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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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
[1] http://centerforsleepandconsciousness.med.wisc.edu/people/to...
I was sure that I had come across something but didn't know what to google! Thanks for the links.
> 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"?
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".
> 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
It's beyond that, it's meaningless.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
This sums up the whole debate debate in a nutshell.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
we can't say the same for fish, or plants... etc.
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."
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...
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.
I'd say it's not about consensus but about proving it.
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.
If you can get past the obnoxious music, you can consider vishing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhE9IIc_FTk
There's a difference between pain and suffering.
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.
Here's the mentioned "Can fish really feel pain?" paper by James D Rose et al.
https://www.agrar.hu-berlin.de/de/institut/departments/daoe/...
The things they put those fish through in order to figure out that: yes, they can actually feel pain.
Guess it's for the greater good of fish everywhere.
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.
Relevant quote:
"We weep for a bird's cry, but not for a fish's blood. Blessed are those with a voice." - Mamoru Oshii
Food is death. Existence is pain. Life is suffering.
Life is pain, highness. Anyone trying to tell you different is selling something.
Not true ~ these qualities are part of life, but are not the whole of life.
Food is also nourishing, existence is also pleasurable, life is also about happiness and well-being.
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.
> 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...
The issue is inescapably tied up with how you define consciousness. Note that it is not generally considered to be synonymous with self-consciousness.
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.
You confuse pain (which is a conscious feeling) with the response to potentially damaging stimuli.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
We are also sentient enough to consciously decide what to kill, and maybe restrict ourselves to plants.
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.
No we can’t, because it is wrong.
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.
Nothing compared to duck pain in France.