From Automatons to Angels: This is Creepy...

but fascinating.

I find myself thinking of that excruciating scene in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep where the replicants are taking the spider apart leg by leg, to the horror of the one "chickenhead" human among them, who suffers from the horrible human disease of empathy.

Or that's how the replicants see it.

The replicants don't look down on this character and vilify him because they feel superior to him. They look down on him because he inspires terror in them.

They seek to discredit Mercerism, Dick's stand-in for any religion that has as its core the saving grace of empathy, because they are terrified by the implications.

How can the evolutionary ascent into consciousness extricate itself from the angelism of pain?

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I believe the scientists are right in the article below about insects and we've all seen the examples they cite below, which seem to lend credence to that theory.

They're probably right about the other Invertebrata, but how will we prove it?

The capacity for the ganglia in the lobster to process pain will probably be argued back and forth til the human tenure is over.

Maybe not. Neuroscientists are making amazing strides these days.

Reading this one marvels.


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It's probably natural to hate the idea that suffering is an alembicizing process.
It's insulting and crass, unsubtle of argument. It's a procrustean concept, one size fits all. It blames the ill for their sickness, babies for their deformities. It's the quintessence of the loathsome concept of Original Sin. Nothing more, nothing less.

And it's the sort of dead horse rationalists wouldn't waste a second on, since the first generation of those thinkers skewered that centuries ago in the few dozen books which constitute the Enlightenment's version of patristics.

Candide and other works by Voltaire strike even the modern reader as pretty flawless in their skewering of what was perceived to be Panglossian nattering and idiocy.

It was pretty much like shooting a flaming arrow at a Montgolfiere.

Even a philosophaster could have written it. And that Voltaire was not.

How hard is it to demonstrate that the world is mad, and there is no end of pointless suffering. Or that the suffering is assigned to the innocent and the culpable equally.

Which is pretty much the crashing sound most of us hear in third or fourth grade.

What did you say? I'm sorry. But I was just listening to Heaven's crystal palace shattering and falling. Go on...

Candide. The book practically wrote itself. All Voltaire had to do was have a nightmare, and make it a funny nightmare--an endless accumlation of disaster and misery and an endless body count. And that is pretty much an accurate series of Polaroids of European history before Voltaire's life, during it, and after.

And, of course, everywhere else.

And if one writes it as satire, so that it moves one to laughter not tears....

It is generally conceded by philosophers that if one can laugh, one is still free.

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And yet...



It's perceived as a modern sacrilege to hold to the spirit.

And it's reckoned a poverty to abandon the struggle to hold to it.



So humans save face by keeping to the middle path and smiling knowingly.

Knowing, of course, nothing of the unfathomable reasons or lack thereof.


It strikes us as uncanny that we can intuit reason in the processes of consciousness, but not in the ground of consciousness.

How is uncreaturely nature like consciousness, and how is it not?

Remember Bergson's funny concept of the elan vital?

French philosophy is not like German philosophy, is it?

(A French philosopher could write a 400 page phenomenology of Playdoh. And we'd probably want to buy it because it would be insanely fascinating. Why do I want to say Barthes right here? Sometimes I think the entire body, history, of French philosophy is really about proving that authenticity is fucked--Sartre's noble counter-humanism notwithstanding, but somehow tenable in the way Bertrand Russell's impossible sets are. I think many of these philosophers write with a unicorn's mind, and with a firm conviction that reality is to be invented rather than merely fathomed. Not that I don't find this charming. I do. This is a longwinded way of saying I feel it's pretty much inarguably true that most of French philosophy is closer to creative writing than philosophy proper. I mean when such a creature existed. Before it died. Before Wittgenstein and so many others drove a stake through its twisted little heart and its Cartesian little mind. Titivate reality. Don't merely plumb it. Are you merely a plumber? Ack!)

I think it's an anthropomorphizing streak in the human spirit along just these lines which gave birth to poetry.

And I think it's this ridiculous anthropomorphizing that keeps poetry alive.

The extension of consciousness, the extrapolation of consciousness, inherent in creative writing is still a form of sympathetic magic. It's still the walls of Altamira or Lascaux, except the fire glows behind the computer screen now.

The prey is still mammalian. But consciousness is the prey.

The body of world poetry strikes me as heterogeneous but fractalline.

It's interesting to me that I don't really know of anybody who ever sought to do a reductionist reading of the fundamental elements of the poem the way phenomenologists tried to take apart consciousness or entomologists write books on insect morphology.

Shakespeare pointed out the finite number of plots that underpin all plays written by mortals.

Did this perceived immutable limitation imply that the universe is in the business of setting down barriers to the infinite everywhere?

Do upward limits like the speed of light mean we live in a rather hilarious universe that exists only to place the kibosh on our desire for the infinite?

Or are our finite guesstimates only failures of the imagination.

Could Shakespeare imagine the twisted dramaturgy of playwrights like Beckett, Ionesco, Pirandello or Tom Stoppard?

But a morphology of the poem that seeks to reduce it to certain quintessences?

I suppose the closest thing I've seen would be le facteur Bachelard, but encountering his readings of poiesis is like seeing the process described by Lewis Carroll.

It's delightful but reads more like a psychologism of fairy tales of the self the self evolves in the mind's creative writing inside the skull.

The readings are allegories and phantasies. They're rather Pongean, and some passages read like certain of Ponge's prose poems.

Perhaps there is someone who has attempted this and I just missed him or her.

Reductionism can be boring, but I think such a book would be amusing.

I mean, to show that the same underpinnings support the infrastructure of a language poem and a surrealist poem and a symbolist poem and a sacred religious text and...

Yes, we have terms for things which are commonalities obviously: metaphor, simile, narrative, trope, rhetoric, epiphany, etc.

I don't mean grammatically, like the Chomskyan thing.

I mean more the movement of thought, the figural shape of the embodied thought, rather like Brancusi's bird or Giacometti's Palace at 4 a.m..

I think Rilke's poetry is often so fascinating because he seemed to be writing the architecure of the poem instead of just writing poems.

I think in some of his work he intuits the Ur-form of The Poem.

I think Barbara Guest does that sometimes too.

Rilkeana.

I don't know.

It's late. Or it's early.

I'm tired.

I need a cupcake.

Enjoy this creepy article.

I hope it doesn't give you nightmares.











The Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs


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Do Invertebrates Feel Pain?

Invertebrates are classically defined as animals, which lack a’ backbone’ or dorsal nerve cord1, such as insects, crustacea (e.g. shrimp, lobster and crab), and molluscs (e.g. clams, snails, and squid). Traditionally, these animals have not been included in legislation concerning cruelty to animals2.

Pain is defined by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) as “An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damage”3. The subjective, emotional component of pain is considered its important aspect, not the activation of pain sensors (nociceptors) in the body. The IASP makes this clear “Activity induced in the nociceptive pathways by a noxious stimulus is not pain, which is always a psychological state, even though we may appreciate that pain most often has a proximate physical cause”3. In other words, the only animals capable of feeling pain are those that can feel fear, anxiety, distress and terror, similar to what humans feel when we receive noxious stimuli.

Almost all organisms, including bacteria, will attempt to escape from an aversive stimulus4. Because bacteria are not thought to be capable of feeling pain (e.g. they lack a nervous system), possessing an escape response to an aversive stimulus is not enough evidence to demonstrate that a species is capable of feeling pain. To infer that a non-human vertebrate (mammals, birds and reptiles) is in pain, researchers rely on the vocalizations and physiological responses (e.g. the release of stress hormones) that an animal produces when faced with an aversive stimulus2. Because these responses are similar to our own when we are in pain, researchers argue that, by analogy, animals showing these responses are also in pain2. This technique cannot be used with invertebrates. Invertebrate physiology is different from our own1. The invertebrates diverged from that of vertebrates hundreds of millions of years ago1.

Scientists have used three lines of reasoning to assess the likelihood that invertebrates are capable of feeling pain5.



The evolutionary function of pain
The neural capacity of invertebrates
The behaviour of invertebrates


1. The evolutionary function of pain.

In vertebrates pain is thought to be an important educational tool6. Vertebrates are relatively long-lived creatures and learning shapes much of their behaviour. Learning from pain (and pleasure) plays a vital role in the development of their behaviour6.

Almost all invertebrates are short-lived and their behaviour is thought to be largely genetically determined7. Therefore, there is less evolutionary pressure selecting for the evolution of pain in this group of animals6.



2. The neural capacity of invertebrates.

Except for the cephalopods, invertebrates have small nervous systems, consisting of many small brains (ganglia). Because of the small number of neurons and the distributed organization of their nervous systems, invertebrates are thought to have limited cognitive capacity6. High cognitive capacity is thought to be a prerequisite for the development of an emotional response6.



3. The behaviour of invertebrates

Invertebrates show few, if any, of the behaviours that we would recognize as evidence of emotion6. Many invertebrates are cannibalistic, and many eat their young when given the chance. Most have no social behaviour. Although they can respond vigorously to noxious stimuli, even this response is inconsistent. Insects, for example, will continue with normal activity even after severe injury. An insect walking with a crushed tarsus (lower leg) will continue applying it to the ground with undiminished force. Locusts will writhe when sprayed with DDT. However, they will also continue feeding while being eaten by a praying mantid6.



Cephalopods



Cephalopods are sometimes given special status by animal care committees (e.g. CCAC) because they have a large, vertebrate-like central nervous system, which is about the same size as that of a fish8. In the United Kingdom these animals have some legal protection, however in the United States they do not.

Although they have large brains, all the coleoid cephalopods (squid, octopus and cuttlefish) have short lifespans8. Most live less than one year. There is no parental care8. The absence of parental care suggests that most of their behaviour is genetically determined (i.e. they must be able to hunt, hide from predators, communicate etc. without instruction by others of their species). They are capable of learning, but their abilities are sometimes greater, sometimes less than that of fish8,9. Most are highly cannibalistic, even the schooling squid. We know nothing about their hormonal response to stress, and therefore we cannot determine whether they have a physiological response that resembles ours when confronted by aversive stimuli. We understand very little about their visual communication system and, therefore, we do not know whether they make any ‘pain-specific’ signals. Given our three criteria above, we have very little evidence that these animals feel pain. Nevertheless, it is possible that as we learn more about them, we may find evidence suggesting that they are capable of feeling pain.



Conclusions
Although it is impossible to know the subjective experience of another animal with certainty, the balance of the evidence suggests that most invertebrates do not feel pain. The evidence is most robust for insects, and, for these animals, the consensus is that they do not feel pain6.


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References

1. Brusca R and Brusca G. 2002. The Invertebrates. 2nd edition. Sinauer.

2. Animal Behaviour Society, 2003. Anim. Behav. 65: 649-655

3. International Association for the Study of Pain. www.iasp-pain.org/terms-p.html

4. Berg, H 1975. Nature. 254: 389-392

5. Sherwin, C 2001. Anim. Welfare. 10: S103-S118

6. Eisemann C et al. 1984. Experientia 40: 164-167

7. Drickamer L et al. 2001. Animal Behavior: Mechanisms, Ecology and Evolution. 5th edition. McGraw-Hill.

8. Hanlon R and Messenger J 1996. Cephalopod Behaviour, Cambridge Univ. Press.

9. Boal J et al. 2000. Behav. Processes. 52: 141-153




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