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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   18971 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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I don't think shrimps have minds, consciousness, or the ability to recognise above the transient physical sensation.

What…do you think pain is, exactly?

I’m asking this as someone who also does not really care about shrimp. It seems obvious to me that transient, physical sensations can be Bad in an abstract sense. I would understand if a human would like to avoid them. Same for a dog or a bird or a weird little sea bug. We’re all capable of identifying Bad Things and preferring to avoid them.

Note that I say “capable,” because we higher beings are also capable of accepting Bad Things to get more Good Things. Even a dog can learn to restrain itself for long enough to get the treat. The shrimp cannot choose. This is…fine. Or, at the least, it’s the natural order of things, and we don’t have any obligation to fix it. But it’s perfectly reasonable to prefer less of the Bad Thing, and to ask ourselves how much of it we want to create.

Which brings me to the octopus.

Frankly, I’m disappointed in your proposed solution. Either you’re assuming empathy for these things is driven by cuteness, and may thus be dispelled by the unvarnished truth; if so, you are failing to take your opponents seriously. Or you know that their support comes from other reasons, in which case you’re engaging in the age-old atheist pursuit. Aha, if those darn Papists see one news segment about a deviant priest, they will surely cast away all belief in the Church!

If octopuses think their own species make delicious meals, why object to a totally different species eating them?

We are responsible for our own choices. Augustine was quite clear on this, too.

You're expecting me to worry about a shrimp feeling pain as though it feels it the way a human does: that it has the concept of pain, remembers past pain, can anticipate future pain, and feels it on more levels than the mere physical.

Once the immediate physical sensation passes, and I have no idea how acutely a shrimp may feel pain which is another question entirely, I don't think the shrimp suffers at all. It's humans who are going around fretting over shrimp, while shrimp in the wild probably have a lot more limbs torn off or damaged than an eyestalk.

Like I said, a plant having its stalk cut also suffers physical damage, but I don't think anyone (as yet) would claim that you are inflicting 'pain' on your rose bushes when you prune them.

Like I said, a plant having its stalk cut also suffers physical damage, but I don't think anyone (as yet) would claim that you are inflicting 'pain' on your rose bushes when you prune them.

This is less obvious from first-principles than you think, and like all such interesting questions, there is a LessWrong sequence post on it.

Damn, looks like Chesterton was right all along:

And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian, but at length declared vegetarianism doomed ("shedding," as he called it finely, "the green blood of the silent animals"), and predicted that men in a better age would live on nothing but salt. And then came the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the pamphlet called "Why should Salt suffer?" and there was more trouble.

What…do you think pain is, exactly?

Momentary sensation. The problem is that people say "pain" when they mean "suffering", and whether shrimp suffer is the question at hand, no?

Maybe I'm missing some brilliant research out there, but my impression is we scientifically understand what "pain" actually is about as well as we understand what "consciousness" actually is. If you run a client app and it tries and fails to contact a server, is that "pain"? If you give an LLM some text that makes very little sense so it outputs gibberish, is it feeling "pain"? Seems like you could potentially draw out a spectrum of frustrated complex systems that includes silly examples like those all the way up to mosquitos, shrimp, octopuses, cattle, pigs, and humans.

It'd be nice if we could figure out a reasonable compromise for how "complex" a brain needs to be before its pain matters. It really seems like shrimp or insects should fall below that line. But it's like abortion limits - you should pick SOME value in the middle somewhere (it's ridiculous to go all the way to the extremes), but that doesn't mean it's the only correct moral choice.

But I don't care about abolishing pain. Pain is part of the normal range of feelings that animals, including humans, all experience. It is often necessary and arguably, a full life lived, includes pain.

Feeling pain does not equal suffering, which is something that you seem to be unable to understand. Plenty of pain doesn't rank as suffering in my book, and suffering can exist without physical pain.

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