Ok, but the question was whether or not they feel pain. We can definitively say they display escape behaviors when presented with an aversive stimulus, so I’d say it’s likely they do feel some sort of pain, even if their perception of it is nothing like that displayed by animals with central nervous systems.
The morality of shredding them alive by the thousands is a different conversation, but I would say yes, nature is cruel, and yes, it’s possible for humans to mimic nature and kill animals in similar ways, but humans also have a knack for taking things too far, eg chickens bred to be so big they can’t even walk or jellyfish-murdering robots
This is one of those things that’s hard to define. If a popcorn kernel gets too hot, it pops and it’s almost like it’s trying to run from the heat. How is that different from a jellyfish reaction to pain? There’s a lot of good arguments on both sides.
Sometimes, I wonder how far away we really are from the popcorn kernel.
Ok, but the question was whether or not they feel pain. We can definitively say they display escape behaviors when presented with an aversive stimulus, so I’d say it’s likely they do feel some sort of pain, even if their perception of it is nothing like that displayed by animals with central nervous systems.
The morality of shredding them alive by the thousands is a different conversation, but I would say yes, nature is cruel, and yes, it’s possible for humans to mimic nature and kill animals in similar ways, but humans also have a knack for taking things too far, eg chickens bred to be so big they can’t even walk or jellyfish-murdering robots
It’s ironic that your username is “protist”, since even many single cell organisms display escape behaviours when presented with an adverse stimulus.
This is one of those things that’s hard to define. If a popcorn kernel gets too hot, it pops and it’s almost like it’s trying to run from the heat. How is that different from a jellyfish reaction to pain? There’s a lot of good arguments on both sides.
Sometimes, I wonder how far away we really are from the popcorn kernel.