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Comment by kranner | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately none of the examples provided in the article (I haven't read the book) prove sentience or suffering as a result of pain. They demonstrate pain, but it can be argued that the pain that fish feel is nonconscious/nonsentient.

I'm only complaining that the proof here isn't watertight btw. As a former-meateater-turned-vegetarian (because of 'sentience' guilt) my intuition is that the pain they feel must be similar to the pain we feel.

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Epistemic asymmetry. You can't even prove that the pain-behavior you observe me demonstrating reflects an internal experience that's anything like your experience of pain, so asking for "proof" that a fish's pain is actually painful isn't even an objectively meaningful question.

Red herring :) I know I can't know what it's like to be a bat, but maybe suffering in fish can be demonstrated via FMRI. Perhaps it has been but this article doesn't mention it. Just because something shows avoidance behaviour against a chemical gradient doesn't follow that it suffers.

Suffering is experiential and subjective. Pain is measurable, in terms of neurotransmitters and electrical activity. Different people can tolerate pain wildly differently. The same person can tolerate pain wildly differently, depending upon circumstances. One can't even meaningfully draw a straight-line relationship from pain to suffering between individuals of the same species, let alone across as wide a gulf as fish to humans.

I understood your point the first time. I'm talking about the leap made between the article's contents and the headline.

Edit: we might mean somewhat different things by 'suffering'. I'm talking about an experience usually (but not always) concomitant with pain that can be measured objectively. Is there such a thing? Can it be measured? I don't know for sure. I feel that it must be there in fish too, but the shallow conflation in this article of suffering and seeming-to-act-under-suffering is a problem for me.

It's a difficult line to place, for instance is pain avoidance plus memory enough? If I imagine a fish thinking "I can't do that again" that certainly looks like sentience, but the resulting behavior (avoidance) can occur without sentience, it seems.

Is something like that been demonstrated in other animals?

Not that I'm aware of.

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