about planet earth and its ozone levels?
The real question we have to ask ourselves is, how much are we responsible for increasing the harmony in the world around us, vs. focusing on our own expansion in terms of technology, luxury and total population.
The article mostly focuses on commercial fishing, but I wonder what this will mean for people that fish for pleasure?
I do mostly fly fishing where (in the UK at least on stocked reservoirs) the catch is killed and (presumably) eaten. I guess in those circumstances it will be treated similar to hunting mammals.
For coarse/catch and release fishing, I'm less sure of the impact. I doubt if anyone will stop, but maybe it will mean mandatory barbless hooks and stronger lines so the fish can be reeled in faster and don't need to be played for so long to tire them out.
I may be missing the point there as I skimmed the video, but you don't actually end up catching any fish as far as I can see. It looks like you're just tossing food at them.
Feel free to whoosh me if this is satire flying over my head.
e.g. a human on an opiate drug can feel pain signals but not be bothered about them. Yet he can still suffer from the knowledge of his impending death.
We can measure pain signals in animals; we can reasonably guess that most species don't know that they're eventually going to die. More than that we don't know yet. Perhaps when we understand better how the mind works (e.g. by developing AGI) we'll be able to understand animals better too.
I read an article not so long ago (unfortunately, I do not recall where) mentioning the studies of a doctor who was able to open some minimal channel of communication with patients under a certain form of anesthesia, through which they were able to answer 'yes' when asked if they felt pain. After the procedure, they had no recollection of pain (or of being questioned, IIRC.)
This fairly clearly does not generalize to all forms of anesthesia, as some (including local ones) do block either pain sensors or the signals from them.
I am offering this merely as a datum, as I am not sure what to make of it.
The tricky bit about consciousness is that nobody can find a useful way to measure or define it. So we end up chasing our tails talking about if fish feel “pain”, that is, they suffer, and yet have no tools or criteria that would help us know.
Let’s imagine that, actually, deer don’t have any form of consciousness and cannot suffer. Imagine a deer critically injured in a hunt — nose flaring, eyes open wide, struggling to stand up, screaming maybe. This feels like a reasonable way for an animal to respond, backed by evolutionary reasons, even if its a mindless automaton.
Now imagine we magically imbue that deer with a consciousness in this situation. What measurably changes about their behavior? They still scream, try to run, struggle to survive — I can’t think of any way the situation would be different. Conscious or not, the deer behaves the same.
Thus, the claim “deers have consciousness” is non-falsifiable — the claim does not provide any way to be disproven, since there is no difference in measurable characteristics if the claim is true or false. One day, we might have a way to quantify consciousness. For the time being we are not even close.
Claims that are non-falsifiable are not really worthy of scientific inquiry. My personal conclusion, then, is that the question of consciousness is not a useful one. Any animal measurably displaying pain is in pain, in every useful form of the word, and we have a moral obligation to prevent it. Fish included.
You have rediscovered the "philosophical zombie" problem.[0]
Dr. Giulio Tononi[1] has developed an apparatus for calculating what he calls "integrated information"[2] which seems so far from limited experiments to be a good corrolary to the presence of consciousness in biological systems.
It's currently computationally intractable for the human brain at full resolution but heuristics are being developed to minimize that problem.
> The tricky bit about consciousness is that nobody can find a useful way to measure or define it
This, particularly the “define” part, is the key problem.
> Now imagine we magically imbue that deer with a consciousness in this situation. What measurably changes about their behavior? They still scream, try to run, struggle to survive — I can’t think of any way the situation would be different.
Of course you can't, because you haven't defined what consciousness means. Without a definition, you can't answer the question of “what is different if it is present vs. absent”.
> Thus, the claim “deers have consciousness” is non-falsifiable
I think you're confusing "consciousness" with "cognition". A deer is cognizant; it observes and reacts to the world around it, among other qualities of cognition. But it does not have self awareness and does not have abstract thought or any thought beyond carnal ones (eat, sleep, run, fight, etc.).
Consciousness is definitely measurable and definable, but context is important as the word is used in many different scenarios. Terry Schiavo was conscious (because she is a human and humans are conscious beings) but was also not conscious (because she lost her faculties for consciousness).
To your points, the first step of talking about consciousness is defining the "rules of engagement", the context under which consciousness is discussed. Practically speaking, consciousness is a trait that separates humans from "everything else". When things display human-like tendencies (reacting to pain, showing affection, communicating, using tools, etc.), we say they are "conscious".
> Claims that are non-falsifiable are not really worthy of scientific inquiry. My personal conclusion, then, is that the question of consciousness is not a useful one.
Hm - ok.
Sure, non-falsifiable claims are against a typical "popperian" definition of what science is about. But then again isn't it worth asking yourself: even though a question is unanswerable at this time, might it still not be worth asking?
A lot of questions that were once impossible to falsify were at one point moved from the realms of philosophy to science - like, are human character innate or is it entirely shaped by the environment. This question was at one point a purely philosophical question, now less so. Still not easily falsifiable. Actually, most questions in science don't fall in the clear-cut category of being that easy to falsify. Because it's not obvious exactly what the question means, or exactly how one would falsify it. Sure, it's easy to do it when talking about physics but that's about the only field. Take many ideas in social psychology, economics, biology or even hypothetical ideas in physics - like string theory.
Does that mean they are questions that are not "useful"?
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadSo it is not obvious that our feeling of pain is universal.
Is that your argument?
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".
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.
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.
geezerjay made the point that the ability to experience pain is a useful survival trait, so we should expect it to be widespread.
Filling in some gaps in your argument (please correct me if I get them wrong), you're arguing that there are other negative stimuli that could have equivalent usefulness and therefore pain itself is not beneficial for optimising survival. Any equivalent stimulus would do.
Since there's no way to tell what anyone feels, the entire subjective experience of pain can only be defined by looking at analogous physiology and response. We can look at things like whether a species has nociception, whether their nociception system interacts with their central nervous system, whether they respond to painkillers, how they make choices about negative stimuli, adaptive avoidance, etc.
To have the same survival value, your 'negative stimuli' must be indistinguishable from pain. They have to be because you imply they illicit the same response in the same situation, and (barring species that are clearly missing key parts of nociception) the response is all we can look at.
Your argument seems to rest on redefining the (admittedly vague) biological understanding of pain to mean a unspecified subset of 'things that are indistiguishable from pain'... which I don't buy as being anything other than an existential conundrum and in my opinion doesn't seem like a basis to call geezerjay's comment "over-simplistic".
While also conflating "pain" with any negative reaction at all as a "basic survival tool".
> Filling in some gaps in your argument (please correct me if I get them wrong), you're arguing that there are other negative stimuli that could have equivalent usefulness and therefore pain itself is not beneficial for optimising survival. Any equivalent stimulus would do.
I wouldn't say "equivalent". But I would say "sufficient".
So go ahead and throw out all your argument based on them being indistinguishable. They are distinguishable, but it can be hard to distinguish them in something that doesn't talk.
Keep in mind that we already know from daily experience that multiple kinds of negative stimuli exist, and only some of them are painful. Suppose that having more types requires more complexity, more metabolic energy. In that case, in simpler organisms, it could easily be true that pain improves survival but the cost is greater than the benefit. And then pain would get evolutionarily selected against despite being useful.
And that assumes that pain is better than not-pain to start with. Maybe pain is a kludge. A lot of deaths have been caused because pain got too overwhelming for someone to continue to escape/fight.
> We can look at things like whether a species has nociception, whether their nociception system interacts with their central nervous system, whether they respond to painkillers, how they make choices about negative stimuli, adaptive avoidance, etc.
Yes, this is a good starting point. They key is acknowledging that there are multiple ways to get reactions, and pain is only one of them, so we have to have finesse in figuring out whether or not pain is involved.
You're right, there could exist a tier of organisms that do have centrally nervous nociception etc. but don't feel "pain", depending on which set of criteria you use to define what is and isn't pain (you didn't say which of the competing sets of criteria you subscribe to).
As far as I see it, geezerjay put forward a reasonable argument and this adds a possible (but so far unsupported) nuance.
It doesn't matter what my exact definition is for pain as long as we can agree that there is a difference.
(We can agree that soft pokes to the head don't hurt, right?)
And because there is a difference, it's not nuance to say "You can show that avoidance of stimuli is nearly universal, but that's not good enough to show pain". Without that equivalence, the argument is half-finished or less.
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.
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.
My argument is that all living things can feel pain, regardless of how it manifests for them.
Eating animals is trickier. You’re eating processed plants, so you’re still harming plants by eating them, but you’re harming an order of magnitude more plants (due to the inefficient conversion from plant to meat), and you’re harming animals as well. There’s therefore a very strong argument to be made that eating meat is immoral.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The difference is between the unpleasant, subjective experience (qualia) and the electrical signals indicating physical damage.
A car has sensors that detect physical damage, yet it doesn't feel pain in the way that humans do. The question is, where on that spectrum bacteria, ants, and fish lie.
> Have you seen ants writhe around after being crushed or dismembered? They definitely feel pain.
Have you seen a car deploy its airbags and notify emergency services after a crash? And yet, they definitely don't feel pain. Visible reaction to a negative stimulus is neither a sufficient nor a necessary precondition for someone or something to feel pain.
Event plants, bacteria, and amoebas? You sound very sure – how do you know this?
Animals have consciousness and can feel pain. Animal and plant bodies are both comprised of many differentiated cells. Both have DNA. Bacteria are singular cells, and have DNA...
Plants have been demonstrated to have short-term memory, recognize family and neighbouring plants, and so on. So... it is extremely likely that plants, bacteria, fungi, and perhaps even amoebas, also have consciousness, feel emotions and feel pain. Maybe not in the way we think about emotions and pain, but in whatever way they do, which is entirely mysterious to us, being animals with animal-consciousness and instincts. We cannot understand what it is like to be a plant, bacterium, fungus or amoeba... it is far too alien to our animal-mind.
You may find these articles of interest:
http://www.naturaltherapycenter.com/the-secret-life-of-plant...
https://nautil.us/issue/34/adaptation/junk-food-is-bad-for-p...
Malfunctioning limbs will cause the same effect. Ant without a gaster will continue to function normally.
I know I feel pain. I don't know anything about your experience of pain.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What do parenting strategies have to do with any of this? (If I understand wikipedia correctly)
> 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.
That can always happen, with any kind of research. I don't see how this gives any reason to assume today that fish don't feel pain.
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.
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-...
Now if youd like to debate about whether death by itself, painless death, is amoral, that would be interesting and relevant to these critters..
I don't see eating meat as particularly immoral (this will likely change in the coming decades, as substitutes get better), but factory farming is pretty evil. Hunting and fishing help you avoid that.
If you hunt for prey, then eat the poor thing, perhaps after contemplating on its life a little. If you do not, then you're literally torturing an animal for no reason other than entertainment, while deluding yourself that you're taking the moral high ground.
This is similar to people who get outraged at hunters, but don't think twice about eating factory farmed meat daily.
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.
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.
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.
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)...
Do fishes have nociceptors? Evidence for the evolution of a vertebrate sensory system, 2003. 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/S016815910...
Can fish really feel pain?, 2012. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/faf.12010/abstrac...
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.
Just like humans are generally all alike (with few exceptions, such as size, food preferences or favorite pop song - we really are extremely similar to one another in almost every aspect of our life), so are animals much more like humans than many people think, and for me the default hypothesis is that they are indeed similar.
Then we try to disprove it. How can I prove that animals do not feel pain? Well I can try a few things: - Maybe they don't run from harm? - Maybe they don't fight when attacked? - Maybe they don't dodge hits? - Maybe they don't care about predators? - Maybe they don't have nervous system at all which we believe to be the basis for pain? (also based on an observation of people whose damaged nervous system made them not feel pain)
Turns out, all those things are broadly true about animals, so it's hard to prove they don't feel pain. So maybe they do?
If you try with thoughts, consciousness, abstraction, planning, communication, emotion, detecting emotion of others of the same species or other species, etc. you will quickly find that: - for some animals it seems quite certain they do all that - for some it's unclear how much they can do - for some it's almost certain they don't do any of that not just because they don't have the type of brain area which in humans is responsible for this, but also because there is nothing in their behavior, senses etc. that even resembles that kind of function.
I don't need to prove that my dog feels pain. Assuming he doesn't, why does he bark, bite, squeal etc. when something hurts it?
Because that is an evolutionary successful thing to do. The barking and squealing communicates to other dogs that there is danger, and the biting is simple self-preservation.
I don't care whether an animal thinks about the pain or emotes about it. You wouldn't put pedo porn on a disk because its bad karma. Just the fact that it exists is grotesque. So why put torture into the mind of a biological disk in the form of doge? The universe gives us so much.. greed is where heinous acts come from. Airing on the side of harmony doesn't cause later strife. Why take chances like cheap profiteers?
The less other people or things look like themselves, the more they are judged not to feel pain or any sort of inner state in the same way. There's never any evidence preceding the judgment; what precedes the judgment is a material dependence on that person or animal being treated in a way that would cause us pain, and the judgment is a result of demanding evidence for that pain that we wouldn't demand to prove that our neighbor felt pain.
Other things that at some time according to the scientific consensus didn't feel pain? Babies and black people.
Your question is foiled by semantics. The truth is the truth, regardless of phrasing of the hypothesis.
For example, if my hypothesis is that fish do feel pain, I pre-establish experiment criteria, which if witnessed during testing would support the conclusion that the hypothesis is true; fish do feel pain. Similarly, if I start with the hypothesis that fish do not feel pain, establish my criteria and witness the empirical results passing said criteria, then the results support that the hypothesis is true (fish do not feel pain).
So, it doesn't matter how the hypothesis is phrased, what matters is the test criteria and the empirical results against that criteria. You can arrive at the same conclusion either way.
If you want to contest something, contest the criteria the researcher uses to base their conclusion. However, it gets more difficult to refute results when multiple experiments using a variety of different techniques & criteria all tend to point to the same truth.
State a hypothesis, test, evaluate the results and draw a conclusion.
What you do with the results of the conclusions is up to you. I personally enjoy fishing, on the other hand, reading this article will give me pause WRT fishing as a sport in the future.
I do think the article has a slant and agenda, but it's an article about i terpreting/applying the results, not a scientific paper. The issue I have with the question presented is that it supposes that the experiments were conducted with some sort of bias. My point is that a properly designed experiment will test a hypothesis and yield evidence that points to some discernable truth. There is nothing different going on here that is any different from other experiments.
> In science, the use of anthropomorphic language that suggests animals have intentions and emotions has traditionally been deprecated as indicating a lack of objectivity. Biologists have been warned to avoid assumptions that animals share any of the same mental, social, and emotional capacities of humans, and to rely instead on strictly observable evidence. In 1927 Ivan Pavlov wrote that animals should be considered "without any need to resort to fantastic speculations as to the existence of any possible subjective states". More recently, The Oxford companion to animal behaviour (1987) advised that "one is well advised to study the behaviour rather than attempting to get at any underlying emotion".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism#In_science
After years of casually observing stray cats, for example, I would nearly bet my life that they experience complex emotions like love, embarrassment, and depression, but I know better than to draw that conclusion around my biologist and zookeeper friends. While the scientific motivation makes sense somewhat, I think it's pretty clearly a feel-good default notion that allows us humans to keep eating, experimenting on, and otherwise subjugating animals for our own purposes (not that I'm not guilty of some of these).
A plant has a nature of giving, radiating, making oxygen and providing for it's environment. A pig is a gatherer and hunter, and one of the more intelligent animals out there. When you try to catch a pig, it runs away, it squeals for it's life.
Anyway it's not about this fact even though it's important, more what's fucked up in our current system is the systematic enslavement of feeling, thinking animals from their birth, in these huge killing camps they call farms these days. If it was even natural, like it used to be more, that the animals lived a life that they could enjoy. How would you feel being bred just for kept in a cage and then systematically killed, with no feeling, no warmness in your life ever ?
I'm not necessarily a huge fan of factory farming, but if people want to be able to buy meat at any time, I don't really know much of a way around it. Though ranching still exists, there are plenty of ranches with heads of cattle that graze freely and eventually are taken to slaughterhouses.
If we did end factory farming, it wouldn't be as simple as just releasing these animals into the wild either. If we did they would very likely die of starvation. So we're talking about a generation of cattle/chickens that would basically need to be killed off so we didn't mess up the environment with a massive population explosion it couldn't handle.
On top of all of that, you are acting as if these animals are capable of the kind of thought that you and I are. They can think about their future, what their eventual fate is. This is fallacious. While animals may show signs of intelligence, there is no evidence of any kind of consciousness similar to ours.
This can even be evidenced through humans. People used to think that deaf people were mentally retarded in some way. Hence "deaf and dumb", however a lot of them were simply missing language. Language is extremely important as it not only allows for group cohesion, it also makes inner dialogue possible. While animals may have some basic kind of communicative capabilities, it is nothing on the level of humans. So without some kind of language, even if they're theoretically capable of cognitive thought, they can't have the same kind of existence as us.
https://www.verywell.com/deaf-history-deaf-not-retarded-1046...
Edit: Another link https://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-langua...
Killing an generation of animals for food is much better than raising hundreds or thousands of generations in captivity for the times to come.
Food is also nourishing, existence is also pleasurable, life is also about happiness and well-being.
Guess it's for the greater good of fish everywhere.
The important thing is not if something feels pain, but where we draw the line in regards if an animal's pain is more important than our pleasure. It does not take much human pleasure to make a few hundred million ameoba suffer, while it had better be pretty large to make a chimp suffer [1].
1. I am using pleasure here as shorthand for anything desired or beneficial for humans.
Of course there is the irrational ground that chimps look similar to us and therefore we find it unpleasant to think about the fact that they are suffering. So in the end it is all about our pleasure and nothing else. The tradeoff is between the amount our pleasure we get and for which it is unavoidable that the animal suffers, against the amount of our pleasure it costs because we feel sympathy for this particular animal race.
The only reason I chose chimps is I rather like them so it would take a lot for me to hurt one. Equally, I don't like Bullrouts [1] (having been poisoned by one) and I would not be upset if they were all to die a slow and painful death.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullrout
If you burn your hand, your body reacts before you become aware of the pain.
That is what the discussion about pain. Amoebas don't have the consciousness to experience pain, because they lack the higher brain functions involved
... this is a belief, not a fact. The reality is: we have no idea.
I think the important part here is making a clear distinction between reactions to noxious stimuli and the actual conscious experience of pain. That is where the discussion is.
The fact that something reacts to noxious stimuli (like amooebas sometimes do) is not a reason enough for moral consideration.
Oh really? Sounds like ideology more than fact.
Are you really insinuating that plants don't feel pain? Because they certainly do. Look up Cleve Backster's research on plants.
Solution doesn't seem that difficult to me.
The choice is between suffering for predators survival or for our pleasure. Note that predators don't always listen to humane treatment of animals proposals, so the amount of suffering could increase. But it will not be our fault, so it's OK, right?
This is a good place to start: https://vimeo.com/209647801
Factory farms are more-or-less a result of corporate capitalism and the greed for money.
Producing meat in this way also can't come close to supporting even current global demands for meat so it's not really a solution.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/nil-zacharias/its-time-to-end...
However, the current Capitalist system's greed will ensure that this doesn't happen, because of the junk/fast food industry and their advertizing.
Without junk/fast food's demands, the amount of meat required to sate the global population may actually shrink, because with proper education, food addiction may vanish, meaning we'll only need to eat what we actually need for nutrition and not for addiction's sake.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/is-the-livestock-indus...
I used to think that, but it's not a defensible point of view if you examine it a little more critically. Animals like pigs (or rather, their very very recent wild ancestors) have needs and behaviours that simply aren't useful to agriculture, and they can't possibly life fulfilling lives (not to mention that they should also be living for about 15 years rather than under a year).
The least we can do is to not eat them. It took me a long time to accept that, but that's how it is.
Why does it have to be about usefulness? They can live happy lives close enough to how they might live in the wild, at least until they're killed, if for food, no?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25064579
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/omega-3s-and-the-eskimo-fis...
The risk of the dying from the top 10 causes of death in the US is reduced, in many cases dramatically, by eating a plant based diet.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr59/nvsr59_04.pdf
Vegans have longer lifespans than non-vegans:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/...
When trying to properly answer the question "Is is acceptable to kill a human being for food, (caeteris paribus)", it is impossible, in the process, to avoid the recognition of the right to self-determination, and I find it difficult not to anchor that right to the perception of self, and to an independent sense of existence.
So it's not just that we will have to kill in order to eat, eventually: it's that sometimes that involves the destruction of a being that can, in some particular way, experience its own existence, which would make that killing ethically unacceptable.
If we value our own right to existence, how transmissible is that right? To what extent are non-human mammals, and vertebrates in general, etc, entitled to it?
Maybe humane killing is still wrong, for some animals.
Personally, I could not avoid considering the implications of the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in adjusting my behaviour, and not only in terms of my diet.
And dare I say this is the reason societies evolved in a way to avoid cannibalism of aged people.
The reason I brought it up is because I think it sets a line when discussing the right to kill for food: there are cases in which no harm comes of it, and other cases in which the practice would be highly objectionable.
A consequence of what you are saying is that it is impossible to claim a higher ground against a murderer if the murderer doesn't benefit from the murder or if an accuser can't make a case for it.
Besides, benefits are relative most of the time: you say there isn't one, but someone else may just as well argue there is.
But if you absolutely need a benefit, so be it: imagine someone eating human flesh simply to satiate one's appetite for it. It would still be a morally questionable practice because of other values put into question.
Anyway, this was a thread about fish feeling pain, so I insist: maybe there are many species we should treat in a different way, independently of whether they feel pain or not. Some scientists have reclaimed the statute of non-human personhood for great apes and cetaceans, for example. So killing them painlessly still raises questions.
It wasn't about if it's right or wrong to kill fish; it was about studies suggesting that fish feel pain at a level that is more than just reflex and so, where possible, we should slaughter fish more humanely than suffocation.
it's a clear evolutionary advantage. we have it, so do other living organisms in one way or another. I wouldn't be surprised if ie ants had some very similar highly unpleasant feedback from their injuries to drive them away from cause of it.
are we really that dumb that if we don't hear human voice scream in horror, then we consider that all is good?
Do scientists (some? most? few?) really agree that all animals are conscious? Or is the writer just interpolating? Would really like the writer to back this one up...
Pain indicates critical disharmony with the ideal state of any being. Same applies to plants! Do you think plants feel pain? They certainly do, but "pain" means something entirely different for them. What about planet earth and its ozone levels?
The real question we have to ask ourselves is, how much are we responsible for increasing the harmony in the world around us, vs. focusing on our own expansion in terms of technology, luxury and total population.
I do mostly fly fishing where (in the UK at least on stocked reservoirs) the catch is killed and (presumably) eaten. I guess in those circumstances it will be treated similar to hunting mammals.
For coarse/catch and release fishing, I'm less sure of the impact. I doubt if anyone will stop, but maybe it will mean mandatory barbless hooks and stronger lines so the fish can be reeled in faster and don't need to be played for so long to tire them out.
Feel free to whoosh me if this is satire flying over my head.
https://www.agrar.hu-berlin.de/de/institut/departments/daoe/...
"We weep for a bird's cry, but not for a fish's blood. Blessed are those with a voice." - Mamoru Oshii
e.g. a human on an opiate drug can feel pain signals but not be bothered about them. Yet he can still suffer from the knowledge of his impending death.
We can measure pain signals in animals; we can reasonably guess that most species don't know that they're eventually going to die. More than that we don't know yet. Perhaps when we understand better how the mind works (e.g. by developing AGI) we'll be able to understand animals better too.
This fairly clearly does not generalize to all forms of anesthesia, as some (including local ones) do block either pain sensors or the signals from them.
I am offering this merely as a datum, as I am not sure what to make of it.
Let’s imagine that, actually, deer don’t have any form of consciousness and cannot suffer. Imagine a deer critically injured in a hunt — nose flaring, eyes open wide, struggling to stand up, screaming maybe. This feels like a reasonable way for an animal to respond, backed by evolutionary reasons, even if its a mindless automaton.
Now imagine we magically imbue that deer with a consciousness in this situation. What measurably changes about their behavior? They still scream, try to run, struggle to survive — I can’t think of any way the situation would be different. Conscious or not, the deer behaves the same.
Thus, the claim “deers have consciousness” is non-falsifiable — the claim does not provide any way to be disproven, since there is no difference in measurable characteristics if the claim is true or false. One day, we might have a way to quantify consciousness. For the time being we are not even close.
Claims that are non-falsifiable are not really worthy of scientific inquiry. My personal conclusion, then, is that the question of consciousness is not a useful one. Any animal measurably displaying pain is in pain, in every useful form of the word, and we have a moral obligation to prevent it. Fish included.
Dr. Giulio Tononi[1] has developed an apparatus for calculating what he calls "integrated information"[2] which seems so far from limited experiments to be a good corrolary to the presence of consciousness in biological systems.
It's currently computationally intractable for the human brain at full resolution but heuristics are being developed to minimize that problem.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
[1] http://centerforsleepandconsciousness.med.wisc.edu/people/to...
[2] http://integratedinformationtheory.org/
This, particularly the “define” part, is the key problem.
> Now imagine we magically imbue that deer with a consciousness in this situation. What measurably changes about their behavior? They still scream, try to run, struggle to survive — I can’t think of any way the situation would be different.
Of course you can't, because you haven't defined what consciousness means. Without a definition, you can't answer the question of “what is different if it is present vs. absent”.
> Thus, the claim “deers have consciousness” is non-falsifiable
It's beyond that, it's meaningless.
Consciousness is definitely measurable and definable, but context is important as the word is used in many different scenarios. Terry Schiavo was conscious (because she is a human and humans are conscious beings) but was also not conscious (because she lost her faculties for consciousness).
To your points, the first step of talking about consciousness is defining the "rules of engagement", the context under which consciousness is discussed. Practically speaking, consciousness is a trait that separates humans from "everything else". When things display human-like tendencies (reacting to pain, showing affection, communicating, using tools, etc.), we say they are "conscious".
Hm - ok. Sure, non-falsifiable claims are against a typical "popperian" definition of what science is about. But then again isn't it worth asking yourself: even though a question is unanswerable at this time, might it still not be worth asking? A lot of questions that were once impossible to falsify were at one point moved from the realms of philosophy to science - like, are human character innate or is it entirely shaped by the environment. This question was at one point a purely philosophical question, now less so. Still not easily falsifiable. Actually, most questions in science don't fall in the clear-cut category of being that easy to falsify. Because it's not obvious exactly what the question means, or exactly how one would falsify it. Sure, it's easy to do it when talking about physics but that's about the only field. Take many ideas in social psychology, economics, biology or even hypothetical ideas in physics - like string theory.
Does that mean they are questions that are not "useful"?