| > Using some italics with an edgy claim There is nothing edgy about it. You can't detect it, you can't measure it, and if the word had any applicability (to say, humans), then you're also misapplying it. If it is your contention that suffering is something-other-than-subjective, then you're the one trying to be edgy. Not I. The way sane, reasonable people describe subjective phenomena that we can't detect or measure is "not real". When we're talking about decapods, it can't even be self-reported. > but I find it deeply sad when people convince themselves that they don't really exist as a thinking, feeling thing. It's self repression to the maximum, Says the guy agreeing with a faction that seeks to convince people shrimp are anything other than food. That if for some reason we need to euthanize them, that they must be laid down on a velvet pillow to listen to symphonic music and watch films of the beautiful Swiss mountain countryside until their last gasp. "Sad" is letting yourself be manipulated so that some other religion can enforce its noodle-brained dietary laws on you. > If you don't have certain measurable proof either way I'm not obligated to prove the negative. |
You do feel pain and hunger, at least to the extent you experience touch. You can in fact be even more certain of that than anything conventionally thought to be objective, physical models of the world, for it is only through your perception that you receive those models, or evidence to build those models.
The notion of suffering used in the paper is primarily with respect to pain and pleasure.
Now, you may deny that shrimp feel pain and pleasure. It's also possible to deny that other people feel pain and pleasure. But you do feel pain and pleasure, and you always engage in behaviors in response to these sensations; your senses also inform you secondarily that many other people abide by similar rules.
Many animals like us are fundamentally sympathetic to pain and pleasure. That is, observing behavior related to pain and pleasure impels a related feeling ourselves, in certain contexts, not necessarily exact. This mechanism is quite obvious when you observe parents caring for their young, herd behavior, etc.. With this established, some people are in a context where they are sympathetic to observed pain and pleasure of nonhuman animals; in this case shrimp rather than cats and dogs, and such a study helps one figure out this relationship in more detail.