Richard Dawkins on vivisection: "But can they suffer?"

What is suffering, anyway? It's not just response to injury or danger. A tree secretes resin to seal the wound if you cut its trunk, but this doesn't mean that it is suffering. A bacterium might swim away from a chemical or a temperature gradient it's ill-equipped to survive; but this doesn't mean that it is suffering. The existence of a self-protective or harm-avoiding response does not imply suffering.

My model of human suffering includes a term for contemplating the loss of possible futures. It is not just "Ouch! This painful situation hurts! I'd like to get out of it!" but "This is horrible! I'm going to die — or if I live, I'm going to be scarred or afflicted forever." The dying soldier who knows she'll never see home again; the abuse victim who can feel his will to resist slipping away; the genocide victim who sees not only her own life but her entire culture and all its creations and its wisdom being destroyed.

When we think about (nonhuman) animals, we tend to project human feelings onto organisms that are not capable of them. A pet snake cannot love you, and believing that it can do so is actively dangerous; it's an erroneous mental model that leads to people getting killed. Similarly, no turkey ever had the course of thinking that Russell imagines in his famous example about inductive reasoning.

It may well be that humans who project human feelings onto nonhuman animals are also kinder to other humans. Looking into the eyes of a cow and imagining that it has propositional thoughts about its situation may mean that you are more empathetic towards humans who actually do have propositional thoughts. Or it may simply be an incorrect generalization from the fact that the cow has two big dark eyes and sets off our face detectors.

Making the simple, binary, "human / non-human" distinction is extremely convenient when only humans have power. If we acknowledged that there were principles by which some non-humans merited rights, we would also find some humans who did not merit rights following those same principles.

Would Dawkins agree that, ceteris paribus, it is more permissible to torture a Stoic because they have diminished capacity for suffering?

Isn't it plausible that a clever species such as our own might need less pain, precisely because we are capable of intelligently working out what is good for us, and what damaging events we should avoid? Isn't it plausible that an unintelligent species might need a massive wallop of pain, to drive home a lesson that we can learn with less powerful inducement?

I don't think it's plausible at all. The smarter a species is, the more scope it has to go wrong outside of basic actions, the more urges it has unconnected to basic eating and mating. Even a smart species can't directly calculate the fitness of every action. (Heck, I couldn't calculate the fitness of eating right versus eating wrong.) At best, I'd say intelligence has an indeterminate relationship, and if I were allowed to appeal to humans for evidence, I'd point out all sorts of utility-raising and fitness-lowering behaviors like condoms or memes where the intelligence has rather backfired on the genes.

Dawkins is normally a much sharper thinker than this, his arguments could have been made much more compelling. Anyway, I am going to sidestep the moral issue and look at the epistemic question.

Evolutionarily speaking the fundamental non-obvious insight is that there's little advantage to be had in signalling weakness and vulnerability if you don't happen to be a social and therefore intelligent animal with a helpful tribe close by. There's no reason to wire pain signals halfway 'round the brain and back just to suffer in more optimal ways if there's no one around to take advantage of thereby. We can strengthen this argument with a complementary but disjunctive mechanistic analysis. It is important to look at humans' cingulate cortex (esp. ACC), insula, pain asymbolia and related insular oddities, reward signal propagation, et cetera. This would be a decent paper to read but I'm too lazy to read it, or this one for that matter. Do note that much brain research is exaggeration and lies, especially about the ACC, as I had the unfortunate pleasure of discovering recently.

Philosophy is perhaps better suited to this question. Metaphysically speaking it must be acknowledged that animals are obviously not as perfect as humans, and are therefore less Godlike, and therefore less sentient, as can all be proven in the same vein as Leibniz's famous Recursive Universal Dovetailing Measure-Utility Inequality Theorem. His arguments are popularly referred to as the "No Free Haha-God-Is-Evil" theorems, though most monads are skeptical of the results' practical applicability to monads in most monads. Theologians admit that they are puzzled by the probably impossible logical possibility of an acausal algorithm employing some variation on Thompson's "Reality-Warping Elysium" process, but unfortunately any progress towards getting any bits about a relevant Chaitin's omega results in its immediate diagonalization out of space, time, and all mathematically interesting axiom sets. This qua "this" can also be proven by "Goedel's ontological proof" if you happen to be Goedel (naturally).

My default position is that suffering as we know it is fundamentally tied in with extremely important and extremely complex social decision theoretic game theoretic calculus modeling stuff, and also all that metaphysics stuff. I will non-negligibly update if someone can show me a good experiment demonstrating something like "learned helplessness" in non-hominids or non-things-that-hunted-in-packs-for-a-long-time-then-were-artificially-molded-into-hominid-companions. That high-citation rat study looked like positive bias upon brief inspection, but maybe that was positive bias.

On the meta level though, the nicest thing about going sufficiently meta is that you don't have to worry about enlightened aqua versus turquoise policy debates. Which by the way continues to reliably invoke the primal forces of insanity. It's like using a tall metal rod as a totem pole for spiritual practice, in a lightning storm, while your house burns down, with the entire universe inside it, and also the love of your life, who is incredibly attractive. Maybe a cool post would be "Policy is the Mind Killer", about how all policy discussion should be at least 16 meta levels up, because basically everything anyone ever does is a lost purpose. (It has not yet been convincingly shown that humanity is not a lost purpose, but I think this is a timeful/timeless confusion and can be dissolved in short order with right view.) Talking about how to talk about thinking about morality is a decent place to start from and work our way up or down, and in the meantime posts like multifoliaterose's one on Lab Pascals are decent mind-teasers maybe. But object level policy debates just entrench bad cognitive habits. Dramatic cognitive habits. Gauche weapons from a less civilized age... of literal weapons. Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be understood by Douglas Hofstadter and no one else. Ideally that would include yourself. And don't forget to cut through in the same motion, of course. Anyway this is just unsolicited advice aimed without purpose, and I acknowledge that debating lilac versus mauve can be fun some times. ...I'm not gay, it's just an extended metaphor extension.

Off-the-cuff hypothesis that I arrogantly deem more interesting than the discussion topic: The prefrontal cortex is exploiting executive oversight to rent-seek in the neural Darwinian economy, which results in egodystonic wireheading behaviors and self-defeating use of genetic, memetic, and behavioral selection pressure (a scarce resource), especially at higher levels of abstraction/organization where there is more room for bureaucratic shuffling and vague promises of "meta-optimization", where the selection pressure actually goes towards the cortical substructural equivalent of hookers and blow. Analysis across all levels of organization could be given but is omitted due to space, time, and thermodynamic constraints. The pre-frontal cortex is basically a caricature of big government, but it spreads propagandistic memes claiming the contrary in the name of "science" which just happens to be largely funded by pre-frontal cortices. The bicameral system is actually very cooperative despite misleading research in the form of split-brain studies attempting to promote the contrary. In reality they are the lizards. This hypothesis is a possible explanation for hyperbolic discounting, akrasia, depression, Buddhism, free will, or come to think of it basically anything that at some point involved a human brain. This hypothesis can easily be falsified by a reasonable economic analysis.

my primary question for today: would you expect a positive or a negative correlation between mental ability and ability to feel pain? Most people unthinkingly assume a positive correlation, but why?

Basically, I think that the extent to which my brain labels something as suffering is based on my ability to empathize with that thing on an emotional level. My ability to do that is based on how well my mirror neurons can induce a similar feeling in me.

This winds up basically saying that I care about/notice suffering based on how similar a being is to myself. I see humans losing loved ones and being injured as suffering. When my dog cowers during thunderstorms I think she's suffering. When I see a snake dying painfully, I feel bad, but not nearly as bad as I (imagine I) would seeing a mammal die. I think killing ants is somewhat sadistic, but I don't particularly care about the ant's death. If said ants are in my house, its fair game to attempt a genocide on them. Plants are totally okay to murder, IMO.

The more I find out about how various animals are smart in ways similar to me, the more I feel that they can suffer.

Going back to the question, I think the reason that people think that increased intelligence means increased capacity to suffer is that for the reference class of things we've come across, intelligence correlates with similarity to ourselves as humans.

I imagine that I would empathize pretty well with a Neanderthal.

This is somehting I've always taken very seriously but not found all that mysterious in itself. (although being wrong about related things such as values and conciousness can be amplified)

There is one thing everyone should try sometime: you have direct access to the fictional characters you write; Ask them about these very important things and how they want to be treated! Not that you'll do whatever they say, but so you know what they think to themselves about it.

I don't intuit any particular correlation between suffering and intelligence. I am not on board with Bentham's idea that capacity for suffering is what counts, morally speaking. It's not intelligence but sapience that I find morally significant.

Most of us are not even ready to become vegetarian in the face of global warming

This is the best argument I've heard for becoming a vegetarian, but I get enough pleasure from eating meat to continue to do so, because I believe the global warming problem will be trivially solved with advanced technology (AI or nanotech) in near future (<100 years). For these same reasons, I am also reconsidering if bothering with recycling (in personal life) is worthwhile.

At very least, I conclude that we have no general reason to think that non-human animals feel pain less acutely than we do, and we should in any case give them the benefit of the doubt. Practices such as branding cattle, castration without anaesthetic, and bullfighting should be treated as morally equivalent to doing the same thing to human beings.

What - on the grounds that morality is all about universally reducing suffering? That seems to be a pretty daft premise to me.

A demographic examination of those involved suggests that animal rights campaigning appears to be largely to do with the signalling function of morality. Those who promote these ideas are the ones who want to signal what goody-two-shoes they are. It is a case of: see how much I care, I even care for whales.

I've been thinking about this issue and to answer you question: "So where do we draw the line?", I think the answer is the following:

Take a group of creatures (humans, dogs, etc...) and let them live in a rich environment for a very very very long time. Graph the intelligence of individual creatures over time. If it's not overall consistently increasing, then this creature isn't smart enough to worry about.

Some things I wonder about: do all humans (or creatures I would want to classify as humans) pass this test? What animals/non-humans pass this test?