arjand wrote: ↑April 13th, 2020, 8:55 amThere are several studies that claim to prove that plants feel pain.
The phrase "to feel pain" is ambiguous. Even if plants are capable of nociception (perception of and reaction to nociceptive stimuli), it doesn't follow that their nociceptions involve subjective sensations of pain.
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Do animals feel pain?
Conceptually, this question is a mess. This is because the term 'feel' plays two quite different roles in the present context, which are frequently not distinguished from one another. Philosophers often use the term when attempting to characterize phenomenal consciousness in general. Consciousness is said to comprise the
felt qualities of experience, or the 'feely' component of experience. In this sense of 'feel' one can talk about the
feel of a perception of vivid red, or what listening to the sound of a trumpet
feels like. But 'feel' is also the term we use for bodily forms of perception, in particular. We talk about feeling the shape of an object with our hands, feeling the warmth of a fire, feeling a tickle on the arm, and feeling a pain in the toe. What links the two uses is that whenever one is in a position to report feeling a bodily state of some sort, the content of that state will have attracted attention and been globally broadcast, perforce becoming phenomenally conscious and acquiring 'feel' in the other sense also.
Given this distinction, it makes perfectly good sense to think that there can be felt states that lack feel. One way this can happen is that there might be feelings of bodily states that
don’t attract attention and become conscious, while nevertheless playing other roles in cognition. In particular, there might be feelings of pain that lack feel. Indeed, I will argue shortly that this
sort of dissociation is a common occurrence in humans (even if it isn't that common for pain specifically). But a second possibility arises in connection with the feelings of animals especially. There might be perceptions of bodily states (of warmth, touch, pain, and so on) that attract attention, and whose role is
more or less similar to that resulting from human global broadcasting of similar contents. At the least-similar end of the spectrum, the result might be bodily feelings that lack feel altogether (i.e. that are definitely not phenomenally conscious). In other cases, there will be bodily feelings for which there is no fact of the matter whether or not they have feel….
In the human case, feelings of pain that lack feel because they fail to attract attention are comparatively rare. For it is part of the very function of pain to attract attention, alerting the agent to a likely source of bodily damage. But anecdotally, at least, there are such cases. These are instances where attentional focus is so firmly fixed on other things that pain—although present, and influencing behavior in other ways—remains unconscious. For example, there are cases of wounded soldiers who don't notice their wounds until the battle is over, and football players who continue to play without noticing any injury (although perhaps they limp or favor their shoulder in consequence). And for sure we know that levels of consciously experienced pain can be
modulated by attention. This is the point of the distraction techniques doctors employ with children, and it may be part of what underlies placebo effects on pain! For if you
believe you won't have much pain you may attend to it less, and consequently
feel less pain.
Although unconscious pains are rare, unconscious instances of other forms of bodily perception are legion. One may shift one’s posture, for example, to better accommodate the shape of the chair on which one is sitting, but without noticing that one has done so, or why. One may draw one’s coat more closely around one‘s shoulders to alleviate the cold, but without noticing that one feels cold. And of course one's hands will often adjust themselves to the shape and texture of items one is grasping or carrying without one being aware of the perceptions of touch that guide the adjustments. When seen in the company of these other forms of unconscious perception of states of the body, uses of unconscious pain are just what one might expect (albeit rarely, given pain’s attention-grabbing function).
We can ask, now, whether unconscious pain (in contrast with the bodily damage that they signal) are appropriate objects of moral concern. It seems plain that they aren't. While we should want to help with the soldier's injury, this is because of its likely effects on his future life, not because it is causing him unconscious pain And although (if we could find a way to do it while he continues to fight) we might give him an analgesic, this would be in anticipation of the pain that he will surely feel as soon as the battle stops, not in order to reduce his current level of (unconscious) pain.
Suppose, then, that there are animals who are capable of forms of nociception, but whose resulting perceptions of bodily damage are never made available to anything resembling decision-making processes, with the result that their perceptions of pain are definitely unconscious ones (perhaps influencing withdrawals of a merely sensorimotor sort). In that case their pains should
not be objects of moral concern, and to cause such an animal pain will not be cruel—although of course it might be wrong for other reasons or in other ways."
(Carruthers, Peter.
Human and Animal Minds: The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. pp. 168-70)
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- By Lagayascienza
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