I don’t appreciate the comment “It seems very suspiciously like it is just something EAs say to avoid commitments to prioritizing tiny animals that seem a bit mad.” Why not instead that assume people like me are actually thinking and reasoning in good faith, and make objective arguments, rather than deriding them in the middle of your otherwise good argument. If we were just intellectually dodging, I doubt we would be here on the forum trying to discuss and figure this thing out...
i could be wrong, but i think my kind of response here probably is common sense-ish (right or wrong). if you polled 100 in people on the street “assuming worms feel pain at all, do you think worms feel a lot less pain than humans?”, i think the response would be an overwhelming yes.
The dog question is a bit of a strawman because that’s not the question being discussed, but i would guess most people would believe that their dog feels less pain than they do (or it appears) as well, although the response here i agree would be quite different than the worm question.
I have looked a little at theories of the mind and i must confess i find it hard to get my head around them well. I have seen though that they are many and varied and there seems to be little consensus.
to have a go at explaining my thoughts, I don’t think that pain is like a substance, but i do think that the way tiny creatures are likely to experience the world is ways so wildly different from us, that even if there is something like sentience there, experiences for them might be so different to ours (including pain) that their experience, memory and integration of that “pain” (if we can even call out that same word) is likely to be so much smaller/blunted/muffled/different? compared with us (if it can even be compared), even if their responses to painful stimuli are similar ish. Pain responses are often binary-ish options (aversion or naught), but when it comes to felt experience the options are almost endless. I consider my experience growing up as a child, from complete blank to age 3, to to a foggy awareness, to something more concrete now. And what of a fetus before that?
so yes, the statement you readily deride “small conscious brains have proportionally less intense experiences than large conscious brains.” makes a decent amount of sense to me as a real possibility.
i could be wrong but this line of reasoning does seem related to integrated information theory (as far as i can tell).
Also i don’t at all understand how this comment can be true “pain is not stuff that the brain makes.” Without the brain there is no pain—does the the brain not then “make” it with neurons and chemicals? If the neuron/brain does not make the pain then what does make it? something has to make it. Unless there is some sleight of hand here around the word “make”...
I don’t appreciate the comment “It seems very suspiciously like it is just something EAs say to avoid commitments to prioritizing tiny animals that seem a bit mad.” Why not instead that assume people like me are actually thinking and reasoning in good faith, and make objective arguments, rather than deriding them in the middle of your otherwise good argument. If we were just intellectually dodging, I doubt we would be here on the forum trying to discuss and figure this thing out...
i could be wrong, but i think my kind of response here probably is common sense-ish (right or wrong). if you polled 100 in people on the street “assuming worms feel pain at all, do you think worms feel a lot less pain than humans?”, i think the response would be an overwhelming yes.
The dog question is a bit of a strawman because that’s not the question being discussed, but i would guess most people would believe that their dog feels less pain than they do (or it appears) as well, although the response here i agree would be quite different than the worm question.
I have looked a little at theories of the mind and i must confess i find it hard to get my head around them well. I have seen though that they are many and varied and there seems to be little consensus.
to have a go at explaining my thoughts, I don’t think that pain is like a substance, but i do think that the way tiny creatures are likely to experience the world is ways so wildly different from us, that even if there is something like sentience there, experiences for them might be so different to ours (including pain) that their experience, memory and integration of that “pain” (if we can even call out that same word) is likely to be so much smaller/blunted/muffled/different? compared with us (if it can even be compared), even if their responses to painful stimuli are similar ish. Pain responses are often binary-ish options (aversion or naught), but when it comes to felt experience the options are almost endless. I consider my experience growing up as a child, from complete blank to age 3, to to a foggy awareness, to something more concrete now. And what of a fetus before that?
so yes, the statement you readily deride “small conscious brains have proportionally less intense experiences than large conscious brains.” makes a decent amount of sense to me as a real possibility.
i could be wrong but this line of reasoning does seem related to integrated information theory (as far as i can tell).
Also i don’t at all understand how this comment can be true “pain is not stuff that the brain makes.” Without the brain there is no pain—does the the brain not then “make” it with neurons and chemicals? If the neuron/brain does not make the pain then what does make it? something has to make it. Unless there is some sleight of hand here around the word “make”...