talkpolitics | It's personal and Political.

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It's personal and Political.

So, I first saw this as just an amusing macro.
Then I got the book in the pic as a xmas gift. I have been working my way through it. It's not a straight-up case for vegetarianism. It is written by a vegetarian--who admits as much. But from my reading of his work the authors point isn't to convert you, but to inform you and let you decide.

Now, I'm not a vegetarian. But I may become one. This book is making me pause and think.

Also I think I should say this early on: what I am discussing generally applies to the "first world". In places where food choices are not as plentiful as in the US or other industrialized and developed nations, perhaps the "choice" to eat an animal is one that is easily made as it's eat the animal or starve. So, forgive me if this doesn't exactly apply to you: I know we have an international crew here, but hear me out, if you would.

(for the sake of this post, I shall use "animals" to mean non-human animals)

We can all agree that animals have feelings, right?
Any of us who have had dogs or cats as pets know that they can feel pain, e.g. when we accidentally step on their tail, they shriek in pain and we acknowledge that. We use pain to teach our pets: if a dog does something he shouldn't we give him a thwack on the nose (not too hard of course, but enough to let him know: "don't do that!")

We imprison Micheal Vick for his dog-fights, right?

So we all agree animals can feel pain. And if you don't like my stated assumption that will not be contested in this post (looking at you, horse lover) you can ignore my post. There will not be a discussion of if animals feel pain here. It is assumed and accepted that they do.

Now, dogs aren't so different from pigs or chickens. Yes, there is a difference between them, but there's no reason to assume that pigs, turkeys, chickens and cattle don't feel pain.

Now, if you don't know, you should know that 95%+ of the meat eaten in the US is factory farmed. Now, factory farms are quite what you might imagine them to be. Gigantic "farms" that operate like a factory. The humane element has been removed and replaced with cold efficiency. If baby pigs aren't of the proper size, they will be picked up by their hind legs and have their heads smacked into the concrete floor and then tossed down a chute waiting for the truck that collects all the many pigs killed this way.

The horrors of factory farming are nearly too long to list. Not only do they morally mutilate those who must work in such factory farms, but they also cause significant health risks to humans. Factory farmed animals are fed antibiotics before they are sick--because the "farmers" (more appropriate might be: "factory owners") realize the conditions that their animals live in are so atrocious that they are *expecting* them to get sick.

Then there's the environmental damages done due to the billions of pounds of shit these animals produce. Now, usually shit can be useful as manure--right? But this shit is loaded with all sorts of crap (like antibiotics) and is created in such a quantity that it is not so great for the planet.

Then there's the fact that to produce all the meat we eat, we must feed the animals--and there are starving children who would very much like the food we give to our farmed animals. And yet, we don't. We give it to Bessie so we can have a nice big burger later.

So, I am here asking for help. Tell me, how may I order my next bacon cheeseburger without lamenting the utterly cruel treatment that my burger was built from? The expected death and suffering of factory farmed animals is documented and proven. There's an annual % of the animals *expected* to die at the farm, in transport, and an expected % of them who will not be stunned properly before being killed and an expected % of them will be improperly killed and thus suffer longer than needed. These expected percentages are such because the goal of factory farms is to make money: not to produce animal meat that comes from animals that were treated humanly. We treat our animals with no humanity--nor humanely. We speed up the process that animals are raised in by genetically mutating them. Turkeys on factory farms are *incapable* of reproducing on their own. The insanity of it all is just too much.

So yes, help me. I love my bacon cheeseburgers. They taste AMAZING.
But how can I ever order another one?

Is it as easy as:

And again: in places where meat is a needed part of the diet to fend off starvation, this doesn't apply. But in the US and Europe where factory farming is the predominant method of getting animal meat--can we really allow the cruelty to animals to continue? When we buy food at the supermarket for our BBQ aren't we really farming by proxy and thus supporting the inhumane treatment of our factory farmed animals? Do we need laws to prevent the inhumane treatment of animals? or should we all just be vegetarians and reduce the demand for meat so that the industry doesn't need to fit 5000 chickens in a space that could humanely fit 100?

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Plants do not have a central nervous system so your question will allways be no.

But how do you know? huh huh huh?

I love some good skepticism, but sometimes, it's too far.

Why consider a central nervous system to be a necessary condition? It's certainly integral to our experience of pain, but I think to generalize universally from that shows a lack of imagination.

Sci-fi is full of artificial intelligences which lack anything that we'd recognize as a nervous system, but whose internal information-states still bear something analogous to ours. Can we say for sure that something similar is not at work within a plant? We already know that some plants communicate with their neighbours using pheromones. The question is not about their anatomical similarity to us, but about the presence or absence of higher-order experience them - whatever physical form that may take.

All that aside, mijopo's objections above are all quite true. None of this implies that it's unacceptable to eat plants; the point is just that it's problematic to go around affirming or denying creatures' rights based on how much or little they resemble us.

The problem with mentioning sci-fi, is that, right there in the title is the word "fiction"

Meaning, not-true. Made up.

So, while it's possible that we are mistaken in assuming a CNS is needed to feel pain, is it not our current scientific understanding of pain that it requires a CNS?

Sure, we *could* be wrong. And there *could* be a teapot on mars....

is it not our current scientific understanding of pain that it requires a CNS?

Fairly recently, our scientific understanding of language was that it required a human brain. And really, if we're talking about a substantive scientific understanding of pain, our current knowledge is exactly, perfectly, zero: we only even acknowledge pain in other humans because they're capable of communicating it to us and we're able to infer it in them by rough analogy to our own pain; how would we go about determining whether a mouse feels pain if that mouse was mute and quadriplegic? It undoubtedly does feel pain, but our reasons for thinking so are based entirely on an anthropocentric metaphor.

the mind-body problem and the other-minds problem remains unsolved for humans; what hubris would it be to consider it solved for plants!

I thought we had a somewhat rough sketch of pain from a neurological perspective and that we could find similar brain-patterns in other animals.

Or am I wrong about that?

Yes, but that sketch is very rough, and demonstrably incomplete. It breaks down for creatures which are less neurologically like us, even though those creatures still exhibit behaviour which is consistent with their experiencing pain and having a self-preservation instinct.

So definitionally, I think it's safe to assert the behavioural account still captures more of what pain is than the anatomical account.

Why consider a central nervous system to be a necessary condition?

What else would you consider a necessary condition? If it has fur?

Can you think of a situation where you would determine if another creature was experiencing pain by examining the state of its neurons? Is that what a doctor does, hooking up an oscilloscope to your sciatic nerve and looking for "pain" in the output waveform? No, in general we let people and animals determine for themselves what's the meaning of their sense data, and we infer that meaning from the resulting behaviour.

In fact, if you went to the doctor and he *did* have such a wires-and-neurons solution to determine if you are in pain, and it said no, but you insisted yes, the doctor would(I should hope) conclude that it is the instrumentation which is wrong, and not your own subjective experience of your sense inputs.

So. If our only diagnostic measure of pain is behavioural and not anatomical, even for people, how can the CNS be said to figure into it at all? Lots of animals with no central nervous system act as if they're in pain, which is just an anthropomorphic way of saying that they react to minimize damage to themselves. Hell, earthworms do that.

I'm not actually arguing for panpsychism here, but I'm saying that its negation is a very shoddy foundation on which to build a moral framework.

Again what else would we set the standard by? We can't mindlink things like a Vulcan.

Certainly not, and you're right to ask. The short answer is that there isn't a well-justified standard and there can't be, until some really key problems in the philosophy of mind are first solved. We can rely on excuses like the language barrier between us and the animal kingdom to explain away our fallibility in trying to evaluate and interpret their mental contents, or the profound difference in cognitive and sensory hardware between us and them, as in the fantastic "What is it like to be a bat?" (http://www.consciousentities.com/bats.htm) but the much more uncomfortable truth is that we humans don't even know that each other experiences desires and pain and whatnot, except insofar as we take one another's word for it. The Vulcan question is pretty darned important here.

So what do we do in the meantime? We proceed according to the ad-hoc definitions we've already got, and go on identifying things as "experiences things" and "doesn't experience things" according to how much their behaviour resembles how we imagine we'd behave in their situation, and based on how effectively their body language communcates mental states that we think we can relate to, and eventually we'll find a hyperintelligent tar pit on a distant planet who teaches us* that our definition is incomplete. In the meantime, eat plants, but justify it behaviourally and not anatomically, because that at least has something to do with how we go about trying to infer the minds of others.

*by devouring hundreds of people

Neither do starfish.

Can you provide evidence that starfish feel pain?
(I'm not doubting you, but a citation always helps ones case)

Oh I wasn't saying they feel pain, I was just noting they don't have a brain. I have salt water aquariums, and I'm amazed they can apparently sense bright lights, and have incredible sense of smell. When I put a shrimp past the surface of the water, I can see the starfishs' arms start coming out as in a way to say "FEED ME SEYMOUR!" lol. I think starfish can feel something though: when I feed a small shrimp to the big brittle star fish, it kind of tugs when I pull back on the shrimp.

Edited 2011-02-15 20:09 (UTC)

Interesting.

I mean, that could just be an instinct of sorts--ya know, "food! get it!" is a pretty primitive notion for any life form to have. Although, I suppose: "no food! ow/hunger!" is also a pretty primitive sort of thing for a life form to have.

See, we're all making guesses about the internal states of animals based on their behaviour! If we dissected a starfish using whatever fictitious high-resolution neural imaging technology we might invent, we'd be hard-pressed to point at an event or a neural cluster and say "that one means ouch." But just the same, we anthropomorphize the starfish by ascribing these "sentiments" to their stimulus-response patterns, giving them cute little exclaimed quotations that imply a higher-order sense of intent!

What no one's really comfortable admitting but is unavoidably true, is that this is also what we do to other humans. Their stimulus-response patterns are many orders of magnitude more complex, but the underlying problem is the same.

Yes, yes, the philosophical problem of other minds has not been solved, this is true.

(no subject)

spaz-own-joo.livejournal.com - 2011-02-15 22:48 (UTC) - Expand

I think starfish have like this cool and weird nervous system that operates independently at all ends of the starfish... that is, there is no head, no front... just five arms and they all take the lead as the situation requires.

Yeah octopusesese are like that too. But much higher up on the scale of intelligence. They're extremely intelligent, but were evolutionarily cock-blocked by the fact there was no generational learning-- the mother dies before she can teach them anything. So every generation starts all over again. But some scientists are now reporting there seems to be generational learning occurring.

They're also not very tasty.

They're eaten by Chinese all the time.

The Chinese bind their tastebuds to make them look smaller.

That's great but who cares about those things? I mean its interesting, but it doesn't make it feel pain.

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