Inverts & Pain - The Ultimate Thread

[cacoseraph]

Then how about a simple experiment... Its not an original experiment but it is easy enough anyone on this board can do. And since we have some real scientists here they can participate and make sure they have not tampered or biased this experiment in any way.

3 jars of dried grain; rice, wheat, rye, whatever, as long as it is the same type, and the same size clear glass jars (for observation). Put the lid on the jars and observe for 1 month...

Jar 1 you say nice things to every day.
Jar 2 you say hateful things to every day.
Jar 3 you ignore.

An alternate would be to do this to 3 plants of the same species, age and size. However you would have to water them the same amount during this month.

According to what Code just wrote, there shouldn't be any change in the grain at the end of the month. But if there is, would the grain be responding to the energy we impart, or to emotions?

Now, what if we did that to our tarantulas?

Just a thought.


(This experiment came from Dr. Masaru Emoto, Yokohama Municipal University, Japan.)

um, what language do plants speak? and do you need to yell or speak in the same tone?

couldn't there be a much simpler explanation than plants responding to the emotional content, such as CO2 fluctuations, humidity flux, etc?

rushing to attribute emotional perception from an experiment like that fails Occam's Razor horribly

(note: i didn't read any more about that experiment than what Nia said)

 

[Nia]

um, what language do plants speak? and do you need to yell or speak in the same tone?)

It doesn't matter what language you speak. It might be confusing if you yelled harshly those loving words though lol.

And there may well be... however, since not everyone here has access to sophisticated equipment in order to measure such, this one is easy enough to distinguish if there is a visible difference in the way the jars are treated. If there is a difference a few times it could be a fluke. Yet it opens up questions if the results indicate the possibility of an emotional or a type of energy response time after time, under different conditions (temps are going to be different at my house than at yours for instance).

Due to the simplicity and variables of this experiment I don't expect anyone to come up with text book 'let's write a paper' results. In fact I expect, judging from this thread, that there will certainly be a difference of opinion on what those results are. If we really wanted to get into the debate on whether or not plants have emotion we should probably start another thread. My intent was to open the possibility that if plants (which have no brain or nervous system) have some type of emotional response, then couldn't tarantulas (which do have a brain and nervous system). And if they have emotional response, then there would also indicate a possibility for the ability to feel pain. As I do not wish to subject any of my beloved tarantuals to hateful words or to ignore them (I'm too emotional) I thought that using plants wold be an alternative.

 

[Code Monkey]

And if they have emotional response, then there would also indicate a possibility for the ability to feel pain.

But there is NOTHING in your experiment that tests for an emotional response, ergo, any conclusions meant to cast doubt on plants a lacking emotion are null and void by default.

Nice/angry/hateful are interpretations in our brains of purely neutral stimuli. Without our empathic capabilities we'd never be able to discern emotional content of anything, so how do plants discern the intent behind neutral stimuli? You have to answer that question first before you can go drawing any conclusions from tossing some good vibes their way.

We can draw probable conclusions when dealing with animals with a similar nervous system such as a dog, with plants you're going to have to do better than an experiment cooked up by some wackos in the 1970s on too many quaaludes.

 

[Nia]

But there is NOTHING in your experiment that tests for an emotional response, ergo, any conclusions meant to cast doubt on plants a lacking emotion are null and void by default.

Nice/angry/hateful are interpretations in our brains of purely neutral stimuli. Without our empathic capabilities we'd never be able to discern emotional content of anything, so how do plants discern the intent behind neutral stimuli? You have to answer that question first before you can go drawing any conclusions from tossing some good vibes their way.

We can draw probable conclusions when dealing with animals with a similar nervous system such as a dog, with plants you're going to have to do better than an experiment cooked up by some wackos in the 1970s on too many quaaludes.

True, there is nothing in the experiment to measure the plants emotional response, just a possibility for a visible reaction to our emotional input. To do so would mean we would each need a polygraph or some other type of equipment to measure the electrical responses of plants during this experiment. Many of us dont have anything more technical lying around the house than a computer and a kids microscope (nor the ability to construct such). If you wish to put forth a full blown experiment to prove or disprove this thought Code, go right ahead...


By the way, since you speculated that this was an experiment on qualudes I thought I'd pass on some sites that are featuring Dr. Emoto's work... keep in mind this is not the scientific aspect of it... I cant read Japanese. A bit of light reading if you will. I dont expect everyone to accept his theory. There will always be skeptics, which makes life interesting.

http://www.globaldialoguecenter.com/emoto_exhibit_flash.html
http://www.newconnexion.net/article/05-04/emoto.html
http://www.whatthebleep.com/crystals/
http://www.life-enthusiast.com/twilight/research_emoto.htm
http://www.masaru-emoto.net/english/eprofile.html

 

[Code Monkey]

By the way, since you speculated that this was an experiment on qualudes I thought I'd pass on some sites that are featuring Dr. Emoto's work... keep in mind this is not the scientific aspect of it... I cant read Japanese. A bit of light reading if you will. I dont expect everyone to accept his theory. There will always be skeptics, which makes life interesting.

http://www.globaldialoguecenter.com/emoto_exhibit_flash.html
http://www.newconnexion.net/article/05-04/emoto.html
http://www.whatthebleep.com/crystals/
http://www.life-enthusiast.com/twilight/research_emoto.htm
http://www.masaru-emoto.net/english/eprofile.html

You do realise that nobody has been able to replicate his experiments and his publications are not peer-reviewed? That means they are not in any sense of the word "scientific". They are, in every sense of the word, pseudoscience. All he has done is put a new spin on the same crap that people were purporting in the 1970s like I said - it wasn't valid then, it isn't valid now.

 

[defour]

Plants can get up, scream, and run off for all I care, but unless you can demonstrate the psychological component, they aren't feeling pain by any objective measure.

According to what Code just wrote, there shouldn't be any change in the grain at the end of the month.

Amazing stuff, and almost painfully frustrating; how can there be such a semantic disconnect? But, after a lot of pondering I think I've figured it out. Are you all sitting down? I've got big news, and I'm betting the farm on it:

This is the FIRST POSITIVE TURING TEST RESULT EVER!!! This thread just made history, people, and I'm astonished and honored to have been a part of it. I for one took it hook, line and sinker, and don't tell me the rest of you didn't. I hope you don't take it too hard, Chip; there was a little cheating after all, since the official rules require that one knows what the game is.

Man, in the afterglow I kind of feel like Garry Kasparov.

Steve

 

[danread]

By the way, since you speculated that this was an experiment on qualudes I thought I'd pass on some sites that are featuring Dr. Emoto's work... keep in mind this is not the scientific aspect of it... I cant read Japanese. A bit of light reading if you will. I dont expect everyone to accept his theory. There will always be skeptics, which makes life interesting.

http://www.globaldialoguecenter.com/emoto_exhibit_flash.html
http://www.newconnexion.net/article/05-04/emoto.html
http://www.whatthebleep.com/crystals/
http://www.life-enthusiast.com/twilight/research_emoto.htm
http://www.masaru-emoto.net/english/eprofile.html

Wow. Do you really believe this stuff?

 

[skinheaddave]

Is it haphazard the course of action they take, or are they really making a choice?

More to the point, are they making a "decision" based on contact, chemical levels etc., or are they reasoning on the best course of action for the survival of the species? Are they looking at the Jones' next door and deciding not to have kids because the Jones' boy got fed to a tarantula?

But on to more fundemental things. The problem here seems to be that you have enough training to access "scientific" papers, but not enough training to make some fundemental distinctions such as:

- emotion vs. taxis
- reason vs. reflex
- peer-reviewed vs. not peer-reviewed
- statistically significant vs. not statistically significant
- correlation vs. cause
- effect vs. cause-effect relationship

In other words, you are more than welcome to continue espousing your views -- but I think I speak for at least a few of us here when I say that you ought to drop the veil of scientific legitimacy until you have a better understanding of the scientific method and critical thinking.

Cheers,
Dave

 

[SpiderDork]

To do so would mean we would each need a polygraph or some other type of equipment to measure the electrical responses of plants during this experiment.

I am really confused here, please elaborate how a polygraph machine would be useful in determining the electrical responses of plants.

 

[Code Monkey]

This is the FIRST POSITIVE TURING TEST RESULT EVER!!! This thread just made history, people, and I'm astonished and honored to have been a part of it. I for one took it hook, line and sinker, and don't tell me the rest of you didn't. I hope you don't take it too hard, Chip; there was a little cheating after all, since the official rules require that one knows what the game is.

As usual, your humour is an expertly sharpened blade, now if only it were genuine insight, it would explain much

---------

@Nia: Without insulting you personally, there is major problem with your alleged counterpoints, and that is that they are built on top of a stack of one bunk claim after another. For instance, when we look at how *you* think Masaru's grain experiment is working, it's based upon this notion of vibrational energies causing effects. See, we don't even need to nitpick at the extremely poor experimental design, because we know from the first that there can't possibly be anything to test. "Vibrational energies" have never been proven to exist either. And if you can't even prove the existence of these "vibrational energies", you can't test for whether they are "positive" or "negative" vibrational energies, further you can't even begin to define what a positive or negative vibrational energy signature would be.

What you wind up with is your typical pseudo-tautological system. You start with a premise that nature actually gives a flying fart about notions of beauty and symmetry. You move onto another premise: that all living things give off these vibrational energies related to their quantity of beauty, balance, etc. You move onto yet another premise, that these vibrational energies affect things around it even though you have yet to demonstrate their existence, quantify their strength, range, or anything else. You make the assumption that angry thoughts must be negative vibrational energy and that happy thoughts must be positive vibrational energy, even though you have no reason at all to make this assumption beyond it fitting with your initial bogus assumptions about nature. At last you reach the notion of "testing" their effects upon inanimate objects such as grain or water. You ignore the fact that you can't actually replicate any of the claims in the majority of trials, explaining away the failure as interfering vibrational energies from the angry neighbor, your inner skepticism, etc. You do seize upon the ones that happen to match your expected outcome. You really seize upon the cherry picked crap that Emoto published and conclude that you have seen proof of these vibrational energies in action, and the proof is that you wind up with things that fit your initial assumption of how nature loves beauty and symmetry.

You come full circle, proving what you wanted to believe in initially, but never having tested anything at all, just tricked yourself like you do with all your pseudoscience and outright mystical beliefs.

To bring this back on topic, this is what people do when they insist they can "argue rationally" that the tarantula can feel pain. They start at the assumption they can feel pain and cherry pick only those phenotypical phenomena that support their initial assumption. They discard the wealth of quantitative data that may not outright prove they can't, but that does suggest with the strongest of possible inductive and deductive reasoning that they cannot. Once they've successfully cleansed their mind of all that nasty EPSP data and dissection information, they're free to argue that based upon what "we know" they must be feeling pain.

Real knowledge, on the other hand, works a lot like a mathematical proof. Each step backwards should be solid, not just more wishful thinking.

 

[Dark]

I think that inverts do experience pain. I know that when i am holding my chilean rose she will just sit on my hand but if i accidentally pushed on her to hard or if one of her legs were to be crushed that she would atempt to bite me or go into a threat position. It wouldn't want to bite me if it didn't feel something negative against what I did. The pain of her loosing her leg would make a negative reaction. All Inverts have nerves and when something happens to a part of the invert that is going to do damage and increase the chance of an early death the invert will react negatively. If i am wronge and inverts feel no pain it still is cruel in my eyes to injure and kill inverts. And so no one asks about my chilean rose i was speaking what if something bad happened nothing really injured my chilean rose

Eric

 

[Code Monkey]

I think that inverts do experience pain. I know that when i am holding my chilean rose she will just sit on my hand but if i accidentally pushed on her to hard or if one of her legs were to be crushed that she would atempt to bite me or go into a threat position. It wouldn't want to bite me if it didn't feel something negative against what I did. The pain of her loosing her leg would make a negative reaction. All Inverts have nerves and when something happens to a part of the invert that is going to do damage and increase the chance of an early death the invert will react negatively. If i am wronge and inverts feel no pain it still is cruel in my eyes to injure and kill inverts. And so no one asks about my chilean rose i was speaking what if something bad happened nothing really injured my chilean rose

Eric

Let me guess, you haven't read anything in this thread?

Short version is that what you are describing is stimulus-response and has nothing to do with the issue of whether the G. rosea possesses enough aware consciousness to experience the psychological component of negative stimuli. No one argues that tarantulas (or amoebae for that matter) cannot sense and subsequently avoid negative stimuli, that has absolutely nothing to do with the question of "can they feel pain?".

 

[Dark]

Let me guess, you haven't read anything in this thread?
.

I have only read the first few comments.

 

[Drachenjager]

Pain

I think one thing that everyone is overlooking here is why would you want to inflict damage to any animal? Ok it's one thing to kill for food, or even feed one creature to another, but to do something like rip the wings off a fly for meanness is something else. I think it say a lot about US and how human we are.
Ok lets say that Inverts Cant feel pain (by that I mean have an emotional or mental stress or discomfort from it, Not that they don’t sense the damage or injury) the fact remains that if you do things to harm its physical well being you are in fact torturing it. The invert may not have physiological damage or sense pain emotionally or even physically the same as we do. That’s not even the point to me. If you intentionally cause harm with no reason its torture even if the one receiving the torture can’t "feel" it or can’t understand that it’s being tortured.
To me it has more to do with YOU than the Invert. You can be pretty sure that animals that are generally the prey wouldn’t have been given the sense of pain or torture by God or evolution (which ever you believe, not going to discuss that here lol ) God wouldn’t have done that and it would serve no evolutionary purpose that I can see.
So those of us with supposed morals and consciousnesses should look at ourselves in this discussion more than the effect on the inverts..

 

[bloodred1889]

ok, i dont think tarantulas ect feel pain like us or cats say, but i do beleive they can feel ingredibly uncomfortable with somthing... like once when franticly trying to put the lid on my tarantulas tank i shut one of her legs in there and the rest of the night she didnt put the leg on the ground, or if it did touch the ground she would flinch... at this point i haddnt read anything to suggest that they dont feel pain so i beleived that she was in pain and i felt really bad

also in documentrys ive seen ppl doing stuff to tarantulas that the tarantula clearly dosnt like, and like in the film aracnophobia although not a good example of truth it begs the question if you did set a tarantula on fire surly it would feel somthing, or if you stood on one, pulled the legs off ect

personly i dont want to find out myself but i do beleive that bugs should have some sort of rights.. mainly from an experience i had when i was little...

when i was young there was this boy who had a tarantula but he couldnt care for it and so gave it to this asshole kid who said he wanted it, anyway it turned out that the tarantula didnt last long because the new owner decided it would be fun poke the tarantula with a stick untill it was hardly moving and then pull its legs off and even after that pull one of its fangs out to show how big they where, i witnissed this and it truly broke my heart the poor tarantula just wanted to get away to safty and i couldnt do anything being an 11 year old girl with like a gang of 15year old boys.. anyway thats all i can say on the subject since im not a scientist..

 

[bloodred1889]

oh and anouther thing why do we think we can decide everything, why do we think its up to us? i mean tarantulas and neerly everyother organism on this planet was here before us untill we came along and started <edit> everything up, now species are dying and losing there homes and all we do is experiment on animals by sticking substences in there eyses to see if its harmfull to us... to us, we are soo bloody arogent, everythings about us how we feel, our safty our world... well its not our world!!! we just happen to live here but not for much longer the way we are going

sorry this whole subject gets me angry, david attenborough is a hero in the natural world in my opinion and has opened our eyes up to how we need to start treating the world we live in.

 

[MizM]

No one here is suggesting that we hurt inverts. This is simply a discussion ABOUT their perception of pain.

 

[bananaman]

time to revive this heated discussion:
it *pains* me to see people blurt out ignorant opinions based on ideas that come from assumptions and suppositions... seriously...

Ts cant feel pain, and as MizM said... that doesnt mean we should hurt them, we love them and want to protect them... but given the eventuality of having to do something to a T for the sole purpose of preserving it (ie. pulling off legs), do not feel bad, it is NOT suffering, it is just trying to preserve itself, it doesnt know any better...

 

[Anansi]

This is a funny thread... Not "ha ha" funny, but funny in the sense that so many important facts are being grossly overlooked...

I think most everyone here would agree that pain is a relatively subjective experience. As humans we experience both mental pain and physical pain. The degree to which each type of pain affects us, depends on what kind of people we are. For example, some people avoid the doctors because they are afraid of needles, while others willfully pierce their skin with 12 gauge pieces of metal.

How can we operationally define pain? Among other physiological aspects, I think it can be operationally defined as that which illicits a fight or flight response.

It's completely ridiculous to relate human pain to invertebrate pain and then take it one step further and state that invertebrates don't feel pain. If you do something to an invertebrate and it illicits a fight or flight response, it's a safe bet that you're causing it pain. Call it self-preservation or whatever you want, but the point is you're causing the invert a significant amount of distress.

Look at lobsters and tarantulas, etc... They dont have facial expressions or ways to vocalize, so how would we know if we're causing them pain? Maybe because they try to defend themselves or run away?

What else would you expect them to do? They cant scream... They cant respond to a 10-item questionnaire. They cant do anything but try to fight or run away...

In conclusion, just because invertebrates dont experience the same type of pain as humans, it does not mean they dont experience pain at all... It's a different pain, but a pain nonetheless, and its all they know, so thats all it is.... pain...

 

[Code Monkey]

In conclusion, just because invertebrates dont experience the same type of pain as humans, it does not mean they dont experience pain at all... It's a different pain, but a pain nonetheless, and its all they know, so thats all it is.... pain...

Sigh, here we go again... To go back a page or two: taxis versus pain; you're simply wrong with your reasoning. Please do not revive this thread with the same sort of bunk that has been repeatedly addressed.

Pain *requires* a psychological component. full stop.
Inverts do not have any indication of a psychological component. full stop.

Nobody anywhere in this thread has not said they don't have nerve stimuli that in a psychological brain could or could not be interpreted as pain, however, that's where your reasoning falls apart. The nerve sensations and resulting taxis you describe above has never been part of a definition of pain, ethical or otherwise, as it's just nerve firing and response. Living organisms completely devoid of a nervous system avoid negative stimuli, that doesn't begin to mean they're aware beings that suffer pain.

If you want to believe that inverts feel pain, go ahead and do so, but if this particular thread devolves into the same sort of emo wannabe "you can't know" back and forths I'll lock it and people can start it up again in the WH where this sort of Jerry Springer logic belongs.