ArticleBiology & philosophy
Fish do not feel pain and its implications for understanding phenomenal consciousness.
Article in Biology & philosophy. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Fish welfare in a changing world: New developments and current challenges.Journal of fish biology · 2026Review
- Attribution of consciousness to non-human animals: insights from AI and multidimensional frameworks.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Why it hurts: with freedom comes the biological need for pain.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- The Olfactory Tract: Basis for Future Evolution in Response to Rapidly Changing Ecological Niches.Frontiers in neuroanatomy · 2022Review
- What Is It Like to Be a Bass? Red Herrings, Fish Pain and the Study of Animal Sentience.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2022Review
- Neural Design Principles for Subjective Experience: Implications for Insects.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- The Zebrafish Amygdaloid Complex - Functional Ground Plan, Molecular Delineation, and Everted Topology.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2020Article
- "But It's Just a Fish": Understanding the Challenges of Applying the 3Rs in Laboratory Aquariums in the UK.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2019Article
- Indicators and Criteria of Consciousness in Animals and Intelligent Machines: An Inside-Out Approach.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2019Article
- Designing Brains for Pain: Human to Mollusc.Frontiers in physiology · 2018Article
- Reply to Adamo, Key et al., and Schilling and Cruse: Crawling around the hard problem of consciousness.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2016Article
- Insects cannot tell us anything about subjective experience or the origin of consciousness.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2016Article
- Is "cooling then freezing" a humane way to kill amphibians and reptiles?Biology open · 2015Article
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Phenomenal consciousness or the subjective experience of feeling sensory stimuli is fundamental to human existence. Because of the ubiquity of their subjective experiences, humans seem to readily accept the anthropomorphic extension of these mental states to other animals. Humans will typically extrapolate feelings of pain to animals if they respond physiologically and behaviourally to noxious stimuli. The alternative view that fish instead respond to noxious stimuli reflexly and with a limited behavioural repertoire is defended within the context of our current understanding of the neuroanatomy and neurophysiology of mental states. Consequently, a set of fundamental properties of neural tissue necessary for feeling pain or experiencing affective states in vertebrates is proposed. While mammals and birds possess the prerequisite neural architecture for phenomenal consciousness, it is concluded that fish lack these essential characteristics and hence do not feel pain.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.