Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987) • Hacker News Board

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#371

Post by verisimi » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 1:10 PM UTC

trasz wrote: post #367

verisimi wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are not talking about a uterus! Or an organ from a person who is dead. We are talking about a mother and a foetus. The foetus is nascent life. Also, the foetus and the mother separate - and become different people - everyone was a foetus once. No one is disputing this! Or are you? A mother/woman plainly feels pain, and in this study, it states that babies do too. (I didn't need the study to tell me this, but whate…

Again, none of this matters - forcing someone into unwanted pregnancy is no different from forcing someone to be an organ donor.

No post body was provided.

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#372

Post by momenti » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 2:01 PM UTC

Kaze404 wrote: post #361

momenti wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be an out-of-context quote. I'd say that attempting to prohibit this tradition has a net negative impact on the integrity and functioning of society because the harm in question is very minor but the reaction to such an attempt will be major. I'm sure you are trying to twist this into "but then I could anesthetize and then circumcise you", however, in that case I'd retaliate so drastically that it would ne…

I’m not trying to twist this into anything, I literally only repeated your own words back to you. So now this isn’t about whether the consequences are minor, but whether the person being harmed has the power to retaliate and how such retaliation impacts society? I’m having a really hard time following your rationale, and if I can be perfectly honest the impression I get is that you first decided that genital mutilati…

Power is one factor informing policy, empathy is another. Neither is sufficient for a policy that sustains the system for long on its own. Only focusing on power would result in e.g. exploitation of Africa. But most don't like this due to empathy.

Focusing only on empathy often misses the point too as it tends to get politicized, overinflating minor issues as in this case, which will ultimately result in power conflicts, degrading long-term sustenance.

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#373

Post by encryptluks2 » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 2:03 PM UTC

CodeSgt wrote: post #370

encryptluks2 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One that I can think of, but I think it may be more "early access": https://mindxsciences.com/ There are blood and urine tests for seratonin, but studies are mixed on how reliable they are. Since depression can also be accompanied by other factors though, there is a wide range of tests that can help provide objective evidence.

So, just as the person you replied to said, nothing approved and usable in clinical settings.

Do you mean like as common as a rapid test, cause they are approved and usable but more specialized medicine.

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#374

Post by tomcam » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 1:50 AM UTC

dotancohen wrote: post #237

tomcam wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My stock joke is that if the doctor or nurse says it won’t hurt, it will hurt at least a little. If they say it will hurt a little, it will hurt a lot. If they say it will probably hurt, time for serious anesthesia. Also, there’s pretty much no such thing as minor surgery except maybe skin tag removal.

The book Enders Game opens with this premise.

Had completely forgotten about it. Rings so true:

https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/endersgame/

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#375

Post by thaumasiotes » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 10:07 AM UTC

asiachick wrote: post #360

thaumasiotes wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> smell being good/bad seems to me to be learned? Go to Taiwan and smell stinky tofu 臭豆腐. I don't understand your example. The name of the item explicitly identifies it as smelling bad.

Sure, but what about other examples. Tons of people like blue cheese. But it smells bad. It doesn't have "smells bad" in the name. Neither does "durian" 榴莲

> Sure, but what about other examples.

But these aren't relevant examples. The claim was that people learn to think of certain smells as "good" or "bad". The example given was 臭豆腐, which makes no sense because it is thought of as smelling bad.

You don't even claim that your examples are thought of as smelling good. You don't have to have "smells bad" in your name in order to smell bad.

The lesson to draw here is that people are willing to eat things that both (1) taste good, and (2) smell bad. If you like blue cheese and it smells bad... how is that a counterexample?

(I'm open to the idea that people disagree on whether durians or blue cheese smell bad. But I'm less open to the idea that their opinion of the smell is learned - from what I've heard, some people think durian smells disgusting, and other people never saw anything wrong with the smell, but I haven't heard of people who initially thought the smell was disgusting but grew to like it.)

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#376

Post by sydd » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 1:05 PM UTC

parentheses wrote: post #185

sydd wrote: post #6

It's fucking scary, that this was recognized in 1987. In the 80s and even in the 90s most places did complex operations on newborns without any kind of painkillers -- imagine a heart surgery without painkillers. Not to mention "simple" stuff like circumcision. Also by this time they knew this about animals too. I think people will look at us as barbarians that we ate them when we knew that they feel pain, can sense t…

(NOT advocating for baby pain here..) Anesthesia is dangerous. It's easy to say "solve pain", but there are trade-offs. Mothers giving birth need to be closely monitored when they're given pain meds. It's hard to believe that infants' frail bodies can handle strong pain-killers at the levels used in surgery. There's also a long-term damage to consider. Infants' bodies are growing and changing so rapidly. Similar to s…

> It's hard to believe that infants' frail bodies can handle strong pain-killers at the levels used in surgery.

Not true, we are giving them strong pain-killers now. Just we have not 30 years ago.

> There's also a long-term damage to consider.

As with every medical procedure there are pros and cons. But there is a reason why one is given painkillers for every surgical procedure. One can opt out in some cases, but its very rare. Just because a baby cant consent its not a reason not to use them. I've yet to hear a story where an adult opted not to take painkillers for an operation, just because it might be better for his health.

> This type of hyperbolic commentary is not productive discussion.

Its not hyperbolic, we have evidence that babies (even few month old fetuses in their mothers womb) can feel pain. There is nothing ambigious about this now.

https://jme.bmj.com/content/46/1/3

https://www.livescience.com/54774-fetal-pain-anesthesia.html

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#377

Post by QuantumGood » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 8:14 PM UTC

bergenty wrote: post #297

QuantumGood wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do some people end up making clearly counterproductive interpretations that ignore not only evidence in general, but clear evidence of harm to others? I remember a Google employee changed a popular font for headings. It broke the layout on a very large number of websites. Several people discussed this with the employee, suggesting the font should be forked rather than force-updated. The employee engaged, but refu…

Your use of they makes this almost incomprehensible.

Writers should use the singular “they” in two main cases: (a) when referring to a generic person whose gender is unknown or irrelevant to the context and (b) when referring to a specific, known person who uses “they” as their pronoun. – apastyle.apa.org

I do not know the gender of the person under discussion, nor do I know if that person has pronoun preferences. I simply followed the "generic person whose gender is unknown" standard.

I've been using "they" in this manner for 50+ years. Never had anyone comment on it before. Are you attempting some kind of meta virtue signalling, considering "pronoun preferences" is a very recently added option?

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#378

Post by corsac » Sat, Jun 18, 2022, 1:37 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #57

BitwiseFool wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"People tend to instinctively anthropomorphize, and this instinct is particularly strong when it comes to our offspring." I don't want to come across as snide when I ask this, but why would it be wrong to anthropomorphize a fellow human being?

That's a fair question. And I'm not saying it is wrong, only that it might be. Let me give a slightly less fraught example: we have an instinct to "honor our dead" and not to "desecrate their bodies." Does that make sense? The dead person doesn't care. Does it even make sense to talk about a dead "person"? One might argue that no dead thing can be a person, it's just a (dead) thing that was once a person and still ha…

Do people instinctively anthropomorphize? I bet the existence of that instinct has far less empirical support than the pain consciousness of newborn babies. Be that as it may, these comparisons to parents' "anthropomorphising" of their kids are not apples-to-apples.

Chatbots and machines programmed to show feeling responses are mimicry. People can be tricked. If you want to fool ships with a fake iceberg, you won't bother with more than the tip. But if you're a glaciologist, examples of sailors getting spooked by fake plastic iceberg tips would not lead you to question whether natural icy marine bodies (especially ones that usually develop into icebergs!) have any mass below sea-level. Or if you're studying carcinization, the fact that robot crab decoys can pass for real tells you exactly nothing about why unrelated phylogenetic lines independently develop crab-like features.

And the "people" in "dead people" refers to real people, who die. A corpse is a "dead person" like a puddle of water is "melted ice". Mourning, including respectful treatment of remains, is symbolic. None of that is anthropomorphism.

It is established that human babies develop into human adults. Their pain and other distinctly human responses resemble the adult forms profoundly. Are babies "a system [that] responds to painful stimulus" but feels no pain? Occam's Razor says no. I see zero downside to reckoning that possibility out of the moral calculus.

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#379

Post by lisper » Sat, Jun 18, 2022, 5:07 PM UTC

corsac wrote: post #378

lisper wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair question. And I'm not saying it is wrong, only that it might be. Let me give a slightly less fraught example: we have an instinct to "honor our dead" and not to "desecrate their bodies." Does that make sense? The dead person doesn't care. Does it even make sense to talk about a dead "person"? One might argue that no dead thing can be a person, it's just a (dead) thing that was once a person and still ha…

Do people instinctively anthropomorphize? I bet the existence of that instinct has far less empirical support than the pain consciousness of newborn babies. Be that as it may, these comparisons to parents' "anthropomorphising" of their kids are not apples-to-apples. Chatbots and machines programmed to show feeling responses are mimicry. People can be tricked. If you want to fool ships with a fake iceberg, you won't b…

> Do people instinctively anthropomorphize?

Yes.

> I bet the existence of that instinct has far less empirical support than the pain consciousness of newborn babies.

I'll take that bet. Why do you think human children play with dolls?

> People can be tricked.

Indeed.

> A corpse is a "dead person" like a puddle of water is "melted ice".

You're kind of making my point for me here. A corpse is an inanimate object. An inanimate object cannot be a person. A corpse was a person, but when that person died it ceased to be a person just as when ice melts it ceases to be ice. When a person dies, when ice melts, they cease to exhibit any of the distinguishing properties that made them a person or that made them ice.

> It is established that human babies develop into human adults.

Sure, but that in and of itself does not make them people any more than the fact that people die makes live people corpses. A live person will some day become a corpse, but while it is alive it is not yet a corpse. A baby will some day become a person, but while it is a baby it may or may not be a person.

> Their pain and other distinctly human responses resemble the adult forms profoundly.

That's simply not true. A baby's response to pain is all but indistinguishable from its being, say, hungry, or just in a bad mood, whereas in adults these are pretty easily distinguished. But even if it were true, so what? You could make an automaton that mimicked adult responses to pain, but that automaton would not feel pain. You can't conclude anything about subjective experience from I/O behavior alone.

Look, I'm not saying that babies don't feel pain. I think they probably do. All I'm saying is that it's not the slam-dunk that many people here seem to think it is.

Re: Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

#380

Post by corsac » Sun, Jun 19, 2022, 3:26 AM UTC

lisper wrote: post #379

corsac wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people instinctively anthropomorphize? I bet the existence of that instinct has far less empirical support than the pain consciousness of newborn babies. Be that as it may, these comparisons to parents' "anthropomorphising" of their kids are not apples-to-apples. Chatbots and machines programmed to show feeling responses are mimicry. People can be tricked. If you want to fool ships with a fake iceberg, you won't b…

> Do people instinctively anthropomorphize? Yes. > I bet the existence of that instinct has far less empirical support than the pain consciousness of newborn babies. I'll take that bet. Why do you think human children play with dolls? > People can be tricked. Indeed. > A corpse is a "dead person" like a puddle of water is "melted ice". You're kind of making my point for me here. A corpse is an inanimate object. An in…

> Why do you think human children play with dolls?

Do children "play" with dolls? I don't think that is a slam-dunk. As far as we know, children may be mindless automata and what we call "doll-play" may be unfeeling mirroring of adult anthropomorphizing behavior absorbed through something like blindsight.

> You're kind of making my point for me here.

Not at all. My point was that calling a puddle "melted ice" has nothing to do with mistaking it for any kind of ice or ascribing characteristics of ice to it. Likewise with "dead people".

> A baby's response to pain is all but indistinguishable from its being, say, hungry, or just in a bad mood

That's simply untrue, even in neonates (not to mention babies several months older). Look into the abundant research applying the Facial Action Coding System and derived systems to infants and their pain vs. other distress responses.

> You can't conclude anything about subjective experience from I/O behavior alone.

This is a denkverbot, not productive skepticism. We can draw robust, valuable conclusions about subjective states without enjoying deductive certainty.