Can something that isn't conscious truly suffer?

Yes, suffering requires subjective experience and subjective experience requires consciousness.

>Do you think cows just sit there if a person burns a mark on it?
Response to environment is part of the definition of life. Of course many features of potentially harmful situations are going to cause aversive stimuli in mammals, that's from natural selection.
OP is clearly referring to higher-order psychological responses to stress. Perhaps this is best reframed as the question of transactional analysis' applicability to a certain species. In any case it requires that notions of ego and self-concept be well-defined, and a robust psychoanalytic framework.

>what about hyper-intelligent aliens who feel the same way about humans?
A more "advanced" species may very well be capable of more advanced or refined suffering than we are, or can conceive of, and may require/exercise greater care and attention to aspects we pay very little to.

Cows are conscious and capable of suffering.

Spend some time working with animals. They have fears, preferences, personalities, etc.

OF COURSE THEY CAN SUFFER.

What is the world coming to when kids are coming to Veeky Forums to ask questions with obvious fucking answers?!

If you think you can consider a cow isn't conscious, YOU ARE FUCKING RETARD. SO RETARDED YOU MAKE VEGANS LOOK LIKE GODS.

.......Isn't conscious...... God damn. God fucking damn. Mankind is doomed.

I'm pretty sure cows are really smart. So are pigs. Fuck chickens though I'm going to eat chicken till I die.

Everything with a nervous system is fully 'self aware' and can feel pain and therefore suffering.

To imply that the exact same brain matter, tissues, and the same or extremely similar chemicals that make up human and other animals nervous systems somehow produces 'consciousness' in humans but somehow only produces an 'illusion of consciousnesses' is fucking retarded. It's literally special pleading.

I'd wager that all vertebrates are fully self aware and consciousness, but from then onwards it gets fuzzy. Things like plants, fungi, weird ass mulitcellural creatures like pyrosomes and shit may or may not have some level of intelligence.

This, but you could have worded your post better.

Pain is a survival mechanism, suffering is experienced even by insects, probably even simpler organisms.
If it squirms when wounded, it's feeling pain.
Believing anything else is ridiculous.

global warming is real and caused by humans.
neo-nicotinoids are killing the honey bee.
cows have consciousness very similar to humans and can suffer like them.

all of these have strong ethical implications that are contrary to very powerful monetary interests.

cows are conscious you retard,

conscious doesn't mean self-awareness or whatever memeshit you think it does.

>global warming is real and caused by humans

Where is it warming?

How do we know a cow isn't a masochist?

Do you think chickens are conscious? Actually curious.

When I think of cows and pigs being pretty conscious it makes me feel bad for eating them but then I put it in the back of my mind cause they're fucking delicious. Then I feel bad again because I know I'm purposely disregarding them for my own gain but then I disregard that I feel bad about disregarding them lol

Really makes you think famalam

Chickens are about as intelligent as dogs. I don't know if they're conscious though.

No one will ever dare to even try to answer that question.

they're less intelligent than dogs

No, but unless you knock that out first, it's conscious.

Everything you can empirically say about suffering in humans, is present in all the higher mammals (and most birds). From a scientific perspective, animals suffer.

You can't say anything empirical about consciousness, until someone actually defines it. But for the only empirically verifiable definitions we do have (medical and legal), animals pass the test.

Dun mean I'm gonna stop eating burgers though. I mean, if we didn't raise them for food, most of these critters would be extinct.

>provide answer
>someone says "that's wrong faggot this is the definition"

Do insects suffer?

There ya get into dicey territory, as a lot of the neurochemistry involved is missing or different.

Though, if you've ever "played" with ants as a kid - you sure as hell know they put on a very good act of it. Most react to physical damage very similarly to the way we do... Though not always. Spray the right chemical on some bugs, and they'll happily eat their own innards until they die.

>Spray the right chemical on some bugs, and they'll happily eat their own innards until they die.
Give a human the right brew of "bath salts" and they'll do the same -- or worse. (Though I assume the reaction is more predictable and reproducible with insects.)

How autistic are you?

I remember I left a bunch of paramecium under a microscope with the light on, and kinda forgot about it for while.

By the time I came back, the water had almost entirely dried up. I looked into it, just in time to see the water retracting, and the one paramecium who happened to be in view, who had previously been completely docile, floating in the water, now in a total frenzy running from edge to edge of its rapidly retracting drop. Pretty soon it seemed to "give up", and went into a bit of a "seizure" as its cell membrane ruptured after the water was gone.

Clearly I'm anthropomorphising in this case, I mean, surely the thing doesn't even have nerve endings to feel pain, right? But damn if that didn't look like fear and suffering.

Actually felt sad for the poor thing, and a bit guilty. (Even realizing I'm killing millions of these sorts of things every day, just by being alive, but I don't usually see it.)

Insects seem to act and perform much closer to how they normally do if they've lost a limb or other part of their body as opposed to humans.
Although that could just be due to some other reason, I don't know a whole lot about either insects or humans.

Well, with most insects, their limbs are specifically jointed to be able to be torn off without causing irreparable damage. But if you try to rip one of their legs off, they will go into a wild panic and fucking fight you.

>Dun mean I'm gonna stop eating burgers though. I mean, if we didn't raise them for food, most of these critters would be extinct.
Aye... I know they suffer, but that's just life.

However, seeing as how part of being a civilized human is to escape that vicious suffering nature normally places upon us, I'd be willing to pay a bit more for my meat, if it meant it'd be raised under slightly more humane conditions, and put down as painlessly as possible. (Seems that pig nitrogen-tent invention was easier for everyone involved - both on the pig, and the folks who have to slaughter them.)

Not a *lot* more, mind you (I realize some other humans depend on cheap meat), but a bit.

On the other hand, I did once come upon a bug with only three legs left (guess it narrowly escaped some ants or something), and it was walking in endless circles.

I don't think insects have a "boredom" function.

True, dogs don't object to fun.

The only difference is the level of complexity. Natural selection has encouraged survival through natural selection. An arbitrarily large number of organisms "suffer" and die each pica-second on this planet alone.

The possibility of an organism with complexity orders of magnitudes greater than the difference between contemporary hominids and single celled organisms has an incredibly high probability.

I would argue that current definitions of sentience and intelligence are subjective to include us and organisms close to our levels of complexity and that we wouldn't be considered sentient to a high percentage of metrics.

*evolution has encouraged survival

>Everything with a nervous system is fully 'self aware'
this is not true.

Well, yes, paramecium react to stimuli... But you'd think it'd be more mechanical... That the thing would just sense the water membrane retracting, and expend just enough energy to move just a bit further away from it, rinse and repeat... But that's not what this one was doing - it was burning full falangi turbo-juice and going from end to end of its rapidly shrinking world, as if it had noticed, and remembered, each end was retracting. Ya think it'd at least just slowly follow the edge, or, something.

But OP's question as could something not-conscious "feel pain", and a paramecium, unlike a cow, doesn't even have the mechanics for it, not being more much complicated than a single pain nerve itself.

Well... I don't think he meant to the degree of recognizing their reflection in a mirror and using that information for removing tape from themselves and such. But the entire purpose of a sensory nervous system, is to be self aware to the degree that you can react to stimuli, and in the case of pain, to damage.

Granted, plants react to stimuli and damage, and have no nervous systems to speak of.

Look at pic related and tell me with a straight face doggos don't experience the full range of human emotions

animal consciousness isn't human consciousness by a long shot

dogs are stupid
they have rudimentary self awareness

you anthropomorphize the animal because it appears to be smiling, when in reality it bases all of its actions purely on instincts rather than rational thought

>implying when you smile at another person, that isn't mostly instinctual

The thread is about consciousness, not sapience.

>According to Google....

They 100% don't and your assumptions would result into bad dog training and maybe an unhappy dog.
>dogs can feel nostalgia
>dogs can feel shame
etc.

awwwwwwwwwwww

Yes but why are they so fucking smug? Especially after taking a shit on the carpet.

Does not caring about animal suffering make me someone a bad person?

Humans don't care about other humans suffering painfully. How can humans care about other animals suffering painfully?

>implying smiles are universally friendly
>or even ever 'friendly'
tsk, tsk.

you meant reflexive

suffering isn't real, at least in the sense that it only exists in the mind of the sufferer

Yes, humans have a capability to feel empathy, therefore when they see other living creatures in a state that they perceive as suffering, the creature suffers through the simulation of the conscious mind.

That being said societal constructs that associate negative emotions with suffering largely play into the subversion of mankind's responsibility to advance the confines of biological and mechanical information systems as an entity capable of doing so.

One could say consciousness to a human is no different than the ability to understand that their information intersects space time only in the form of neural networks of brain cells. A human on earth says "I am conscious", a lifeform somewhere else in the universe says the same in with their own mechanisms of associating basic information with biological equivalencies.

"I am conscious"
"glorp glorp a zorp"

At the end of the day neither escape the reality that they cannot exist without physical form.

>glorp glorp a zorp
youtube.com/watch?v=t_LJtG2gXSc

Everywhere

Pain =/= suffering, you mouthbreathing retard.

There are different levels and types of consciousness, and yes, anything that feels pain can suffer. Only an idiot would think that the sensation of pain is somehow unique to humans.

>muh imaginary definitions

Here's another example of you being a retard

Then explain how the fact that humans have self awareness, but animals with the nearly identical nervous system, same hormones, same chemical messengers and same synapses are somehow not self aware.

The phenomenon of consciousness is the DIRECT result of having sensory organs processed through a central nervous system. Anything else is special pleading.

Self-awareness is a special trait of consciousness. It is the conscious being being able to perceive itself. Most animals are conscious but most aren't self-aware, since self-awareness seems to be a product of intelligence. But just because an animal is not self-aware doesn't mean it doesn't suffer or feel pain.

>Treating self awareness as a binary matter
Just stop. If a being is conscious it inherently has some degree of self awareness.

It is a binary matter. A being is either aware of itself as an individual or it isn't. Just like it either passes the mirror test or it doesn't.

Pain is information about damage to tissues.

Suffering is the reaction to that pain.

And stress is the result of suffering.

Now, the problem is that we can't tell if other animals experience human emotions as we do or not. We can know if they suffer stress but we don't know if they understand the concept of suffering, for as far as we know every time they try to avoid pain based around their memories they're just following a protocol in their minds.

The problem is, that animals is a very broad term, would you say that an arthropod suffers if they lose a leg? They sure react to losing a leg but as an escape mechanism.

And if we go to humans is when things start to get fuzzy. No matter how hard you try, there is always an animal that seems to experience as humans do, and after experiments being done into their brains we know that the difference is much smaller than we thought but still there is the problem of understanding.

In humans pain is composed of much more things than damage, when you suffer pain you're crating a small trauma in your mind tha fixes that situation in your memory to avoid that, until here monkeys and cows can do the same, but humans will keep sufering from that memory, give it meanings and reexamination, will define your personality and at the end of the day, result in much more stress than other animals do for the simple fact that we try to understand that pain beyond the primitive physical implications and asign a value for it.

If you would start killing chickens in a farm, they would surely start running from you more energically every time you come, but at the end of the day, their behaviour is not modified by that thought and they don't seem to stress about the lose of others as if not seeing the relation between losing a certain number of their kind and acknowledging the fact that they will meet the same fate some day.

How dare he use the information on the internet!

>Can something that isn't conscious truly suffer?
Obviously no.
You might as well claim that kicking a stone will hurt it or that shutting down a computer is murder.

not really, perhaps you lack emphaty

Maybe I'm an hypocrite because I care about pet animals or other animals in general, but damn I love steak.
However I think its part of our nature, to eat them.
Do I want them to die for our comsumption? Yes, I appreciate it.
Do I want them to suffer while doing so?
I'd rather not.

Consumption*,
sorry.

She's an A-zombie. She doesn't have introspective access to her own thought process, so she thinks of pain not as a mental state but as the response brought about by that mental state. Whether she is a P-zombie is an open question, as it is for everyone.

Pain [math]\subset[/math] suffering.

Would you consider a mildly mentally handicapped, mute human capable of suffering? Because they are nearly the same thing. I would go as far to say anything with a brain is consious, and anything that can communicate in any way (this includes anything from barking/mooing/meowing , all the way down to the honey bee waggle dance) is sentient. Note the difference between sentient and sapient.

I like you

Are those crystals in the metal? wow that must be damascus steel! Or... could it.... is that VALERIAN!?!? it must be worth a firtune!

>Because they are nearly the same thing
Why do people on Veeky Forums always come up with the most retarded comparisons?
They're clearly nothing alike you dumb retard.

>implying humans excel at sapience

>plants may or may not have some level of intelligence
kek

OP asked his question wrong. It should read;
>Can something that isn't truly conscious suffer.
And by truly conscious here we mean self-conscious.
Cows have consciousness, of course, they are aware of their environment.
But are they aware that they are aware is another question and impossible to prove one way or the other, but indeed if we were to try to prove it, it would seem that they aren't. Animals are like complex biological robots. Once they learn something they just do the say thing over and over again without reflection and the rest is just instinctual.

its true though user

have been measured to show basic levels of fear in the past

be nice to your garden

>>Can something that isn't truly conscious suffer.
No, not what I meant.

No, they haven't. Putting electrodes on a plant and measuring electric signals when you cut it does not equal pain and fear.

they have nerves to feel pain. feel pain over long periods, I'd call that suffering.

Does it really matter?

I'm willing to grant that animals suffer in medical research and food production; but so what? Why should we care?

As the social animal known as human you have a biological behavior of empathy. Empathy has a lot of benefits that let us build human society. Empathy allows us to sense fear in others and usually incentivizes us to let the loser withdraw.

For food animals the value of empathy is to keep the animal calm, protecting our own bodies from a 1,000lb cow that might resist or panic in a dangerous way.

Its much easier to butcher a creature that is calm. (well you kill it then butcher, but killing is part of the process.)

Can something conscious truly suffer?

Suffering is a continuum. Consciousness is a continuum. They're interdependent.

It doesn't matter what you meant.

maybe there are different degrees of consciousness
Like a person is more conscious than a cow is more conscious than a rock

yes bro a cow can truly suffer

How is consciousness related to the sensation of physical pain?

When you stub your toe, the pain exists regardless of you thinking about it.

Can that dog write a treatise on the canine condition?

Heraclitus, who was glossed by Aristotle and survives in Fragments, proposed that Man was nature gained sentience.

Our level of awareness is far greater because we can build upon what is inherited and because we have evolved to master the environment.

Man is at once little above a beast and little below a Grecian god.

Wonder what caused the chickens to behave that way.

you fucking idiot, does a stone live? does it have nerve cells?!

excellent non-answer you fucking retard

>But are they aware that they are aware
Wtf!

dogs can be nostalgic. ever seen a doggo freak out after he hasn't seen you in years?

Tell me why a damaged highly sophisticated neural network is any different than a less sophisticated network made of identical materials.

Doesn't understand basic english, browses Veeky Forums
why am I not surprised?