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Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft | Hacker News Reader

> I don’t really doubt that it’s in principle possible to assign percentage values to suffering intensity, but the 3% value (which the source admits is a “placeholder”) seems completely unhinged for an animal with 0.05% as many neurons as a chicken,

There is a simple explanation for the confusion that this causes you and the other people in this thread: suffering's not real. It's a dumb gobbledygook term that in the most generous interpretation refers to a completely subjective experience that is not empirical or measurable.

The author uses the word "imagine" three times in the first two paragraphs for a reason. Then he follows up with a fake picture of anthropomorphic shrimp. This is some sort of con game. And you're all falling for it. He's not scamming money out of you, instead he wants to convert you to his religious-dietary-code-that-is-trying-to-become-a-religion.

Shrimp are food. They have zero moral weight.

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Denying the existence of something that you and everyone else has experienced is certainly an approach.

Look, I’m not going to defend the author here. The linked report reads to me like the output of a group of people who have become so insulated in their thinking on this subject that they’ve totally lost perspective. They give an 11% prior probability of earthworm sentience based on proxies like “avoiding noxious stimuli”, which is… really something.

But I’m not so confused by a bad set of arguments that I think suffering doesn’t exist.

> Denying the existence of something that you and everyone else has experienced is certainly an approach.

You've experienced this mystical thing, and so you know it's true?

> They give an 11% prior probability of earthworm sentience

I'm having trouble holding in the laughter. But you don't seem to understand how dangerously deranged these people are. They'll convert you to their religion by hook or crook.

> You've experienced this mystical thing, and so you know it's true?

Suffering is experience, and my own internal experiences are the things that I can be most certain of. So in this case, yes. I don’t know why you’re calling it “mystical” though.

> They'll convert you to their religion by hook or crook.

I have a lot more confidence in my ability to evaluate arguments than you seem to.

Setting aside the shrimp, are you denying that any humans, including yourself, experience suffering?

Humans self-report "suffering". Strangely, those who claim it the most enthusiastically don't seem to be experiencing pain from disease or injury.

I would hesitate to use that word myself, though my personal experiences have, at times, been somewhat similar to those who do use the word.

Using some italics with an edgy claim doesn't allow you to cut through centuries of philosophy. It's almost as if, when philosophers have coined this term in language "subjective experience" and thousands have used it often in coherent discussion, that it actually has semantic value. It exists in the intersubjective space between people who communicate with shared concepts.

I don't have much to say about the shrimp, but I find it deeply sad when people convince themselves that they don't really exist as a thinking, feeling thing. It's self repression to the maximum, and carries the implication that yourself and all humans have no value.

If you don't have certain measurable proof either way, why would you choose to align with the most grim possible skeptical beliefs? Listen to some music or something - don't you hear the sounds?

> Using some italics with an edgy claim

There is nothing edgy about it. You can't detect it, you can't measure it, and if the word had any applicability (to say, humans), then you're also misapplying it. If it is your contention that suffering is something-other-than-subjective, then you're the one trying to be edgy. Not I.

The way sane, reasonable people describe subjective phenomena that we can't detect or measure is "not real". When we're talking about decapods, it can't even be self-reported.

> but I find it deeply sad when people convince themselves that they don't really exist as a thinking, feeling thing. It's self repression to the maximum,

Says the guy agreeing with a faction that seeks to convince people shrimp are anything other than food. That if for some reason we need to euthanize them, that they must be laid down on a velvet pillow to listen to symphonic music and watch films of the beautiful Swiss mountain countryside until their last gasp.

"Sad" is letting yourself be manipulated so that some other religion can enforce its noodle-brained dietary laws on you.

> If you don't have certain measurable proof either way

I'm not obligated to prove the negative.

> If it is your contention that suffering is something-other-than-subjective, then you're the one trying to be edgy.

You do feel pain and hunger, at least to the extent you experience touch. You can in fact be even more certain of that than anything conventionally thought to be objective, physical models of the world, for it is only through your perception that you receive those models, or evidence to build those models.

The notion of suffering used in the paper is primarily with respect to pain and pleasure.

Now, you may deny that shrimp feel pain and pleasure. It's also possible to deny that other people feel pain and pleasure. But you do feel pain and pleasure, and you always engage in behaviors in response to these sensations; your senses also inform you secondarily that many other people abide by similar rules.

Many animals like us are fundamentally sympathetic to pain and pleasure. That is, observing behavior related to pain and pleasure impels a related feeling ourselves, in certain contexts, not necessarily exact. This mechanism is quite obvious when you observe parents caring for their young, herd behavior, etc.. With this established, some people are in a context where they are sympathetic to observed pain and pleasure of nonhuman animals; in this case shrimp rather than cats and dogs, and such a study helps one figure out this relationship in more detail.

> You can’t detect it, you can’t measure it

Eh, perhaps we can’t detect it perfectly reliably, but we can absolutely detect it. Go to a funeral and observe a widow in anguish. Just because we haven’t (yet) built a machine to detect or measure it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

> Eh, perhaps we can’t detect it perfectly reliably, but we can absolutely detect it. Go to a funeral and observe a widow in anguish.

If your definition of suffering describes both the widow grieving a lost husband and a shrimp slowly going whatever the equivalent is of unconscious in an icewater bath... it doesn't much seem to be a useful word.

> Just because we haven’t (yet) built a machine to

Yes, because we haven't built the machine, we can't much tell if the widow is in "anguish" or is putting on a show for the public. Some widows are living their most joyous days, but they can't always show it.

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