[thechat] Fish do feel pain

Erika Meyer emeyer at lclark.edu
Thu May 1 13:01:22 CDT 2003


>What surprised me was the title - the leap from responsiveness to damaging
>physical stimuli, to subjective experience of pain is a huge one.

yeah, if you're being all objectively scientific.  good point.

>Sunflowers move in response to the direction of the sun - does this mean
>they can 'see' ?
>
>In other words, don't anthropomorphosize salmon, they hate that. :)

Just because I feel a spiritual connection with salmon doesn't mean 
I'm anthropomorphizing them.  That is IMO another out-of-control 
western concept stemming from the myth of objectivity.

Yeah a level of objectivity is possible, but it is never absolute.

When you remove the spiritual from everything, what do you replace it 
with?  The myth of objectivity.

Science, objectivity, scientific method replaces God as the 
"infallible source."    But it ain't infallible and if it's the only 
lens you use, you're vision is gonna be skewed...

Yeah, I guess we gotta go define pain now, you know, in objective 
terms... a totally impossible endeavor.

Maybe we should argue about when a fetus become a human, maybe we 
should argue about where life begins and ends... why doesn't science 
tell us the ANSWER??  WHY WHY WHY????

Erika

-- science fan and daughter of microbiologist

-- 


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