Quote:
Originally Posted by John Wilkes Booth
ok this is interesting cause from what i recalll you are a scientist or at least are studying in that field..so let me ask how do you differentiate between suffering and avoidance responses?
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Basically, it's been a concern of ethics boards in biology experiments; it's been determined that the complex structures and dynamics associated with suffering (so-called "neural correlates of consciousness") exist in the forebrain.
If you take an animal like c. elegans (the nematode), they don't really have a brain - more like a nerve bundle (the neuronal ring) that integrates sensory systems (input) and muscle/endocrine systems (output) but these structures and their associated dynamics are more akin to reflexive responses in humans (for example when you withdraw your arm - the signal doesn't travel to the forebrain, lower brain handles reflexive actions, if we had to be conscious of a fire burning our hand before we reacted, we'd probably be too slow).
IACUC (the ethics board for animal experimentation in the US) requires us to first anesthetize tadpoles and frogs, then remove their forebrain to eliminate the chance of them experiencing suffering. Experiments are then performed on the neurons of the remaining living, but presumably not-conscious, hind or mid brain.
And we see some similarities and complexities in animals with a big forebrain to body mass ratio (dolphins, elephants, monkeys, humans). All these animals seem to have rich and conflicting emotions that implies are richer conscious experience (due to having more elaborate morphology and dynamics associated with the forebrain). All of these are of course, vertebrates, which is a requirement for having a well-organized and divided brain (rather than a kind of symmetric bundling of wiring)
Of course, this isn't definitive, and we still have a lot to discover about consciousness in the first place, but there have been useful theories developed based on this and the resulting complexity of the information integrated across systems (Tononi's Integrated Information Theory is an example). Their usefulness has been in assessing the consciousness of comatose patients, I believe (I'd have to review the literature again to be sure).