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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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".
It's not terribly surprising, intuitively, that a large range of living things feel and remember pain.
The seeming clarity or obviousness doesn't mean it's not worthwhile to study it, test the assumption, prove or disprove, figure out what creatures are subject to it and to what extent, etc. I imagine we could learn a lot trying to explain it.
> 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.
Epistemic asymmetry. You can't even prove that the pain-behavior you observe me demonstrating reflects an internal experience that's anything like your experience of pain, so asking for "proof" that a fish's pain is actually painful isn't even an objectively meaningful question.
> 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.
Isn't feeling pain the equivalent of negative reward?
Negative reward must be avoided, similarly, pain must be avoided.
Isn't this a good enough reason to feel pain?
Did you read the article? It attempts to explain why verifying "pain" is difficult: simply reacting to a stimulus is an unacceptably low bar, unless you're living your life believing that all the plants you've eaten and the bacteria you've soaped off your hands were murdered, so they're attempting more subtle analysis to pull back the curtain on the inner states of animals, point being that the inner state is what's necessary for pain.
Using the word "pain" as such, you conflate behavior related to negative stimuli, nociceptors' signals processing, and subjective feelings. Only the first one can drive evolution.
It's not. It just means you blocked the negative stimulus, so that innate reflex you mentioned does not trigger.
It doesn't necessarily mean they feel pain.
Personally I don't think this question is possible to answer, so I behave as if all animals feel pain and I avoid inflicting it, except when I have no alternative. And when I have no alternative I try to minimize the duration and/or severity (giving priority to minimizing duration over severity).
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.
They would have to experience some negative stimulus to avoid it. Disagreement with the term pain does not remove the resume that learned avoidance requires detection of a negative stimulus.
Further, while we separate negative stimulus into say thirst and pain, the fact you can torture people with either means the difference is ethically more semantic than meaningful.
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.
reply