Does suffering REALLY matter?

[mistermack]

You don't actually know that. This is the problem with working out if something has consciousness or not.

Isn't consciousness a matter of degree, rather than something you either have or don't have?

If you anaesthetised (fuck the spelling) an ant, so that it stops moving, or responding to stimuli, hasn't it lost consciousness? And when it comes out from the anaesthetic, and starts moving again, hasn't it regained consciousness?
Not the same as ours, not the same degree, but still a form of it?

Looked at like that, there isn't much in the animal kingdom that doesn't have consciousness, to some degree.
I suppose the question of suffering is exemplified in abortion. It's impossible to say when a fetus is capable of suffering.
And once the fetus is dead, does it matter that it suffered, now that it doesn't exist any more?

[JimC]

rEvolutionist wrote:

I think the fact that they show emotional distress indicates a very high likelihood that dogs and cats (and most higher mammals) possess consciousness and self-awareness. Seth calls that anthropomorphism, I call arbitrarily separating humans from other higher mammals "religious".

I think that is in danger of using too broad a definition of both consciousness and self-awareness. As an aside, I suspect that those terms, if not identical, at least have a very substantial overlap.

Most mammals seem to have a fairly broad emotional repertoire, one that has many similarities to humans; certainly enough to make "suffering" a perfectly valid descriptor of their mental condition when in pain, or even, as an extension, when grieving for a dead offspring. Mammals (and birds) also have a wide variety of other mental skills, such as problem solving and basic reasoning, for sure.

However, my view of self awareness is that involves aspects of reflection and symbolic association which go well beyond non-human animal abilities, to the point where a recognisable gulf exists. This doesn't have to be something that mystically disconnects us from other animals - my view is that the gulf is filled, in the sense of evolutionary history, by the range of mental abilities found in the branch comprising all our hominid ancestors...

[Seth]

Any pet owner is going to tell you to fuck off if you say that a cat or a dog cannot suffer...

I don't know about that, Jim. I know some pet owners who don't like to swear.

Actually cats and dogs, like any other animal, experience pain and fear, which are natural evolved self-preservation sensations and instincts. Humans impute "suffering" to that experience based on anthropomorphic projection. Dogs (and particularly cats) don't lay blame or feel sorry for themselves, they just experience and endure the slings and arrows outrageous fortune and react accordingly.

I think that experiencing pain and fear is enough to be classified as suffering, particularly given that, at least in mammals, it manifests in clear emotional states which we can recognise as being at least similar to our own experience. Sure, humans can reflect on their pain and fear, and "feel sorry for themselves", which adds another dimension of potential misery, but I think consciousness of one's own pain is not a required condition for me to determine that a dog or a cat is suffering.

I think the fact that they show emotional distress indicates a very high likelihood that dogs and cats (and most higher mammals) possess consciousness and self-awareness. Seth calls that anthropomorphism, I call arbitrarily separating humans from other higher mammals "religious".

It's not arbitrary, it is based on self-awareness and conciousness. There may be a "very high likelihood" but that's far from the usual metric required here which is critically robust peer-reviewed science. I think that a creature "suffers" when that creature is capable of defining and articulating the emotion, because "suffering" is an emotional reaction to pain and physical (or perhaps mental) distress. I grant you that other creatures may have the cognitive ability to define "suffering" within themselves even if they are not able to articulate it in language we understand, but that's just speculation at this point.

"Suffering" has a moral and ethical component as well, so doesn't an organism need to have a moral and ethical structure in order to "suffer?"

[mistermack]

"Suffering" has a moral and ethical component as well, so doesn't an organism need to have a moral and ethical structure in order to "suffer?"

Not at all. A one day old baby can certainly suffer, but I can't see how it has any kind of moral or ethical structure.
The potential for the baby's brain to suffer is very important, as it forces the baby to communicate it's distress to the parent.
If babies couldn't suffer, we would never have evolved, we would have become extinct millions of years ago.
It's still vital to our survival even now.

[JimC]

You don't actually know that. This is the problem with working out if something has consciousness or not.

Isn't consciousness a matter of degree, rather than something you either have or don't have?

If you anaesthetised (fuck the spelling) an ant, so that it stops moving, or responding to stimuli, hasn't it lost consciousness? And when it comes out from the anaesthetic, and starts moving again, hasn't it regained consciousness?
Not the same as ours, not the same degree, but still a form of it?

Looked at like that, there isn't much in the animal kingdom that doesn't have consciousness, to some degree.
I suppose the question of suffering is exemplified in abortion. It's impossible to say when a fetus is capable of suffering.
And once the fetus is dead, does it matter that it suffered, now that it doesn't exist any more?

Again, in my view you are using consciousness in too broad a sense. An ant has an intricate pattern of neuronal activity, well adapted to optimising its behaviour. When anaesthetised, that activity would be greatly altered, and/or reduced, and the activity would resume later when the anaesthetic wears off. But to regard that as "regaining consciousness" is a stretch...

An ant has pain receptors, and will respond in an adaptively appropriate way when they are stimulated. However, unlike mammals, I think we can be reasonably sure that the pain is not accompanied by an emotional state of distress, which I assert can be described as "suffering". Taking it further, neither the dog nor (certainly) the ant can internally reflect on their own pain, and incorporate it into a mental model of "self"

[JimC]

"Suffering" has a moral and ethical component as well, so doesn't an organism need to have a moral and ethical structure in order to "suffer?"

Not at all. A one day old baby can certainly suffer, but I can't see how it has any kind of moral or ethical structure.
The potential for the baby's brain to suffer is very important, as it forces the baby to communicate it's distress to the parent.
If babies couldn't suffer, we would never have evolved, we would have become extinct millions of years ago.
It's still vital to our survival even now.

I agree. It's not the state of "suffering" that has a moral or ethical dimension; instead, it is our responses to the suffering of others that has such a dimension.

[Brian Peacock]

[JimC]

You cruel, unfeeling bastard!

[mistermack]

It's interesting whether we should be concerned about the suffering of animals.
There seems to be a distinction between necessary and unnecessary suffering.

A Polar Bear eats it's victims alive. They generally die from loss of blood. The bear doesn't have a way (or need) of killing swiftly, like a cat.
If seals didn't suffer, there would be no Polar Bears. If a mother bear stopped inflicting suffering on seals, her cubs would starve. So suffering is entrenched, right up the food chain. So why should we kick against it?

We humans react to suffering and care about it more than practically any other creature. We are long-lived animals, who have evolved to live in extended societies of our near and slightly more distant relatives. When we get concerned about the suffering of others, it's because down through our evolutionary history, those that we mixed with were usually closely related, and we were primed to protect the survival of our own genes, as expressed in them.

Now things have changed, we mix daily with complete strangers, and even with other species. The logical reason to care has gone, but the instinct remains.

[JimC]

It's interesting whether we should be concerned about the suffering of animals.
There seems to be a distinction between necessary and unnecessary suffering.

A Polar Bear eats it's victims alive. They generally die from loss of blood. The bear doesn't have a way (or need) of killing swiftly, like a cat.
If seals didn't suffer, there would be no Polar Bears. If a mother bear stopped inflicting suffering on seals, her cubs would starve. So suffering is entrenched, right up the food chain. So why should we kick against it?

We humans react to suffering and care about it more than practically any other creature. We are long-lived animals, who have evolved to live in extended societies of our near and slightly more distant relatives. When we get concerned about the suffering of others, it's because down through our evolutionary history, those that we mixed with were usually closely related, and we were primed to protect the survival of our own genes, as expressed in them.

Now things have changed, we mix daily with complete strangers, and even with other species. The logical reason to care has gone, but the instinct remains.

Some points:

Suffering in nature is real and unavoidable, and I hear no-one in this thread "kicking against it". We acknowledge the fact, and move on.

I agree that the evolutionary origins of our reactions to suffering are tribally oriented, for the reasons you pointed out. However, I made the point earlier that the changing zeitgeist of human culture has broadened the compass of our tribal responses in terms of who deserves our compassion and support. In many cases, it stops at ethnic group or nation, but it is tending, I optimistically claim, to encompass not only the rest of humanity, but those advanced animals that our actions impinge on, such as pets and domesticated animals. We can and should act to minimise the suffering they endure, to the extent that is reasonable and possible, if for no other reason than to encourage a climate where compassion flourishes, to the eventual good of all. To me, this can be a logical reason to care...

[Seth]

"Suffering" has a moral and ethical component as well, so doesn't an organism need to have a moral and ethical structure in order to "suffer?"

Not at all. A one day old baby can certainly suffer, but I can't see how it has any kind of moral or ethical structure.
The potential for the baby's brain to suffer is very important, as it forces the baby to communicate it's distress to the parent.
If babies couldn't suffer, we would never have evolved, we would have become extinct millions of years ago.
It's still vital to our survival even now.

But is the baby suffering or is the baby merely reacting as programmed to painful stimuli? I say the latter. "Suffering" is a subjective philosophical and moral label we apply to the assumed cause, purpose or origin of the stimuli. If we whip an innocent child till her back is a bloody mess and she shrieks in agony while we do it, we can say that she is suffering based on her innocence and the nature of the painful stimuli. But take the same act and apply it to a Christian Flagellant and it's not suffering at all, it's a celebration of religious belief that the person will willingly inflict upon himself. Is he suffering?

Suffering, being a subjective mental moral and ethical analysis of the situation must therefore be strictly a philosophical construct that only applies to organisms with sufficient cognitive powers to understand the "rightness" or "wrongness" of the event, which defines whether the individual experiencing it is suffering or not.

I agree with you that the ability to sense and react to stimuli, painful or otherwise, is an evolutionary necessity, but assigning a quantum of goodness or badness to that event is definitely a sentient and self-aware function. This does not preclude animals from understanding the inequity of the stimuli, which is what "to suffer" means, but more scientific evidence is needed to confirm the cognitive abilities of animals to see where the line is drawn when it comes to sentience.

[Audley Strange]

Hmm, I get what you are saying there Seth, that there is actually some kind of self-mythologising narrative "why me", so to speak, that is cultivated by humans in response to sensation signals that they deem negative.

However there is a simpler definition of "Suffer" which is "to endure." In which case animals do suffer pain.

Everyone wins!

[rainbow]

beep

Nobody cares.

Really?

Well, even if they did, they'd never understand.

[pErvinalia]

You don't actually know that. This is the problem with working out if something has consciousness or not.

Isn't consciousness a matter of degree, rather than something you either have or don't have?

If you anaesthetised (fuck the spelling) an ant, so that it stops moving, or responding to stimuli, hasn't it lost consciousness? And when it comes out from the anaesthetic, and starts moving again, hasn't it regained consciousness?
Not the same as ours, not the same degree, but still a form of it?

By consciousness I mean essentially a sense of self / self-aware. Not simply "awake".

[pErvinalia]

rEvolutionist wrote:

I think the fact that they show emotional distress indicates a very high likelihood that dogs and cats (and most higher mammals) possess consciousness and self-awareness. Seth calls that anthropomorphism, I call arbitrarily separating humans from other higher mammals "religious".

I think that is in danger of using too broad a definition of both consciousness and self-awareness. As an aside, I suspect that those terms, if not identical, at least have a very substantial overlap.

Most mammals seem to have a fairly broad emotional repertoire, one that has many similarities to humans; certainly enough to make "suffering" a perfectly valid descriptor of their mental condition when in pain, or even, as an extension, when grieving for a dead offspring. Mammals (and birds) also have a wide variety of other mental skills, such as problem solving and basic reasoning, for sure.

However, my view of self awareness is that involves aspects of reflection and symbolic association which go well beyond non-human animal abilities, to the point where a recognisable gulf exists. This doesn't have to be something that mystically disconnects us from other animals - my view is that the gulf is filled, in the sense of evolutionary history, by the range of mental abilities found in the branch comprising all our hominid ancestors...

Absolutely. As MM said, it's almost certainly a scale.