
Fish Feel Pain - anarbadalov
https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/fish-feel-pain-now-what/
======
pillowkusis
The tricky bit about consciousness is that nobody can find a useful way to
measure or define it. So we end up chasing our tails talking about if fish
feel “pain”, that is, they suffer, and yet have no tools or criteria that
would help us know.

Let’s imagine that, actually, deer don’t have any form of consciousness and
cannot suffer. Imagine a deer critically injured in a hunt — nose flaring,
eyes open wide, struggling to stand up, screaming maybe. This feels like a
reasonable way for an animal to respond, backed by evolutionary reasons, even
if its a mindless automaton.

Now imagine we magically imbue that deer with a consciousness in this
situation. What measurably changes about their behavior? They still scream,
try to run, struggle to survive — I can’t think of any way the situation would
be different. Conscious or not, the deer behaves the same.

Thus, the claim “deers have consciousness” is non-falsifiable — the claim does
not provide any way to be disproven, since there is no difference in
measurable characteristics if the claim is true or false. One day, we might
have a way to quantify consciousness. For the time being we are not even
close.

Claims that are non-falsifiable are not really worthy of scientific inquiry.
My personal conclusion, then, is that the question of consciousness is not a
useful one. Any animal measurably displaying pain is in pain, in every useful
form of the word, and we have a moral obligation to prevent it. Fish included.

~~~
uoaei
You have rediscovered the "philosophical zombie" problem.[0]

Dr. Giulio Tononi[1] has developed an apparatus for calculating what he calls
"integrated information"[2] which seems so far from limited experiments to be
a good corrolary to the presence of consciousness in biological systems.

It's currently computationally intractable for the human brain at full
resolution but heuristics are being developed to minimize that problem.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie)

[1]
[http://centerforsleepandconsciousness.med.wisc.edu/people/to...](http://centerforsleepandconsciousness.med.wisc.edu/people/tononi.html)

[2]
[http://integratedinformationtheory.org/](http://integratedinformationtheory.org/)

~~~
pillowkusis
I was sure that I had come across something but didn't know what to google!
Thanks for the links.

------
mannykannot
I read an article not so long ago (unfortunately, I do not recall where)
mentioning the studies of a doctor who was able to open some minimal channel
of communication with patients under a certain form of anesthesia, through
which they were able to answer 'yes' when asked if they felt pain. After the
procedure, they had no recollection of pain (or of being questioned, IIRC.)

This fairly clearly does not generalize to all forms of anesthesia, as some
(including local ones) do block either pain sensors or the signals from them.

I am offering this merely as a datum, as I am not sure what to make of it.

------
baumbart
As humans we are evolved to have more compassion the more similar a being is
to us, and less compassion the more different it is from ourselves. Human
ethics is often selfish (pun not intended) in the sense that it is based on
what feels bad for US when doing it. In my opinion, there is nothing
objectively "good" or "bad", there is only harmony or disharmony in nature.

Pain indicates critical disharmony with the ideal state of any being. Same
applies to plants! Do you think plants feel pain? They certainly do, but
"pain" means something entirely different for them. What about planet earth
and its ozone levels?

The real question we have to ask ourselves is, how much are we responsible for
increasing the _harmony_ in the world around us, vs. focusing on our own
expansion in terms of technology, luxury and total population.

------
em3rgent0rdr
I have trouble believing that the common scientific consensus was that only
terrestrial vertebrates feel pain. Isn't pain an essential evolutionary
survival mechanism? Probably is one of the first feeling evolution produced
along with pleasure (for eating and sex).

~~~
red75prime
Negative stimulus reaction and pain are different things. We know we feel
pain. We can guess that organisms with similar brain architectures are feeling
pain. We can guess that chemotaxis don't induce anything like our pleasure and
pain in bacteria. Ants keep doing their job even after fatal damage. If they
feel something, it is not anything like our pain.

So it is not obvious that our feeling of pain is universal.

~~~
Valmar
> Negative stimulus reaction and pain are different things.

How are they different? Pain is a negative stimulus response that allows us to
know whether something is causing damage to our body.

> We know we feel pain. We can guess that organisms with similar brain
> architectures are feeling pain.

How does feeling pain have anything to do with a brain's architecture? It has
more to do with nerves... block a nerve's functioning, and you don't feel
pain. Also, pain can be psychosomatic.

> Ants keep doing their job even after fatal damage. If they feel something,
> it is not anything like our pain.

Have you seen ants writhe around after being crushed or dismembered? They
definitely feel pain.

> So it is not obvious that our feeling of pain is universal.

Depends on your definition of pain, doesn't it?

~~~
adwn
> _How are they different? Pain is a negative stimulus response that allows us
> to know whether something is causing damage to our body._

The difference is between the unpleasant, subjective experience (qualia) and
the electrical signals indicating physical damage.

A car has sensors that detect physical damage, yet it doesn't feel pain in the
way that humans do. The question is, where on that spectrum bacteria, ants,
and fish lie.

> _Have you seen ants writhe around after being crushed or dismembered? They
> definitely feel pain._

Have you seen a car deploy its airbags and notify emergency services after a
crash? And yet, they definitely don't feel pain. Visible reaction to a
negative stimulus is neither a sufficient nor a necessary precondition for
someone or something to feel pain.

~~~
Valmar
Living beings are not mere machines, so the comparison makes little sense. All
living beings have some form of consciousness, and so, are able to feel some
form of discomfort, of which pain is the most extreme.

~~~
adwn
> _All living beings have some form of consciousness_

Event plants, bacteria, and amoebas? You sound very sure – how do you know
this?

~~~
Valmar
I look at the common elements that living beings have, compared to plain
matter.

Animals have consciousness and can feel pain. Animal and plant bodies are both
comprised of many differentiated cells. Both have DNA. Bacteria are singular
cells, and have DNA...

Plants have been demonstrated to have short-term memory, recognize family and
neighbouring plants, and so on. So... it is extremely likely that plants,
bacteria, fungi, and perhaps even amoebas, also have consciousness, feel
emotions and feel pain. Maybe not in the way we think about emotions and pain,
but in whatever way they do, which is entirely mysterious to us, being animals
with animal-consciousness and instincts. We cannot understand what it is like
to be a plant, bacterium, fungus or amoeba... it is far too alien to our
animal-mind.

You may find these articles of interest:

[http://www.naturaltherapycenter.com/the-secret-life-of-
plant...](http://www.naturaltherapycenter.com/the-secret-life-of-plants/)

[https://nautil.us/issue/34/adaptation/junk-food-is-bad-
for-p...](https://nautil.us/issue/34/adaptation/junk-food-is-bad-for-plants-
too)

------
gadders
The article mostly focuses on commercial fishing, but I wonder what this will
mean for people that fish for pleasure?

I do mostly fly fishing where (in the UK at least on stocked reservoirs) the
catch is killed and (presumably) eaten. I guess in those circumstances it will
be treated similar to hunting mammals.

For coarse/catch and release fishing, I'm less sure of the impact. I doubt if
anyone will stop, but maybe it will mean mandatory barbless hooks and stronger
lines so the fish can be reeled in faster and don't need to be played for so
long to tire them out.

~~~
kawsper
If you can get past the obnoxious music, you can consider vishing:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhE9IIc_FTk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhE9IIc_FTk)

~~~
gadders
I may be missing the point there as I skimmed the video, but you don't
actually end up catching any fish as far as I can see. It looks like you're
just tossing food at them.

Feel free to whoosh me if this is satire flying over my head.

------
tremendulo
There's a difference between pain and suffering.

e.g. a human on an opiate drug can feel pain signals but not be bothered about
them. Yet he can still suffer from the knowledge of his impending death.

We can measure pain signals in animals; we can reasonably guess that most
species don't know that they're eventually going to die. More than that we
don't know yet. Perhaps when we understand better how the mind works (e.g. by
developing AGI) we'll be able to understand animals better too.

------
MaxBarraclough
Here's the mentioned "Can fish really feel pain?" paper by James D Rose et al.

[https://www.agrar.hu-
berlin.de/de/institut/departments/daoe/...](https://www.agrar.hu-
berlin.de/de/institut/departments/daoe/quagrec/dntw/jp_bfm/publ_html/roseetal-
fishfish-online-2012.pdf)

------
xyproto
The things they put those fish through in order to figure out that: yes, they
can actually feel pain.

Guess it's for the greater good of fish everywhere.

------
bjoli
I have thought a bit about what we put some fish species through.before eating
them. Sure, they probably don't experience pain the same way animals closer to
us do, but dragging them for a very long time with hooks in their
mouths/throats and then suffocating them to death just never seemed right to
me.

------
Tharkun
Relevant quote:

"We weep for a bird's cry, but not for a fish's blood. Blessed are those with
a voice." \- Mamoru Oshii

------
kristianov
Food is death. Existence is pain. Life is suffering.

~~~
inDigiNeous
All goes around in circles. The more suffering we cause, the more suffering we
feel. I wish people would understand this, when regarding eating animals.

~~~
pessimizer
What will you eat when we find out that plants feel pain, they just don't look
as much like us when they feel it as a pig does?

~~~
inDigiNeous
Ok this is the most oldest argument people throw around. Let's just agree to
look at this argument for a while and dissect couple of things: a plant
doesn't run away when you catch it. A pig does.

A plant has a nature of giving, radiating, making oxygen and providing for
it's environment. A pig is a gatherer and hunter, and one of the more
intelligent animals out there. When you try to catch a pig, it runs away, it
squeals for it's life.

Anyway it's not about this fact even though it's important, more what's fucked
up in our current system is the systematic enslavement of feeling, thinking
animals from their birth, in these huge killing camps they call farms these
days. If it was even natural, like it used to be more, that the animals lived
a life that they could enjoy. How would you feel being bred just for kept in a
cage and then systematically killed, with no feeling, no warmness in your life
ever ?

~~~
supreme_sublime
Plants aren't capable of running away. I really don't see this as much of an
argument. Then again, I don't know if I agree that "plants feel pain" either.

I'm not necessarily a huge fan of factory farming, but if people want to be
able to buy meat at any time, I don't really know much of a way around it.
Though ranching still exists, there are plenty of ranches with heads of cattle
that graze freely and eventually are taken to slaughterhouses.

If we did end factory farming, it wouldn't be as simple as just releasing
these animals into the wild either. If we did they would very likely die of
starvation. So we're talking about a generation of cattle/chickens that would
basically need to be killed off so we didn't mess up the environment with a
massive population explosion it couldn't handle.

On top of all of that, you are acting as if these animals are capable of the
kind of thought that you and I are. They can think about their future, what
their eventual fate is. This is fallacious. While animals may show signs of
intelligence, there is no evidence of any kind of consciousness similar to
ours.

This can even be evidenced through humans. People used to think that deaf
people were mentally retarded in some way. Hence "deaf and dumb", however a
lot of them were simply missing language. Language is extremely important as
it not only allows for group cohesion, it also makes inner dialogue possible.
While animals may have some basic kind of communicative capabilities, it is
nothing on the level of humans. So without some kind of language, even if
they're theoretically capable of cognitive thought, they can't have the same
kind of existence as us.

[https://www.verywell.com/deaf-history-deaf-not-
retarded-1046...](https://www.verywell.com/deaf-history-deaf-not-
retarded-1046548)

Edit: Another link [https://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-
langua...](https://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-language/)

~~~
inDigiNeous
Have you ever watched an animal in the eyes? Can you not see consciousness
there ? This is the same as thinking that animals don't have feelings. What
about dogs, have you not seen dogs doing kind things ?

Killing an generation of animals for food is much better than raising hundreds
or thousands of generations in captivity for the times to come.

------
justanotherjoe
> Moreover, the notion that fish do not have the cerebral complexity to feel
> pain is decidedly antiquated. Scientists agree that most, if not all,
> vertebrates (as well as some invertebrates) are conscious and that a
> cerebral cortex as swollen as our own is not a prerequisite for a subjective
> experience of the world

Do scientists (some? most? few?) really agree that all animals are conscious?
Or is the writer just interpolating? Would really like the writer to back this
one up...

~~~
mannykannot
The issue is inescapably tied up with how you define consciousness. Note that
it is not generally considered to be synonymous with self-consciousness.

------
danieltillett
Of course they do else they would not avoid things that damage them
physically. Even amoebas "feel" pain.

The important thing is not if something feels pain, but where we draw the line
in regards if an animal's pain is more important than our pleasure. It does
not take much human pleasure to make a few hundred million ameoba suffer,
while it had better be pretty large to make a chimp suffer [1].

1\. I am using pleasure here as shorthand for anything desired or beneficial
for humans.

~~~
misja111
I don't see any rational ground to make the suffering of an amoeba a million
times less relevant than the suffering of a single chimp.

Of course there is the irrational ground that chimps look similar to us and
therefore we find it unpleasant to think about the fact that they are
suffering. So in the end it is all about our pleasure and nothing else. The
tradeoff is between the amount our pleasure we get and for which it is
unavoidable that the animal suffers, against the amount of our pleasure it
costs because we feel sympathy for this particular animal race.

~~~
danieltillett
There is none, but that doesn't change that we need to make this decision.
Your body kills millions on amoeba every day just to stay alive. Ultimately
the tradeoff between human pleasure and animal suffering is arbitrary and set
by society and personal preference.

The only reason I chose chimps is I rather like them so it would take a lot
for me to hurt one. Equally, I don't like Bullrouts [1] (having been poisoned
by one) and I would not be upset if they were all to die a slow and painful
death.

1\.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullrout](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullrout)

~~~
pessimizer
I think the only problem with that criterion is that it doesn't work for
Azerbaijanis and Armenians.

------
saiya-jin
why is anybody surprised? if any complex organism has nervous system, this can
transfer all kinds of information including pain.

it's a clear evolutionary advantage. we have it, so do other living organisms
in one way or another. I wouldn't be surprised if ie ants had some very
similar highly unpleasant feedback from their injuries to drive them away from
cause of it.

are we really that dumb that if we don't hear human voice scream in horror,
then we consider that all is good?

------
wiz21c
Could we agree once for all that we are predators in a food pyramid and that
this naturally implies that we kill to eat. Now, as a sentient species, we
might try to kill in a more acceptable way (for the victim), but that won't
change much to the result : we kill.

~~~
cageface
Humans are omnivores with a physiology primarily geared towards eating &
digesting plants. We can eat animals but we absolutely don't _need_ to to live
a long, healthy life. So it's really a matter of how much you value your own
pleasure & taste over another creature's suffering.

~~~
leadingthenet
There’s still a significant difference between eating meat less often and
abstaining from meat and other animal products completely, isn’t there?

~~~
cageface
Yeah sure. The suffering you cause is proportional to how much meat you eat.
If quitting it entirely is too big a step for you then try scaling it back.
Even a single meat-free day a week is a good place to start. You may find you
don't miss it as much as you think you will.

~~~
Valmar
> The suffering you cause is proportional to how much meat you eat.

Oh really? Sounds like ideology more than fact.

Are you really insinuating that plants don't feel pain? Because they certainly
do. Look up Cleve Backster's research on plants.

~~~
cageface
It takes 7-10 kg of plants to produce one kg of meat, so you're causing that
much more suffering even if you are willing to claim that plants suffer as
much as we do from pain.

~~~
Valmar
Then we just need to feed the animals their natural diets instead of the
abnormal, unnatural diet of grains and soyabeans that most factory-farmed
animals are currently fattened on.

Solution doesn't seem that difficult to me.

~~~
cageface
If we do that then we can all eat meat about once a week. And anyway the ratio
of plants eaten to meat produced would be about the same so no gain there.

------
hathym
Nothing compared to duck pain in France.

