black soldier flies… feel pain around 1.3% as [intensely] as us
At your blog, I asked if anyone could find the argument for this proposition. In your reply, you mention the linked report (and then you banned me, which is why I am repeating my question here). I can indeed find the number 0.013 on the linked page, and there are links to other documents and pages. But they refer to concepts like “welfare range” and “critical flicker-fusion frequency”.
I suppose what I would like to see is (1) where the number 0.013 comes from (2) how it comes to be interpreted as relative intensity of pain rather than something else.
Just to be clear, I banned you because I find your comments to be annoying consistently. You are, in fact, the first commenter I’ve ever banned.
As for the question, they look at the various neural correlates of suffering on different theories, split their credence across them, and divy up the results based on expected consciousness. The report is more detailed.
I found an answer to the main question that bothered me, which is the relevance of a cognitive “flicker frequency” to suffering. The idea is that this determines the rate of subjective time relative to physical time (i.e. the number of potential experiences per second); and that is relevant to magnitude of suffering, because it can mean the difference between 10 moments of pain per second and 100 moments of pain per second.
As for the larger issues here:
I agree that ideally one would not have farming or ecosystems in which large-scale suffering is a standard part of the process, and that a Jain-like attitude which extends this perspective e.g. even to insects, makes sense.
Our understanding of pain and pleasure feels very poor to me. For example, can sensations be inherently painful, or does pain also require a capacity for wanting the sensation to stop? If the latter is the case, then avoidant behavior triggered by a damaging stimulus does not actually prove the existence of pain in an organism; it can just be a reflex installed by darwinism. Actual pain might only exist when the reflexive behavior has evolved to become consciously regulated.
At your blog, I asked if anyone could find the argument for this proposition. In your reply, you mention the linked report (and then you banned me, which is why I am repeating my question here). I can indeed find the number 0.013 on the linked page, and there are links to other documents and pages. But they refer to concepts like “welfare range” and “critical flicker-fusion frequency”.
I suppose what I would like to see is (1) where the number 0.013 comes from (2) how it comes to be interpreted as relative intensity of pain rather than something else.
Just to be clear, I banned you because I find your comments to be annoying consistently. You are, in fact, the first commenter I’ve ever banned.
As for the question, they look at the various neural correlates of suffering on different theories, split their credence across them, and divy up the results based on expected consciousness. The report is more detailed.
I found an answer to the main question that bothered me, which is the relevance of a cognitive “flicker frequency” to suffering. The idea is that this determines the rate of subjective time relative to physical time (i.e. the number of potential experiences per second); and that is relevant to magnitude of suffering, because it can mean the difference between 10 moments of pain per second and 100 moments of pain per second.
As for the larger issues here:
I agree that ideally one would not have farming or ecosystems in which large-scale suffering is a standard part of the process, and that a Jain-like attitude which extends this perspective e.g. even to insects, makes sense.
Our understanding of pain and pleasure feels very poor to me. For example, can sensations be inherently painful, or does pain also require a capacity for wanting the sensation to stop? If the latter is the case, then avoidant behavior triggered by a damaging stimulus does not actually prove the existence of pain in an organism; it can just be a reflex installed by darwinism. Actual pain might only exist when the reflexive behavior has evolved to become consciously regulated.