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Comment by ikeyany | Hacker News Reader

Those barriers are certainly falling. The campaign to end the live boiling of lobsters and crabs [1] is underway due to our findings that crustaceans can feel pain.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42873644

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I remember seeing on cooking shows for at least the past decade that the preferred, humane method of killing a lobster or crab is a swift knife cut through the head.

I had thought that that was the generally accepted method, so I'm surprised that live boiling is still done.

> the preferred, humane method of killing a lobster or crab is a swift knife cut through the head

Yes, this is known to kill the crab.

Grimly hilarious that anyone ever thought they couldn’t

Every being with a consciousness must have feelings. Otherwise the consciousness wouldn't know what to do.

That doesn't mean physical pain is necessarily among the feelings felt.

It’s damn effective, harder to believe pain is felt by most (all?) animals than that it isn’t. The default assumption should be that they feel pain, not that they don’t.

I think creatures that don't feel pain would not survive long in the wild. If they don't feel pain they would not have any reason for avoiding dangerous situations.

Viruses and bacteria avoid harm and death if they can help it, but that doesn't necessarily mean they can "feel pain".

Senses are not the same as what we call feelings. And consciousness can be very basic -- merely responding to sensory input.

Consciousness is on a higher level: it observes what we observe ( = sensory input, either intern/vegetative or extern).

Means, body feels pain, the consciousness can tell "I fell pain" - not necessarily in words but on a similar "language".

You could even define feelings as data generated by, and consumed by, consciousness.

Nociception /= pain

The true magical thinking here is that there is a difference where the similarity is so obvious and the origins are the same

It’s easier to get through the day if we make up lies to tell ourselves.

everyone calm down...nature is ruthless.

here spend some time on https://www.reddit.com/r/natureismetal/

Naturalism is a fallacy for a reason - there's no intrinsic advantage to being more like nature. Instead let's reason about it just as we would anything else.

There's also no need to tell people to calm down. The discussion in this thread appears quite calm to me.

> there's no intrinsic advantage to being more like nature

It all depends on how you define "advantage":

Being integrated into the ecosystem, instead of acting outside of it like it doesn't exist or matter at all to our survival, and thus being able to survive long-term is a rather big advantage. Otherwise, we might become victims of our own "success" [0].

Now, if you define advantage very narrowly, as in "What's in it for ME?" then you might have a point, tho it's a very shortsighted and egoistical point which leads back to [0].

[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...

I think they're referring to the "appeal to nature" [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

I was indeed referring to this logical fallacy.

I don't see how treating animals well removes us from the ecosystem. We have already drastically changed the ecosystem of the Earth - might as well do some positive things for it.

But if you are so skeptical of the "appeal to nature" how would you decide what's positive for Earth/the ecosystem?

Wouldn't you just come back to the conclusion of "What's good for nature must be natural or else it can't be part of nature?"

Imho it's that logic which most "appeals to nature" are built upon.

By figuring out a list of priorities and balancing the benefits of different strategies in terms of those priorities?

Very hard to do. You've got a form of utilitarian calculus going on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felicific_calculus

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