“i don’t believe very small animals feel pain, and if they do my best guess would be it would be thousands to millions orders of magnitude less pain than larger animals.”
I’ll repeat what regular readers of the forum are bored of me saying about this. As a philosophy of consciousness PhD, I barely ever heard the idea that small animals are conscious, but their experiences are way less intense. At most, it might be a consequence of integrated information theory, but not one I ever saw discussed and most people in the field don’t endorse that one theory anyway. I cannot think of any other theory which implies this, or any philosophy of mind reason to think it is so. It seems very suspiciously like it is just something EAs say to avoid commitments to prioritizing tiny animals that seem a bit mad. Even if we take seriously the feeling that those commitments are a bit mad, there are any number of reasons that could be true apart from “small conscious brains have proportionally less intense experiences than large conscious brains.” The whole idea also smacks to me of the idea that pain is literally a substance, like water or sand that the brain somehow “makes” using neurons as an ingredient, in the way that combining two chemicals might make a third via a reaction, and how much of the product you get out depends on how much you put in. On mind-body dualist views this picture might make some kind of surface sense, though it’ll get a bit complicated once you start thinking about the possibility of conscious aliens without neurons. But on more popular physicalist views of consciousness, this picture is just wrong: conscious pain is not stuff that the brain makes.
Nor does it particularly seem “commonsense” to me. A dog has a somewhat smaller brain than a human, but I don’t think most people think that their dog CAN feel pain, but it feels somewhat less pain than it appears, because it’s brain is a bit smaller than a persons. Of course, it could be intensity is the same once you hit a certain brain size no matter how much you then scale up, but it starts to dop off proportionately when you hit a certain level of smallness, but that seems pretty ad hoc.
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 believe very small animals feel pain, and if they do my best guess would be it would be thousands to millions orders of magnitude less pain than larger animals.”
I’ll repeat what regular readers of the forum are bored of me saying about this. As a philosophy of consciousness PhD, I barely ever heard the idea that small animals are conscious, but their experiences are way less intense. At most, it might be a consequence of integrated information theory, but not one I ever saw discussed and most people in the field don’t endorse that one theory anyway. I cannot think of any other theory which implies this, or any philosophy of mind reason to think it is so. It seems very suspiciously like it is just something EAs say to avoid commitments to prioritizing tiny animals that seem a bit mad. Even if we take seriously the feeling that those commitments are a bit mad, there are any number of reasons that could be true apart from “small conscious brains have proportionally less intense experiences than large conscious brains.” The whole idea also smacks to me of the idea that pain is literally a substance, like water or sand that the brain somehow “makes” using neurons as an ingredient, in the way that combining two chemicals might make a third via a reaction, and how much of the product you get out depends on how much you put in. On mind-body dualist views this picture might make some kind of surface sense, though it’ll get a bit complicated once you start thinking about the possibility of conscious aliens without neurons. But on more popular physicalist views of consciousness, this picture is just wrong: conscious pain is not stuff that the brain makes.
Nor does it particularly seem “commonsense” to me. A dog has a somewhat smaller brain than a human, but I don’t think most people think that their dog CAN feel pain, but it feels somewhat less pain than it appears, because it’s brain is a bit smaller than a persons. Of course, it could be intensity is the same once you hit a certain brain size no matter how much you then scale up, but it starts to dop off proportionately when you hit a certain level of smallness, but that seems pretty ad hoc.
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”...