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KiteAuraan posted:Nothing because it's outside of our power, but if it's within our power to stop suffering in any form I would say that as rational beings we have a moral imperative to stop it. Hold up here. This is a major philosophical claim you're making here, and one that's not at all agreed upon. If it's within our power to stop suffering, do we really have a moral imperative to do so? There's tons of actual human suffering already in the world which I feel no moral compulsion to stop. Why should I suddenly worry about animal suffering when I'm not even worried about most human suffering? That is to say, I certainly agree that stopping suffering is morally good. It's definitely a good deed to stop both human and animal suffering. But am I morally obligated to do so?
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Dec 6, 2014 17:40
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blowfish posted:Uh... what about an AI that starts by moving around a coordinate grid, and uses a statistics package to bias its movement away from coordinates that say "don't go here" by correlating the probability of a field saying "don't go here" with some other variables you wrote into the coordinate field? It certainly exhibits learned avoidance of a noxious stimulus (people keep trying to redefine pain to mean this for some reason), so should it have a right not to feel pain? See, this is the problem that I have. Most animals will withdraw, escape, etc in response to some noxious stimulus. Is that pain? Plants, too, will sometimes withdraw from noxious stimuli, the mimosa plant being chief among them. Is that pain? If you've ever taken a close look at insects, you can tell that they are little more than biological robots. They march around, they follow a few simple rules, and they keep marching even if they lose a leg. Do they really experience pain? My point is that you can have "responses to noxious stimuli" and "pain" without ever having suffering. Even in people, too. As a medical student, I've done a number of neurological exams on unconscious/comatose people. They will withdraw to pain, flex an extremity to pain, etc. But as far as anyone can tell, they aren't actually "experiencing" pain. They certainly aren't experiencing fear, anguish, or existential terror. Is pain what we as humans truly dislike, or is it suffering? And how many animals suffer? I would argue few others, if any. Personally, I would refrain from hurting anything with a demonstrable sense of self. Dolphins, gorillas, etc. Anything that passes a mirror test or shows empathy for others. But many animals, even if they experience pain, don't really suffer. I don't worry about them nearly as much.
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Dec 7, 2014 04:57
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Torka posted:Something I've always noticed about drinking alcohol while I'm in physical pain is that it doesn't actually reduce the sensation of pain the way a proper analgesic like acetaminophen does, it just makes me not mind it. It's still there but it stops being bothersome, somehow. There's an entire class of anesthetics that basically operate on this principle: the dissociative anesthetics, including ketamine and PCP. They don't directly block peripheral pain signals like lidocaine or induce unconsciousness like propofol or halofurane or whatever. Instead, you don't perceive the pain as applying to you. With higher doses, you can lose your sense of self entirely. The pain is there, but it doesn't have any attachment to your body. Again, this might seem like a basic point that pain =/= the perception of pain, but it really is central to any animal rights/mistreatment argument. I won't deny that animals experience pain. It's a highly useful evolutionary trait. But what do they think about it? My argument is that if you don't have a sense of self, you can't actually suffer from the pain.
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Dec 7, 2014 18:10
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Rexicon1 posted:What are you defining as "sense of self". I've read a bunch of cognition psychology papers and I still have a very hard time figuring out how to determine what creatures have a "sense of self". Are you saying that they have the ability to identify that what is happening is happening to them? Are you thinking about second-order cognition where they are able to think about themselves as separate from everything else? It's important to understand these terms that we often take for granted in order to avoid specious arguments about "self". There's the idea of self-concept vs. self-awareness vs. self-knowledge and each has its own implications. That's the hard part, and I certainly won't claim to know the answer. I'm not familiar with what that functioning might be called in psychology. I guess the function that I'm referring to is that of the parietal lobe, where various sensory information is processed to form a coherent mental model of one's own body. That's why you can get parietal lobe lesions leading to hemineglect or foreign limb sensation, etc where you either aren't aware of part of your body or don't recognize part of your body as "you." That is, unless the animal is developed enough to create a mental model of themselves and identify with it, it's hard to imagine that there's a distinct entity suffering as opposed to a more machine/robot-like stimulus-response to pain without "suffering" involved. That's why I would consider tests of self-awareness like the mirror test to be important for determining a creature's moral significance. I would still prefer to err on the side of caution--it's certainly possible that there are other animals with a good mental model of themselves who don't pass the mirror test for whatever reason, and we need to determine how to identify those or prove that the mirror test has good correlation.
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Dec 7, 2014 19:25
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