“Extreme pain or discomfort reduces health-related quality of life by 41%.
“Nerve damage results in a loss of health-related quality of life between 39% for diabetes-caused nerve damage and 85% for failed back surgery syndrome.”
This makes sense—one interesting point here is that failed back surgery syndrome and severe nerve damage are some of the more severe and chronic pains humans suffer (makes me shudder thinking about it TBH, have a couple of friends who have suffered from that) yet people still lead “net positive” lives with the pain and usually want to keep living.
“I also think that many coping mechanisms (e.g. “I’m suffering for a cause! Or for my children!” etc) are mostly possible because the suffering being has higher order brain function which allows those complex ideas to have similar mental sway to the feeling of suffering. So it feels plausible to me that a chicken would have a harder time “coping” with suffering than a human in an equivalent situation.” That’s true—its also true that human’s complex ideas lead us vulnerable to complex mental health issues which can modulate pain to make it worse. I’d be so uncertain as to be 50⁄50 on whether modulation effects would be worse for humans.
”To quantify my subjective and very uncertain feelings on the matter, I’d put a 40-80% probability that coping mechanisms don’t reduce chickens’ suffering by more than 50%” - This sounds fair enough
“Extreme pain or discomfort reduces health-related quality of life by 41%.
“Nerve damage results in a loss of health-related quality of life between 39% for diabetes-caused nerve damage and 85% for failed back surgery syndrome.”
This makes sense—one interesting point here is that failed back surgery syndrome and severe nerve damage are some of the more severe and chronic pains humans suffer (makes me shudder thinking about it TBH, have a couple of friends who have suffered from that) yet people still lead “net positive” lives with the pain and usually want to keep living.
“I also think that many coping mechanisms (e.g. “I’m suffering for a cause! Or for my children!” etc) are mostly possible because the suffering being has higher order brain function which allows those complex ideas to have similar mental sway to the feeling of suffering. So it feels plausible to me that a chicken would have a harder time “coping” with suffering than a human in an equivalent situation.” That’s true—its also true that human’s complex ideas lead us vulnerable to complex mental health issues which can modulate pain to make it worse. I’d be so uncertain as to be 50⁄50 on whether modulation effects would be worse for humans.
”To quantify my subjective and very uncertain feelings on the matter, I’d put a 40-80% probability that coping mechanisms don’t reduce chickens’ suffering by more than 50%”
- This sounds fair enough