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  • Ok, and I opened by acknowledging the hard problem of consciousness but you never actually said that you disagreed with my assertion that my amputated hand doesn't feel pain.

    Do you think my amputated hand feels pain? It would seem that you would have just as much (more maybe! given electric shocks or heat to the fingertips will make it recoil) evidence for it feeling pain as grass. And that all your arguments about grass signalling also apply to my amputated hand.

    If you don't think my amputated hand feels pain (or could be considered at least as likely as grass to) why don't you?

    • I wasn't suggesting a leaf feels pain or that it would be the leaf that would have some definition of pain and suffering if it were ripped from the stem. It would be the rest of the plant.

      So why are you bringing up a part that, when separated from the whole, no longer has that capacity in any living thing?

      • wait what? that's an extremely unusual stance!

        What do you mean separated from the whole? all the non hand parts of me are also no longer whole but I am willing to believe amputees, even multiple amputees, even people who have lost the majority of their body can feel pain if their brain is alive and mostly intact.

        This is consistent with my belief that pain experiencing happens in a centralised mass of nervous tissue we call a brain.

        If you don't think centralised masses of nervous tissue are needed to experience pain (required for plants to, given that no brain is something we can prove) what do you think is? Why would a patch of grass have that thing but not a blade of grass (grass lacks localised organs afterall) or my hand?

        • Until you stop insisting that an amputated hand is equivalent to an entire plant, this is a ridiculous discussion.

          Plants are alive. Amputated hands are not. Those are facts you can't seem to accept.

          • We appear to be imagining different scenarios. Imagine it is freshly amputated and is still alive, or that we amputate it and hook it up to an artificial circulatory system, or indeed my circulatory system but at a distance so nothing else is connected (curious if you think the pain chance changes in that situation).

            I'm sorry, I could have been more explicit. It seemed obvious to me discussing a dead hand was silly but being the internet it's worth clarifying these things.

            • Imagine it is freshly amputated and is still alive,

              Why should I imagine it when that's not reality?

              or that we amputate it and hook it up to an artificial circulatory system, or indeed my circulatory system but at a distance so nothing else is connected (curious if you think the pain chance changes in that situation).

              Where it would be no more "alive" than Henrietta Lacks' eternal cell line. If you have to keep it from decomposing by artificial means, it's not alive like a plant is alive. This should be obvious to you.

              Find a better analogy.

              • it's not an analogy it's a thought experiment. I am trying to understand the shape of your ideas.

                So the ability to feel pain is harmed by cybernetics? division from a whole (still no idea what you mean specifically there in the absence of localised organs)? and if you're going to die in about an hour?

                • None of what you are talking about has anything to do with what I'm talking about. You can mention severed hands as much as you like.

211 comments