how did you get the cow?
I want cows too!
I believe that scientists and philosophers have already dealt with the âwhat if we are all cartoonsâ theory.
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And Keanu!
Philosophers, yes. Theyâve also already dealt with the âlower animals donât feel painâ theory.
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Do you have an âI?â Can you provide any actual evidence that this âIâ that you claim feels pain is not simply an illusion?
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How can we proscribe proper behaviour without lines, though? A child who is 15 years, 364 days old does not suddenly grasp the responsibility necessary to be behind the wheel the next morning, but we have to put the line somewhere.
Maybe you donât really need all those lines. Or all the proscriptions, either. I dunno.
As for pain, you could assume, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that every living thing feels pain if you damage it. Thatâs what a lot of people assume, and it seems to work OK for me.
Because when people make claims that something is unable to feel pain, itâs because they want to excuse torturing it. Nobody says an enemy soldier feels no pain, or that childbirth isnât painful; instead they justify that pain on other grounds. Unnecessary pain is torture.
So youâd advocate issuing driverâs license to seven year olds? The vote?
There is plenty of reason for finding out if something can experience pain (or anything else) other than for deciding whether or not we should cause it. Research for its own sake is valuable, because weâll never know when and what we might need to know.
Moreover, we need those lines to decide what is and is not necessary or justifiable.
When you see one of those things, you can hover over it to see what was typed, and there is also an emoji cheat sheet. 
Just look at it!
Yet I doubt anyone feels the need to investigate whether 13 year olds are capable or incapable of driving. Itâs easy to recognize the truth is between the two: most could somewhat, some better than others, on average with less ability and need than 18 year olds.
Setting policy is a different matter than trying to understand reality. Reality is often analog, and going in with the aim of drawing lines is saying you plan to ignore that. We evolved from invertebrates, our responses and theirs are derived from the same, and I donât think it helps us understand the details to pretend there wasnât a continuum there.
Yeah. I do think the differences in degree matter in whatâs justified; I would crush a biting mosquito to protect my arm, and never a scratching cat. But recognizing that living things feel damage in their own ways, and so not inflicting it needlessly, seems a better base than to try and invent a point where you could torment things without reproach.
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Ahem: Delicious higher living creatures with complex nervous systems.
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No it means if a lobster was dressed as a baby elephant and brushed with acid, other elephants would mourn. Donât you know anything?
Early scientist pulled the same crap with catâs and dogs. Even today, you can find people hacking up animals and saying âThey donât feel anythingâ or âItâs just reflexes.â Pain exists for a reason: It keeps us from harming ourselves. If these geniuses believed certain animals couldnât register pain, how did they figure the animal could live itâs life without doing itself in earlier, magic?
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Im sorry, this is just wrong. Lobsters arenât born delicious, you know. They depend upon us to make them delicious.
Well, not âALLâ: Nociceptors (pain receptors) have been found in nematodes, annelids and molluscs. Most insects do NOT possess nociceptors, one known exception being the fruit fly.
But, I agree on the fact that we are nothing special. We are just another animal on this planet.
bingo.
Iâve been told that even raw, theyâre delicious. A little sweet, apparently.
Pain is a survival mechanism. If a creature doesnât feel pain, it canât stay out of trouble. Itâs as simple as that.
A truly shocking article, next theyâll be telling us that mammals can yawn, and tuna have this thing called hunger, something that was previously thought only to be a human trait!! ; )
Do we REALLY know it felt pain? Perhaps it thought someone had put some butter on it, and it was being helpful by rubbing it in.
Also - sea food like that are basically giant bugs that live under water. It is disgusting that you eat these things.
Iâm not the one advocating social change here, my friend. But I was a competent driver at age 11, and by age 13 I had driven trucks, tractors and large construction equipment without doing any harm. (Letâs not talk about the 1200cc tricycle incident. Nobody died.)
Deleting the rest of my response because @chenille already said it better than I did.
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