I suspect that there is a difference in projecting our emotional reaction to pain as empathy toward fellow humans and animals as well. It isn’t that one cannot observe animals in pain, but to suggest that we ‘know’ what the animal is experiencing is a projection on our part. This isn’t to suggest that we should feel free to treat animals with callous indifference, but we have no way to know how the animal experiences pain other than our human perspective, which may have nothing to do with the animals experience.
I would argue that it is no more a projection then we do with other people, given the evidence.
What’s dubious is the assumption that an animal which exerpiences the world in a fundamentally different way than you, is going to experience pain in a fundamentally similar way.
I’m just wondering how this argument works: human brains are similar to other mammalian brains therefore the way non-human mammalian animals apprehend pain is similar to the way humans do? And this is based off what? The psycho-physical law that if a brain is similar then experience must also be similar in the relevant ways. And even though a few percentage different in DNA accounts for something as distinct and important as higher cognitive functioning and thought processes, the assumption still follows that many similarities trumps few, but highly important difference? An even though the 1.5%(maybe 5%) difference between human and chimpanzee DNA, this translates into 15 million changes in our genome, these changes are irrelevant to the experiencing of pain.
It is only through a behavioral analogy that you acknowledge the pain of the Other, anyway, so to say that because an animal does not speak your language you can no longer make behavioral analogies is to say that when you punch me…and I throw up my hands and shout “ouch!”…I might not be in pain…and could be lying.
Is this your position sir? Or are you willing to agree that animals act in ways which are indicative of experiencing pain? When you smack a dog, and it yelps, do you assume it is not in pain?
Put a dog in an MIR and check out brain activity poke it with a needle, the same areas light up as in a human brain. Furthermore, the morphology of the areas that experience the pain (like the thalmus, insula, and cerebellum) are all quite homogeneous in the structure across species lines.
And this translates into the dog experiencing/apprehending pain in a relevantly similar way to humans, how? Maybe if the sum total of the brain was structures involved with noxious stimuli, but that is not the case, and millions of differences remain that impact how something feels pain in unknown ways. Perhaps you are contending that the brain is a series of closed structures, where the apprehension of stimuli to one structure is independent of other structures? Whereas there would be multiple minds, each one corresponding to independently functioning strucures.
Otherwise I don’t see how what you said entails identical experience.
I fully accept that other animals feel pain, but this is not the problem I have with such an argument, the question is weather a dog feels pain in the same way that a human feels pain, despite major differences in the functioning of the brain. Meaning, is it bad for a dog to feel pain, in the same way that it is bad for a human to feel pain. Or for an analogy, some people are less effected by pain than others, am I to understand that dogs are affected in the same way as humans, despite the fact that even among humans the experience differs.
Am I also to understand that higher cognitive functions do not impact the experiencing of pain in any significant way?
As Xunzian has shown, the similarities in nervous system structure between most animals (vertebrates) suggests that the human species, with such a nervous system, experienced pain long before it could express it verbally or through behavior, other than involuntary action (flinching or blocking a punch or snatching your hand from a fire). If this is the case, you cannot rely on language alone as the signification that another person is in pain. And if this is the case, you must assume that similiar behaviors express similiar fundamental experiences. I would, for example, assume the dog was in pain if he attempted to run from me when I smacked him.
Again, you are missing the point. The question is not if a dog experiences pain, but given the differences between a dog and a human, is this pain experienced in an relevantly similar way.
Not at all. It is a complex network, however, these areas are the ones that are specialized to experience pain. Despite being a complex network, a surgeon can place a needle into a man’s brain and render him unable to speak, or to constantly speak in gibberish. It is networked, but quite precise.
So, from that, we can see that:
-
Animals have the same apparati that humans do with respect to pain perceptions.
-
Animals react to pain in similar ways to humans.
-
Humans believe that other humans can feel pain
3a) Humans believe other humans can feel pain because they have similar apparati with respect to pain perception
3b) Humans react to pain in similar ways to each other.
Now, can we ever really “know” whether another human feels pain or whether an animal feels pain? Well, that all depends on which philosopher you listen to and how far you want to ride the crazy train with respect to the question “what is knowing”. After all, even human brains have differences and no one doubts that even the most horrendously retarded person can feel pain.
The question is merely of how acutely one can feel pain. Again, there is a huge variance here in the human population – for example, women feel pain less acutely then men. Some people have a polymorphism in their opioid receptors that makes them either much less or much more susceptible to pain. But we are talking about the quale of pain which does seem to be consistent. I would go so far as to argue that the range of experience of this quale is also relatively limited even across species lines – after all, by all accounts animals respond similarly to similar levels of pain as a human being.
So you’re telling me that with all the differences between a dog brain and a human brain, and given that the relatively few differences between human and human brain correlates into meaninfully different ways of experiencing pain, the differences of dog/human does not correlate into a significant difference in apprehension of pain.
Again, you’re conclusion does not follow from your premises, you do not know what it means to experience pain without upper cognitive functions, nor do you know what it means to experience pain with the brain of a dog. All you can say is that dogs experience pain, and they experience pain when exposed to the same noxious stimuli as humans, this says nothing about what this experience is. Pain is the experiencing of pain, or how pain is apprehended in the mind.
If you mean by “way” certain procedures the body generates to cause the body to behave in such a way that lessens the chances that it be affected by the painful stimulus again…yes, it is “experienced” in the same way.
Perhaps you should consider your idea in strict materialist terms; what else is there “feeling” pain if not the material body of the organism?
Are you asking if there is a “you” inside a dog? Are you asking if he thinks to himself when getting smacked “damn, that hurts…why is this happening?”
It even seems that you recognize this inconsistency in your line of reasoning, and you resort to the outward behavior of animals to contend that the experience is similar. But, this is obviously dubious, and probably circular.
As I’ve said before, the only other option is solipsism, which is a rather debunked line of thinking.
We have outward behavior. We have the structures that give rise to said behavior. Both match up and are consistent with one another. There is some variance, but not terribly much.
Now, we can either assume that these two elements are separable, so you have:
Pain stimulus —>physical structures that respond to pain activating—>magic—>pain response.
Or you have:
Pain stimulus—>physical structures that respond to pain activating—>pain response.
I would argue that the second option is more reasonable then the former.
Experiencing is a pyscho-physical process, meaning it involves consciousness, but consciousness is nothing but a phyiscial process expressed in a psychic way. The question is, does the difference between a dog brain and a human brain account for different modes of consciousness, and thus difference ways of experiencing. The answer is obviously yes, and thus one cannot assume that a dog experiencing pain in the same way a human does, as they do not experience in the same way.
Like I said, this line of argumentation is circular, you are saying that we know a dog experiences pain the same way as human because it reacts to noxious stimuli in a similar way to human. The missing premise is that dogs and humans are moved to similar action by similar experience. Or more presisly you assume that dogs and human experience in a similar way, thus react in a similar way, then you see dogs react to similar stimuli as humans, thus affirming what you already assumed.
But again, we’re talking about involitary reactions here, which says nothing about the expiencing of pain, but more about instinctual behavior.
No, we have
Pain stimulus---->physical structures that respond to pain activating—>a complex network of brain function dependent on things that mediate apprehension---->psychic pain response.
or you have
Pain stimulus---->a closed system of physical structures that are not mediated by other parts of the brain—>behavioral pain response that magically correlates to a definite way of experiencing.
Just give me the psycho-physical law that correlated physical B(in all relevant animals) to apprehension B, and we can be done with it.
And while we’re at it, we might as well get the psycho-physical law that states “outward behavioral response B entails experiencing of X.”
And no, I am not offering up a dualism.
Absolutely crazy!
The ‘magic’ was about the unknowable. After all, the line between those two is unknowable even in other humans. I fail to see how your system accounts for that.
And parallel thought isn’t circular.