Philosophical Vegan Forum

haveing just read the wikipedia entery on that topic (found here http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_fish) I found it listed many studies conculdeing fish do feel pain, all of witch where debunked. does anyone know of any future reading meterial, or there own opinion/knolage on the topic (i know we have some people well studied on the issue on this site).

bobo0100 wrote:haveing just read the wikipedia entery on that topic (found here http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_fish) I found it listed many studies conculdeing fish do feel pain, all of witch where debunked.

There's a difference between something being debunked and being criticized. Wikipedia notes both sides of arguments.
This "Professor James D. Rose" is doing most of the criticism, and he's clearly an idiot. See the section on Neuroscience in that article.

If you reject behavioral evidence, then you might as well be a solipsist.
People can dishonestly endeavor to define pain in such a particular way as to dance around excluding most other species, just as racists can dance around giving qualities like rationality, intelligence, and creativity such specific definitions as to attempt to limit them to a single culture (and thus presumably to a single "race").
It's moronic.

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/No_True_Scotsman
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/no-true-scotsman

Of course fish feel pain.

The more meaningful question is what kinds of stimuli are or are not actually painful to fish- and that's something which can only be reliably determined behaviorally at this time, but in which field research is inherently cruel.

It appears that some fish nerves are more forgiving than human nerves in some regards, such as in the case of injuries; either the nerves are desensitized after emitting pain signals, or the brain effectively cuts them off after registering it. Kind of a "what's done is done" principle.

Like if your arm were cut off, it would hurt, and then you'd get over it and on with surviving.

This makes it particularly difficult to experiment with certain kinds of fish pain, since the event (of some kinds) may be shorter lived than in some other animals.

Even when I used to eat meat, I never liked to eat fish. I always got seasick, and maybe even threw up. But anyways, yes, fish are sentient beings who feel pain, just like pigs, cows, and chickens. They just don't express it like the ones listed.

im listening to your statements and i understand what your saying, but the statements are for a large part useless for a debate. does anyone know of any helpful reasuses on the topic?

bobo0100 wrote:im listening to your statements and i understand what your saying, but the statements are for a large part useless for a debate. does anyone know of any helpful reasuses on the topic?

No, this is not a matter that requires further resources.

This is an epistemological issue of people rejecting clear behavioral evidence. You need to explain why that kind of reasoning is flawed, and why it should not be the basis for a rational world-view.

Arguing against these points with further evidence is like arguing against a solopsist with evidence- because the evidence is observational and can not prove the validity of observation with observation in a fundamental way, they will reject it. Arguing with people who reject logic or observational reality is futile, because they will always believe what they want, reject anything you offer, and ask for some unreasonable and impossible standard of evidence to pretend they aren't closed minded.

brimstonesalad wrote:This is an epistemological issue of people rejecting clear behavioral evidence.

in that case i will give you the most common argument against behavioural evidence. it is somewhere between hard and impossible to tell the difference between them acting in such a fashion because they are in pain, or because they are avoiding a harmful stimulation. i do believe this was said in the wiki post.

bobo0100 wrote: in that case i will give you the most common argument against behavioural evidence. it is somewhere between hard and impossible to tell the difference between them acting in such a fashion because they are in pain, or because they are avoiding a harmful stimulation. i do believe this was said in the wiki post.

Again, you are misunderstanding the issue.

The same can be said for all of the human beings around you, if you disregard observation and apparent behavioral evidence.

Study hard solipsism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism

When you formulate an argument against solipsism, explain why that doesn't apply to this topic.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Again, you are misunderstanding the issue.

The same can be said for all of the human beings around you, if you disregard observation and apparent behavioural evidence.

the same cannot be said for the humans around me, because we have evidence of pain in humans, other than behavioural evidence.

please remember I'm playing devils advocate to improve my arguments, not because i don't accept behavioural evidence.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Study hard solipsism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism

When you formulate an argument against solipsism, explain why that doesn't apply to this topic.

I do know what solipsism is. I also fail to see how the argument i presented falls into solipsism.

bobo0100 wrote:because we have evidence of pain in humans, other than behavioural evidence.

NO, we don't.

If it's not the behavior of the system, it's the behavior of a small part of the system- that's LESS convincing, not more so.
If you don't accept the clear behavior of a system as evidence of a higher order function, the behavior of a tiny part of that system is irrelevant.


Sure, blue wavelength light strikes certain cone receptors in the eyes, and triggers a signal to the brain with a cascade of transmitters and nerve responses. But it's still a mere qualia. What exactly leads you to believe that what you perceive as "blue" also looks the same to others?

What if Bob perceives blue as you do red, and has just learned to call it blue, seeing red instead as you see green, etc.

You can not step into another human's mind. So what if there are certain named nerves and neurotransmitters involved- that's meaningless and completely irrelevant to the topic at hand.

It's also complete bullshit in terms of behavioral evidence, where there are PLENTY of examples in biology of similar structures and hormones being used in different organisms for completely different purposes.
You can't assume the same chemical signal means the same thing to different organisms, or even different people.
Even within humans, there's ample evidence that some people don't perceive the nerve pain others do, or even perceive certain kinds of what others would feel as pain as pleasurable.

What you can do is look at the behavior it creates in the entire system, and deduce its function in that instance from said behavior.

People who want to ignore behavioral evidence are just being deliberately dense to avoid admitting to obvious facts (no different from the worst of anti-real religious dogmas) and frankly are complete idiots who have apparently never considered what that line of thought actually means or leads to.

bobo0100 wrote:please remember I'm playing devils advocate to improve my arguments, not because i don't accept behavioural evidence.

That's fine, but again, please study solipsism.

You might also want to study qualia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

You are unlikely to be able to reason with people who have checked their brains at the door on the way in.

Fish show stress, distraction, less alertness, and a worse ability to make decisions when stimulating the pain receptor cells. These receptor cells are connected to the brain and the change in behavior is a demonstration that it is being processed. Now the criticism of James D. Rose is not fully unjustified, since the article he's criticizing is using the word pain in a different sense then we most of the time do in the human context. It's true that fish don't have the same brain structure as humans have, but nobody was actually talking about pain as humans experience it. Fish have a brain area that is comparable to a human's amygdala, a part of the brain that processes basic emotions like fear. Maybe you wouldn't call it pain (although it's sometimes also considered as pain in the human context), but of course it isn't something that should be taken lightly since it is a form of suffering.

This James D. Rose is dismissive of fish having the mental representation that is needed to experience pain. He's arguing this on the basis that they don't have 'specialized neocortex regions of the cerebral hemispheres'. It's strange that he's even arguing that it is unconscious, without any justification (absence of evidence != evidence of absence). This article is from 2003 and is pretty much outdated and there has been progress since. The pallium is a brain area that may be equivalent to this human neocortex. It's still an open question as far as I know, but I would be surprised if fish wouldn't feel direct pain sensations since it gives an enormous evolutionary advantage.

His argument that it isn't known that fish are conscious as a rejection of behavioral evidence is indeed silly like brimstoneSalad already explained.