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comment by b_b
b_b  ·  3582 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Consider the Lobster

I have read it, and I still disagree.

Avoidance doesn't imply suffering, and once you know some basic facts about the nervous system, it takes some serious anthropomorphizing to call what a lobster goes through "suffering".

A spinal cord, for example, is far more complex than a lobster's nervous system, and an intact spinal cord can initiate pain avoidance mechanisms, even when the signal hasn't reached the cortex. The pain is not experienced, as such (reflexes, for example, when you pull your hand away from a hot stove before the pain has set in), but you innately avoid it nonetheless. A human spinal cord has roughly 10^9 neurons, four orders of magnitude more than a lobster has in total.

The comparison may not be one to one, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around the lobster being able to do any higher order processing given its limited hardware. In the end, none of us can subjectively experience what it's like to have ganglia instead of a brain and spinal cord, so it remains little more than speculation and imagination. But my sense is that what we observe is mere avoidance, and not anything like what we would call pain.