They don’t have a brain really and kinda just float there. Do they even feel pain?
No Brain? For Jellyfish, No Problem
“I think sometimes people use its lack of a brain to treat a jellyfish in ways we wouldn’t treat another animal,” Helm says. “There are robots in South Korea that drag around the bay and suck in jellyfish and shred them alive. I’m a biologist and sometimes sacrifice animals, but I try to be humane about it. We don’t know what they are feeling, but they certainly have aversion to things that cause them harm; try to snip a tentacle and they will swim away very vigorously. Sure, they don’t have brains, but I don’t think that is an excuse to put them through a blender.”
Ok, but the question was whether or not they feel pain. We can definitively say they display escape behaviors when presented with an aversive stimulus, so I’d say it’s likely they do feel some sort of pain, even if their perception of it is nothing like that displayed by animals with central nervous systems.
The morality of shredding them alive by the thousands is a different conversation, but I would say yes, nature is cruel, and yes, it’s possible for humans to mimic nature and kill animals in similar ways, but humans also have a knack for taking things too far, eg chickens bred to be so big they can’t even walk or jellyfish-murdering robots
This is one of those things that’s hard to define. If a popcorn kernel gets too hot, it pops and it’s almost like it’s trying to run from the heat. How is that different from a jellyfish reaction to pain? There’s a lot of good arguments on both sides.
Sometimes, I wonder how far away we really are from the popcorn kernel.
We can definitely say they display escape behaviours when presented with an adverse stimulus, so I’d say it’s likely they do feel some sort of pain
It’s ironic that your username is “protist”, since even many single cell organisms display escape behaviours when presented with an adverse stimulus.
But everyone and everything rather avoid pain, wouldn’t they? And if I would like to treat those the way I would like to be treated, then why not try to help mitigate that pain where possible?
The follow up question would be what us and isn’t pain.
If a bacterium swimming in one direction encounters a toxin and changes direction to avoid dying, did it experience pain? If a tobacco plant reacts to attacks from insects by producing more nicotine and alerting its neighbours to do the same through signals sent through both rhizomes and airborne pheromones, does it experience pain? What about a worker ant, whose behaviour can be perfectly simulated by an algorithm simple enough that you can simulate hundreds of ants interacting?
Personally, I’d say none of these organisms are capable of feeling pain. Or if they are with the help of some definitions of what constitutes pain, it’s just a signal like an automated assembly machine getting a signal from its sensors that a human entered its work space and it needs to slow down its robot arm to snails pace. So still incapable of suffering.
Also, if you set the threshold for what constitutes the ability for suffering too low, you quickly collide with the ethics of even early term abortion.
If you care about brainless animals, you might as well care about plants.
