But even a 10% chance that fish feel pain—and that we annually painfully slaughter a population roughly ten times the number of humans who have ever lived—is enough to make it a serious issue. Given the mind-bending scale of the harm we inflict on fish, even a modest chance that they feel pain is enough.
Completely in agreement here.
And while it’s possible that evolution produced some kind of non-conscious signal that produces identical behavior to pain, such a thing is unlikely. If a creature didn’t feel pain, it’s unlikely it would respond to analgesics, seek out analgesic drugs, and get distracted by bodily damage.
This is where I would disagree. I expect moderately-complicated creatures would develop traits like these under evolutionary pressures (except seeking out analgesic drugs). The question then is how likely is it that the best / only / easiest-to-evolve way to produce this slate of behaviors involves having a conscious experience with the relevant pain profile.
We know that human brains have undergone massive changes since our most recent common ancestor with fish, that terrestrial environments place very different demands on our bodies, that human beings have an unparalleled behavioral flexibility to address injuries, etc. so it is plausible that we do have fairly different nociceptive faculties. It seems to me like a pretty open question precisely how neurologically or algorithmically similar our faculties are and how similar they would need to be to for fish to qualify as having pain. The fact that we can’t even tell how important the cortex is for pain in humans seems like strong evidence that we shouldn’t be too confident about attributing pain to fish. We just know so little. Of course, we shouldn’t be confident about denying it to them either, but much confidence either way seems unjustifiable.
Majorly disagree! I think that while probably you’d expect an animal to behave aversively in response to stimuli, it’s surprising that:
This distracts them from other aversive stimuli (nociception doesn’t typically work that way—it’s not like elbow twitches distract you and make you less likely to have other twitches.
They’d react to anaesthetic (they could just have some aversive behavior without anaesthetic).
Completely in agreement here.
This is where I would disagree. I expect moderately-complicated creatures would develop traits like these under evolutionary pressures (except seeking out analgesic drugs). The question then is how likely is it that the best / only / easiest-to-evolve way to produce this slate of behaviors involves having a conscious experience with the relevant pain profile.
We know that human brains have undergone massive changes since our most recent common ancestor with fish, that terrestrial environments place very different demands on our bodies, that human beings have an unparalleled behavioral flexibility to address injuries, etc. so it is plausible that we do have fairly different nociceptive faculties. It seems to me like a pretty open question precisely how neurologically or algorithmically similar our faculties are and how similar they would need to be to for fish to qualify as having pain. The fact that we can’t even tell how important the cortex is for pain in humans seems like strong evidence that we shouldn’t be too confident about attributing pain to fish. We just know so little. Of course, we shouldn’t be confident about denying it to them either, but much confidence either way seems unjustifiable.
Majorly disagree! I think that while probably you’d expect an animal to behave aversively in response to stimuli, it’s surprising that:
This distracts them from other aversive stimuli (nociception doesn’t typically work that way—it’s not like elbow twitches distract you and make you less likely to have other twitches.
They’d react to anaesthetic (they could just have some aversive behavior without anaesthetic).
They’d rub their wounds.
etc