It's not obvious at all. Actually it's not obvious at all that anything else than yourself can feel pain :) I agree that it's a reasonable extrapolation though :)
I have stepped on a dogs foot. It made a “Yipe!” noise and leapt back. Then it approached me “submissively”, with it’s head held low and tail down. It seems rather “obvious” to me that the animal felt pain, reacted suddenly to the sensation, and then completely changed it’s demeanour towards me.
I believe the person you're responding to is referencing solipsism.
Please define "feel". They experience structural damage - yes, same as every other living organism or plant if damaged. If I tear dandelion in half it will emit poisonous juice. Does it "feel" pain though? I think no. The "feel" part probably can happen only in the sufficiently large brain, and lobster most likely don't qualify.
Different sets of neurons fire for different people on the same stimulus. Does that mean you don't feel pain in the same way another person feels pain?
That's an open question. But if we would assume that answer is "no", then all alive beings can "experience pain" because it' the same mechanism in all of them. Jellyfish can "feel the pain" if we will assume such answer, and I imagine a single boat travel cutting and tearing thousands of jellyfish will easily beat this whole lobster conundrum in the severity of the problem :)
PS: I'm not advocating for cruel behavior against animals. It's just that some questions don't have an easy clear answer at all, especially scaled to the planet level.
Context: I'm not a hypocrite. I eat a lot of meat. I would put very strong money down that by the time most people reading these comments are in an old folks home with their grandchildren, the vast majority of the population will consider consumption of all meat unethical. I don't think it will be illegal yet (just extremely regulated, and expensive - not the least bit because the carbon footprint of meat production…
Go ahead and go vegan... you can tell your kids you were decades ahead of most of your peers. Even if you don't particularly care what future generations think of you, the environment, or your personal health, going vegan can still be fun if you have enough buffer in your life to turn it into a hobby!
I will suggest some tasks to get started... what is the best vegan ice cream in your area? Ready to level up? What is the tastiest edible mushroom you can find in your city? If you've been going to a traditional grocery store for omnivores, you may have only ever been exposed to three different ages or strains of Agaricus bisporus (white vs. brown little mushrooms are just different strains... "Portobello" is just a bigger/older Agaricus bisporus). There's literally an entire Kingdom of life that the mainstream western food production system hasn't been making available for you to eat. Imagine if your grocery store only had one shelf labeled "Plants" that just had three colors of potato!
Seeing him strung out on opiates (edit: turns out it was benzos) made you get off opiates?
He did not get addicted to opiates, he had a bad reaction to prescribed benzodiazepines (anxiety medication) when his wife had cancer. Take your lies and complete lack of compassion and get bent.
My mistake he was hooked on benzodiazepines (lie corrected for you).
Which I have just discovered are like opiates on steroids. I am shocked that as a clinical psychologist, he was unaware that it was such powerful medication.
Please define "feel". They experience structural damage - yes, same as every other living organism or plant if damaged. If I tear dandelion in half it will emit poisonous juice. Does it "feel" pain though? I think no. The "feel" part probably can happen only in the sufficiently large brain, and lobster most likely don't qualify.
> The "feel" part probably can happen only in the sufficiently large brain, and lobster most likely don't qualify. This seems pretty arbitrary. As a vegan I draw the line at plants vs animals and while it is hard to live in industrialized society without harming animals, it’s easy for me to see how dropping a lobster in a pot will cause the animal to suffer. I’m doing just fine simply not eating them. Why do mental g…
The thing is - lobsters are an easy problem. We can (theoretically) collectively decide that lobsters shouldn't be touched at all and nobody will be hurt (some fishers maybe?). But the same logic about "feeling" pain is applicable to practically anything as is demonstrated in the comments below. And then it becomes a humanity problem - can we kill living organisms for ANY reason?
There is no easy, or even hard answer at all for this. And won't be in the nearest future, simply due to a sheer scope of the problem, number of different kinds of organisms and numbers of reasons they are being killed today.
Yes ,don't cook lobsters alive I would say. Most animals can definitely feel pain, maybe even insects. Don't cause them unnecessary pain. It's pretty said that the so called most intelligent animal species needs laws to understand that.
How not causing pain to animals when cooking them relates to intelligence? I suspect that my comment can sound blunt to you, so let me explain. When a human wants to eat something, their goal is not only to eat, but to do that without harming their emotional state. E.g. if I (or anyone) wanted to eat badly and catched an animal, I wouldn’t boil it alive, because it would scream of pain and hurt my mental state. But if it doesn’t show any signs of it under the lid, like a crab or a lobster, then what’s the deal? Why go to lengths cutting specific nerves behind a hard carapace, if it does zero harm to me? I see that it may do harm to you, but animals suffer all the time, everywhere in the nature. I don’t understand how to think this way and not burst in tears every minute of my life. Isn’t it more intelligent to accept the fact that the nature sucks and you can’t do much to it? I’m not writing it to bother you, I genuinely don’t understand the logic of said relation.
He did not get addicted to opiates, he had a bad reaction to prescribed benzodiazepines (anxiety medication) when his wife had cancer. Take your lies and complete lack of compassion and get bent.
My mistake he was hooked on benzodiazepines (lie corrected for you). Which I have just discovered are like opiates on steroids. I am shocked that as a clinical psychologist, he was unaware that it was such powerful medication. That said I think he has done some great work.
It's used routinely in clinical psychiatry and psychology. And you listen to your psychiatrist, even as a psychiatrist and especially as a psychologist.
Please define "feel". They experience structural damage - yes, same as every other living organism or plant if damaged. If I tear dandelion in half it will emit poisonous juice. Does it "feel" pain though? I think no. The "feel" part probably can happen only in the sufficiently large brain, and lobster most likely don't qualify.
> The "feel" part probably can happen only in the sufficiently large brain, and lobster most likely don't qualify. This seems pretty arbitrary. As a vegan I draw the line at plants vs animals and while it is hard to live in industrialized society without harming animals, it’s easy for me to see how dropping a lobster in a pot will cause the animal to suffer. I’m doing just fine simply not eating them. Why do mental g…
As a vegan how do you reconcile the thousands of insects and field animals that get culled during harvesting those lentils?
I don't really have a problem with vegetarians but I do struggle to understand the lines they seemingly draw at random.
Minimising harm should be a given for all but that doesn't rule out all meat eating that veganism somehow does.
Which I have just discovered are like opiates on steroids when it comes to addictive properties.
I don't really understand what you mean by that. They're completely different families of drugs used to treat different diseases, and have different side effect profiles. Opioids are typically used to treat pain, while Benzodiazepines treat anxiety disorders.