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

nytimes.com

381–387 of 387 posts

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

#381
post #379
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…

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

#382

This is, I believe, one of the downsides of empiricism and the fixation on citation rather than observation and reason. The idea that a whole profession came to reject the idea that infants are able to feel pain is astonishing, especially considering anyone who has ever taken care of infants knows that these little human beings react to things which are known to be painful. Babies feeling pain is something that shoul…

The thing that bothered me the most wasn't the awareness of pain in babies, it wqs the answer "they won't remember" when I mentioned the pain argument.

WTF.

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

#383
post #380
post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 not…

> Do children "play" with dolls? I don't think that is a slam-dunk.

Seriously?

> As far as we know, children may be mindless automata

Yes, that's possible. You can't prove that humans in general are not philosophical zombies. But I have memories of being self-aware around age 4 or so, so from my own personal experience I put that as an absolute upper bound on where humans might not be persons yet.

On the other hand, I also remember exhibiting I/O behavior that would cause an outside observer to conclude that I was experiencing much more intense pain than in retrospect I was actually experiencing.

> Facial Action Coding System

Of course it is possible to create a taxonomy of facial expressions and how those correlate to physical stimulus. What you can't do is know the subjective experiences that those expressions correspond to because no adult knows what it is like to be a baby. If anyone actually knew that, we would not be having this discussion at all.

> We can draw robust, valuable conclusions about subjective states without enjoying deductive certainty.

I don't deny that. What I'm saying is that you cannot draw those conclusions simply by observing a system's I/O behavior. You have to take the underlying mechanism into account. If you doubt this, look at this photo:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91YBjzSRmnL...

The subject of that photo appears to be in distress, but it is not in fact in distress. The way I know this is that the subject of that photo is actually a doll (look at the eyebrows), and dolls cannot be in distress. So there is an existence proof that merely because a physical system appears to be in distress that is not enough evidence to conclude that it is in fact in distress. You need something else.

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

#384
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It ends up that opioids are terrible drugs. Opioids ruin lives. Opioids restore lives. People die from taking them. People are functionally dead when they're unobtainable. The most false thing about opioids is that they are any one thing. I've used hydrocodone for months at a time. It's addictive so there are protocols that need to be followed. Stick with the dose and taper when done. However, that was in the past.…

> My state now has a hard 3 day limit and few Dr.s are willing to write even that. I don’t mean to de-anonymize you, but what state is this? I know state laws vary, but I haven’t heard of anything close to those sorts of restrictions.

Florida

ref: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/opioids/florida-law-pu...

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

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.ucsfhealth.org/treatments/surgical-abortion-seco... Five seconds on Google to find the answer to your question. Embryos don't have a human brain when you use an abortion pills as well, and second/third-trimester abortions that are not "the mother's life is in danger" are incredibly rare, even in the United States where people are incredibly uneducated on the subject because of antiscientific religious pre…

> antiscientific religious pressure I find it really weird that this phrase is used when talking about things like abortion, but never gets used when talking about infant circumcision. Isn't the only reason that infants are allowed to be permanently mutilated along with lifelong loss of sensation due to intense lobbying by antiscientific religious pressure?

Yes, we should abolish circumcision as well

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

#386
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

https://www.ucsfhealth.org/treatments/surgical-abortion-seco... Five seconds on Google to find the answer to your question. Embryos don't have a human brain when you use an abortion pills as well, and second/third-trimester abortions that are not "the mother's life is in danger" are incredibly rare, even in the United States where people are incredibly uneducated on the subject because of antiscientific religious pre…

> second/third-trimester abortions that are not "the mother's life is in danger" are incredibly rare

Correct, and since it doesn't affect many people, a legal ban to protect innocent lives is even more achievable than it seems.

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

#387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

If this is a genuine criticism some people would have, what would be the suggested rewrite for a person of unknown gender?
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