Suppose I am a person who is either not embodied or who doesn't know that he is embodied. I spend all my time communing directly mentally with other minds, playing games like chess, speculating philosophically, praying to God--I am a theist--etc. I never have any perceptions of anything physical. One day, I learn that the world contains matter--maybe God suddenly equips me with some senses, or maybe I learn this from some authority that I have the right to trust. Among the material things in the world, I learn that on one planet there are complex information processing systems, some of which are made of soft but somewhat resilient stuff, with lots of carbon atoms, though with a calcium endoskeleton, and some of which are made of harder but more brittle stuff, with lots of silicon atoms and metals, largely arranged on flat plates, and with a polymer or metal shell. All these information processing systems have sensors and actuators, and engage in complex processing that mediates between sensor input and actuator output. (Some of these systems may even be indeterministic.)
So far, I have little reason to suppose that these information processing systems are conscious. And as for pain, I would not have that concept at all. But to explain various behaviors among some of these systems, both the carbon and the silicon based ones, I could easily posit the concept of a shpain as something that mediates causally in certain ways between sensors sensitive to damage and various behavioral patterns, and I would understand the general utility of a shpain subsystem.
But now I learn that one kind of carbon-based information processing systems is conscious--I call them the "featherless bipeds". How do I learn this? Maybe an authority tells me. I also learn that there is at least a strong correlation between shpain and pain in the featherless bipeds. Of course, to learn this, I have to acquire the concept of pain. Maybe God suddenly lets me have a dose of it, just so I can understand what the featherless bipeds are feeling, and the authority tells me that what I felt was what they feel.
It takes a while to get over the surprise that some of the enmattered critters are conscious. They're just so different from the conscious beings AROUND ME.
I eventually observe that, as a contingent matter of fact, the information processing in the featherless bipeds is significantly more complex than that in all the critters on their planet. For instance, as one of their philosophers noted, only the featherless bipeds are capable of communicating on an indefinite variety of topics.
Some of the silicon-based critters on their planet that exhibit shpain are significantly more complex in their information processing than some of the carbon-based ones, but none of them approach the complexity of the featherless bipeds.
As someone fond of speculation, I now form several hypotheses:
- Something like the additional information-processing complexity of the featherless bipeds is necessary for pain.
- Some critters other than featherless bipeds do exhibit pain.
- All critters other than featherless bipeds that exhibit shpain also exhibit pain.
- All carbon-based critters other than featherless bipeds that exhibit shpain also exhibit pain.
I do not think I have decisive reason to believe any one of these hypotheses at this point.
Suppose I further learn that the featherless bipeds have an "other minds" doxastic module that diagnoses shpain behaviors in those critters that are sufficiently close in appearance to featherless bipeds as pain. Does this give me additional reason to accept (2), (3) or (4)? At least if I am a theist, it does. For if I am a theist, then I have reason to presume that doxastic modules in the minds of God's creatures are truth-directed.
However, further investigation shows that the "other minds" doxastic module in the featherless bipeds has a certain hyperactivity--it is much more given to false positives than false negatives. Some of these bipeds, instead of reasonably positing a transcendent and immaterial God, believe that the star at the center of their solar system is a super-human intellect, while others attribute agency to rivers, clouds or their planet as a whole. I sometimes see their "other minds" module being actuated by the behavior of objects that the biped in question knows to have only the slightest degree of information-processing ability, though in those cases the actuation of the module is usually immediately squelched by the biped. Learning all of this forces me to downgrade the evidence that the featherless bipeds' diagnosis of other critters' pain gave me.
Furthermore, I notice that there is significant evidence that, at least to a large degree, the featherless bipeds are the product of evolution. The evolution, I believe, is divinely sanctioned, but nonetheless results in various modules only being reliable within certain parameters. The "other minds" module, in particular, seems to have evolved primarily, though not solely, in order to facilitate social interaction--the featherless bipeds are very much social critters. Therefore, the context in which we can expect it to be most reliable is interaction with conspecifics.
Still, I do have some reason to accept (2) and maybe even (3).
I also look at neuroscientific studies, but I have a really hard time telling whether the experimenters were studying pain or shpain when they were dealing with critters other than featherless bipeds.
Now, for the final step. Suppose that when I learned about pain, I also learned that it is bad, and in what way and to what degree it is bad. I tell everything I've learned to an atheist friend, who then runs this argument: "You might be able to find--albeit with great difficulty--an excuse for God to allow the featherless bipeds to feel pain. But there is no excuse for God to allow the less sophisticated critters to feel pain. Since they do feel, God does not exist."
It seems to me that I should not take this argument very seriously. While I do have a presumption in favor of attributing pain to less sophisticated critters, that presumption is based on three arguments: an analogical argument, neuroscience, and the testimony of the featherless bipeds' "other minds" module. (That this module is not mine does not, I think, affect anything. Maybe through self-hypnosis, I could recreate a functional clone of this module in myself, and get the same conclusions through it as the featherless bipeds get through theirs. That surely wouldn't affect things much.)
Now, the analogical argument is weakened by two disanalogies: first, it is much harder to find a reason for God to allow the less sophisticated critters to feel pain, and, second, those critters are indeed less sophisticated, and observation of the featherless bipeds reveals that their intellectual sophistication plays a significant role in the qualitative features of their pain perception (e.g., looking at a pained body part through the wrong end of binoculars makes the body part seem smaller, and ma kes the bipeds report less pain). The neuroscience data I have access to is so far not so strong, and is marred by what seems to me an outlandish hypothesis on the part of featherless biped neuroscientists that consciousness is a function of neural function. And the "other minds" module argument is weak, because I have observed that most if not all the bipeds' intellectual modules only work well within a certain range of applications, and this particular module is particularly prone to overreach.
It seems that at this point it would be reasonable for me to say to my friend: "Interesting argument! However, I assign a high probability to the disjunction of there being a justification of God allowing pain in the other critters and to these critters not having pain, only shpain."
I could stop here. But instead I think some more about philosophy of mind, and come to a well-grounded conclusion that consciousness cannot simply be a physically-grounded function of the purely material stuff that the featherless bipeds are made of. Conscious states require either an immaterial component (of the sort that I take myself to be wholly constituted by) or else non-natural properties. Reflection, then, makes me think that the consciousness of the featherless bipeds must be an act of God or the result of some law of nature that neither I nor they have discovered. Without that act of God or law of nature, they would just be what they appear to me to be--bunches of particles whose motions can be fairly naturally interpreted as computations. So now I ask myself: If it's an act of God, did God likely do this for the other critters? I have reason to think so in light of the great value of consciousness. But there is an exception here--in the case of pain, there appears to be a disvalue and no theodicy except perhaps for the featherless bipeds. So while I have some reason to think that God gave consciousness to some of these critters, I have a lot of reason to think that the consciousness with which he had endowed them would not include severely unpleasant pain. I then consider the "law of nature" option, but find it doesn't lead anywhere else, since the laws of nature are a result of the divine will, too.
If, further, I come to think (along with the majority of the featherless bipeds) that the information-processing systems realized in silicon and metal do not have consciousness, this will strengthen my convictions.
Thus my angelic counterpart. Should I reason otherwise than he?
Alexander,
I am not a professional philosopher or even a student of philosophy, so I am not sufficiently knowledgeable to engage appropriately your Cartesian argument that it is quite possible that animals experience only shpain, not pain. Still, there do seem to me, a mere layperson, to be some problems with your animal shpain conjecture.
An initial problem I see with your argument is that if we have grounds for thinking that animals experience not pain but only shpain, then I think your skepticism about animal minds and animal pain/shpain would equally apply to other humans apart from an appeal to God, but the whole point of your argument seems to be an effort justify the existence of God in light of the possibility that animal pain actually exists, and thus if you appeal to God as a means for evading a type of solipsism in regards to other humans' minds and other humans' pains, it seems to me that a bit of circularity, though not necessarily overly vicious circularity, has worked its way into your argument. That is, you want to present a theodicy to address animal pain, but your argument seems to be weakened by a circularity because, within your shpain theodicy, you appeal to the very God whose existence you are trying to justify.
A further problem is one of pragmatism. Let us accept your conjecture that animals suffer only shpain. If we accept that, then in our daily lives, we have no grounds with which to advocate against animal cruelty, against vivisection, against the abuses of factory farming, etc. If we accept your conjecture, would we not be more likely to behave and tolerate cruelty to animals as seems clearly to have been the case in the past when many scientists and anatomists argued precisely in Cartesian terms that the horrid experiments which they carried out on animals were nothing more than manipulations of organic machines? But, of course, you may say that you present the conjecture only as a means for showing that it is logically possible that animals suffer only shpain and not pain, thus absolving God of any responsibility for allowing animals to suffer harm. If you are looking only for logical possibility in your theodicy, then your argument may possibly succeed (though I do still see problems with the aforementioned circularity issue); however, if you are looking for a theodicy that is not merely logically possible but that is also plausible, then it seems to me to be a rather unsuccessful theodicy as everything we know--skeptical philosophical arguments notwithstanding--from biology, neurology, comparative anatomy, evolution, animal husbandry, veterinary science, and our everyday interaction with our companion animals seems to point very strongly to the conclusion that animals actually do suffer pain, not shpain.
Good questions.
1. The case of other humans differs in several ways. (a) There are plausible explanations for why God would allow people other than me to feel pain; indeed, many of the explanations for why God would allow me to feel pain apply. (b) The similarity between me and other normally functioning human persons is much greater than our similarity to any other animals. (c) Christian tradition makes little sense apart from the assumption of others' pain.
2. The question is about how the evidence we have impacts the claim that God exists. When we try to figure this out, we need to look at what we would expect God to do, and to do that we need to make use of theistic claims. This is how any argument from evil must work. The atheist has to assume, for instance, that if there is a God, he is good.
3. If the only way to justify belief in other human minds is by reference to God, and I am not saying it is, then the atheist is in big trouble. :-)
4. As for cruelty to animals, I did not establish that animals feel no pain. I lowered the probability. After the argument, maybe the probability is 0.8. Let's say that I did even better than that--let's say that I lowered it to 0.4. Still, if an action has a 0.4 probability of causing severe pain to somebody, that is an excellent reason not to do that action. Suppose that Georgina has been given a drug and I think there is a probability 0.6 that that drug will prevent her from feeling any pain. It is still typically wrong for me to do things that in the absence of the drug would cause severe pain, for two reasons: (a) these actions tend to damage the body, and it's wrong to damage any sufficiently complex organized organic system, conscious or not, without a very good reason, and (b) it is wrong to take a significant risk of causing severe pain--0.4 is definitely a significant risk.
Unfortunately people sometimes fail to take probabilities appropriately into account. Thus, they may say, while drunk, that probably they won't kill anyone. And they're right--most drunk drivers do not kill anyone. But that's beside the point--for it is wrong to take unnecessary risks with others (or with oneself). This is related to my argument that one should be opposed to many cases of abortion even if one thinks that, say, the probability that a fetus is a person is only as low as 5%.
I have previously though of this problem in terms of reasons for God not to give animals true pain. But this post has prompted me to think of it the other way around: why would God create animals who could feel pain? To what end? For any natural (external) purpose, e.g. avoiding danger, shpain is enough.
Humans have a reason to experience true pain: we can act evilly and "pain" is in some sense the manifestation of evil in a sensory form. (Perhaps that is all pain is, in fact: evil as presented to our senses.) It may be valuable, perhaps even necessary, that we are able to experience evil directly in this sort of way, to be conscious of what it is that we can and do inflict on others. Man has the free will to enact evil, and the intelligence to understand evil, so it seems reasonable, if not inevitable, that the sensory part of his soul can feel evil (i.e. pain).
Animals cannot commit or comprehend evil, so why should they get to feel it? That seems not just cruel, but unnecessary and unwarranted.
I like your characterization as "hyperactive"! While it would be a serious error to mistake the sun for a deity, the sun does have a purpose beyond its merely scientific utility — a poetic purpose... not a spirit, but it has some sort of spiritual meaning. I think that this provides additional support for a hypothesis that our instincts about animals are not wholly wrong; but we may not be meant to take them literally. That is, it can be true that we have a moral obligation to treat animals humanely without having to believe that they are just funny-looking furry little people.
Yes, I wanted to turn around that intuition that our default belief about an animal is that it's having pain. :-)
Thinking about the sun makes me think of the objection that if animals aren't conscious (which I'm not claiming), it's OK to torment them. So, nobody thinks the moon is conscious. But most people will have the intuition that it would be wrong for a mining corporation to completely blow apart the moon just for a supply of some mineral. And this intuition of theirs will be completely disconnected from consequentialist considerations (debris hitting earth, severe damage to ocean and beach ecosystems that rely on tides, severe problems for animals whose natural cycles may depend on lunar cycles). Likewise, I suspect a lot of people would oppose to using up all of Uranus for a supply of helium balloons (a LOT of helium balloons--we would be selling them to aliens, maybe).
Heh, and aliens are well known for their love of helium balloons! I also thought of another comparison: our intuitions are completely wrong at a quantum level, but at the everyday level they work. So in one sense, our intuitions about how the world really works are quite wrong, and yet in a practical sense our instincts do usefully tell us how to act.
Simiarly, our intuitions about animals may be quite wrong in determining how animals really are built, but nevertheless accurate in guiding us in how to behave. This dichotomy is more obvious but less bothersome in the case of the moon, presumably because it's so obvious what the moon really consists of — it's just a big rock; we're not tempted to think that it's conscious, and we happily accept two different intuitions (one saying the moon is "only" a big rock in its physical makeup, the other saying the moon is extremely valuable in its intrinsic worth).
Looking at it this way, I see a pretty good defence for why we might have the instincts we do: precisely because it's so hard to understand how animals are made (we have tons yet to learn about animal physiology, let alone animal souls/consciousness), God has arranged for us to have these strong intuitions that direct our behaviour. Since we don't know any better (as opposed to the case of the moon), we extrapolate from those instincts and rationalize them as "animals feel pain". But actually it's not that we think animals are like us and so therefore we must treat them humanely, but rather that we feel the need to treat animals humanely and so we conclude they must be like us.
I like that way of turning the standard story on its head. The standard story is: we think animals are like us in terms of pain, so we conclude that we should treat them well. The revised story is: we think animals should be treated well, so we conclude that they are like us in terms of pain.
Yes; and just having watched somebody get shot on a TV show reminded me that the standard excuse is that fake violence is OK because nobody actually feels pain. Yet some of us have strong feelings against seeing gruesome violence, no matter how fake; and some of us feel that violent scenes are not merely unpleasant but immoral beyond a certain point. I think that's another indication that pain is not the sole or most important factor.
It still is a hard feeling to shake, though. I think in religious terms, any kind of destruction is a sign of the Fall, and thus something we ought to recoil from naturally.
Here's another thought from another old article of yours (Knowing What Pains are Like): you claim that the memory of a pain is not necessarily painful, but I don't think I buy that. I think that recollection of something red means truly experiencing redness while you recall it, and to truly recall pain means actually feeling that pain again. That we don't (usually, unless the pain was traumatic or extreme) I think is because we cheat — we're not really recalling the pain, just the surrounding circumstances. (Also, our memories tend to be weak, I think, in that my memory of a red thing is not as red as actually seeing it; but if I could call to mind a perfect, undegraded memory then it would be just as red &mdash or just as painful.)
In other words, I can remember the shpain or the non-painful qualia of falling off my bike, but not the actual pain-quale that went with them. (The advantages to this are obvious.) Perhaps this is another factor in misleading us in our animal analogies. Imagining pain in someone or something else is like remembering pain in ourselves; we attribute pain to those memories even when not actually experiencing pain the act of recollection — we can remember intellectually that there was pain involved, separate from remembering the pain itself — and so we develop a habit of extrapolating pain from the concomitant context. The when we imagine the same context applying to an animal, we naturally extrapolate the pain that should go along with it. (That may also help explain why mental anguish is more painful to remember: without physical accompaniments on which to hang our memory, we are forced to remember the pain itself more directly, and thus we feel it again, we re-live it.)
Perhaps if we always recalled the pain-qualia directly when remembering, we would be less likely to automatically extend the analogy that far. But of course our memories would hurt us a lot more, so we wouldn't want to do that!
I have been following this discussion on and off and it strikes me as a little bit surreal. From my dilletantish knowledge of empirical studies of non-human animals, it seems we are learning more and more how continuous human beings are with the rest of creation. any theology of animals needs, I think, to take this into account.
At the very least, we need to re-think the suggestion of Wesley and Butler of animal souls.
It does not solve the problem of evil, but if we agree with MM Adams that God makes it such that each individual has a life that is overall good, then it may be a start.
Well, just as typical medievals did, I certainly believe in animal souls, as well as plant ones. Even ones of electrons (though in the last case, "form" is a better word--but it's still the same sort of thing).