0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
First of all. I don't agree in differing animals from other animals (Humans)
Secondly pain is a physiological process releasing certain neurotransmitters warning the organism of harm done.
Some of those lines of communication is already shortened to be outside our conscious knowledge, like burning yourself where your body reacts before you know it.
Nope, everyone feel pain, it's a survival response to a hurtful environment. What a dog define it as I don't know, or a amoeba, but they will react to it. The only thing a 'higher consciousness' brings with it is the ability to rationalize around it and find excuses for treating others differently 'as they can't feel pain'. (It's called 'objectification' in Swedish, where you by defining something/one as less than you, a 'object', now will be 'allowed' to do what you want. It's used in a lot of situations, seldom honorable, wars and concentration camps comes to mind here, serial killers another, your boss acting like a jerk/dictator a third.)So, not true.If you instead argued what importance your 'time experience' have on future choices we would come closer to what differ different animals. We have a highly developed abstract definition of 'time', in where we constantly draw conclusions from our history. That's a main reason why we invented books too, so that we could describe the past in detail, not diluting it by trying to remember from generation to generation.But when it comes down to it all animals have the same basics, and we're just one of them.
Nope, everyone feel pain, it's a survival response to a hurtful environment. What a dog define it as I don't know, or a amoeba, but they will react to it.
Defining your way of generalizing to a postulate stating a 'superior way' of defining pain doesn't make it a truth Nam.
If it is too long, then here's a summary:Nociception (the neural dynamics following a painful/noxious stimulation) is typically thought of as an inherent proxy for pain. I argue that it isn't; rather it is a learned proxy for pain. In fact, to a baby nociception should be perceived as jumbled as vision or hearing.And just as certain CNS elements, say in the occipital lobe, aid us in learning to identify faces and shapes, so do CNS elements in the spinal chord (i.e. the automatic limb retraction mechanism) aid us, I argue, in learning about pain.
Btw: Now that I see what you mean, yeah, I think we agree on some things, although I'm much more doubtful of there being any simple 'linear mapping' of the brains functions connected to animal responses, than you might be But, I'm older than you too? So, you might blame that on either experience, or galloping senility
Assume that pain even without a brain involved are a reflex for avoiding a hurtful environment. We have some examples of people that don't feel pain. Their life is a misery as they constantly hurt themselves getting no warnings. If you assume that all bodies feel best when in good order you have a reason for pain. Congenital insensitivity to pain (CIPA), is a rare disorder of the genes that pretty much can destroy all chances to live a normal life.
Following from this, a related hypothesis is that if an animal was removed of its capacity to rely on this limb-retraction mechanism soon following birth, it would then become unable to properly learn about the conscious experience of pain from pain-inducing events. This is so since they would lose a guide that normally directs them towards learning the significance of nociceptory neural patterns. In other words, they would not properly make the direct connection between nociception and, for example, tissue damage. This is not to say that such an animal would be unable to learn this connection eventually. For example, even though they will not automatically retract their limbs upon extreme nociception, they would still be able to eventually make the connection between damaged tissue and nociception.Of course, the drawback to learning pain via the actual observance of damaged tissue as opposed to via a limb-retraction mechanism is that the damage has already been done before one is able to learn from it. Not only this, but even after learning the connection between nociception and tissue damage, the fact of the matter remains that whereas the limb-retraction mechanism is automatic by nature, the nociception/tissue-damage connection requires the use of more deeply-rooted neural connections in the CNS thus increasing the reaction time. Also, since such a mechanism would not be automatic (unlike the limb-retraction mechanism), the requirement of properly-planned movements of the limb is introduced as well; this may also increase the reaction time. The greater reaction time ultimately amounts to greater tissue damage before an animal can ‘think-up’ a proper extraction route for the limb being damaged.
This gift by the CNS can come in a variety of forms; anything from automatic retraction of limbs to avoid tissue damage, to all the primary, secondary, etc. areas of the different modalities of the brain, which provide us with mechanisms for extracting species-specific and relevant information from the raw sensory input.
Well, the problem is that you're not discussing 'pain', as in the neurological reactions to it, as much as you're questioning if 'lower organisms' translate it the same way as we.
Myself I expect it to be the other way around. The better your cognitive ability, and the more 'wired' ones brain is, the more chance one will be able to translate the impressions into other patterns. Like we see at times with humans actively seeking pain. I don't know any other animal doing so?