[Dent]

Atmospheric Oxygen is pain?

1. When do you think suffering in the living world originated, and why do you think it originated? DP: When?
Shortly before the Cambrian explosion over half a billion years ago. The most rudimentary aversive experience may well be more ancient, maybe in the ancestors of choanoflagellates: free-living unicellular and colonial flagellate eukaryotes, which are the closest living relatives to animals. Choanoflagellates display key constituents of neurons, notably the same sodium channels. Nonsense mutations in our SCN9A gene, which encodes the Nav1.7 sodium ion channel, lead to congenital insensitivity to pain.
Clearly the exact date of the world’s first aversive experience, the first “micro-pinprick” so to speak, is a matter of conjecture. Yet dating the earliest forms of suffering is hard too. The experience of pain, I think, only amounts to full-blown suffering in multicellular creatures. Any distinction between mere pain and full-blown suffering is conventional; but it’s not arbitrary. Why don't vertebrates with central nervous systems - and likewise organisms in other phyla with complex cephalic ganglia - undergo not mere discrete neuronal “pinpricks”, but instead, on occasion, a unitary, ghastly experience of severe “physical” or emotional pain? Agony or despair can seem to consume one’s whole being, penetrating the very recesses of one’s soul. This is one aspect of the so-called “binding problem”, more commonly discussed in the context of the unity of perception.

Interview with David Pearce about the abolitionist project