Mice go grey when tortured

[confused2]

Scientific breakthrough - mice go grey when you torture them.
Apparently they were being tortured for some other reason (What? Why?) when the breakthrough was made.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51208972

"Pain in mice triggered the release of adrenaline and cortisol, making their hearts beat faster and blood pressure rise, affecting the nervous system and causing acute stress.
This process then sped up the depletion of stem cells that produced melanin in hair follicles.
...
And while carrying out experiments on mice, they stumbled across evidence this was the case.
...
This leaves the door open for scientists to help delay the onset of grey hair by targeting CDK with a drug."

I kept hamsters for many years - sometimes they had accidents and sometimes they were ill but when recovered they looked pretty much good as new.

Why and what kind of a thing do you have to be doing to a small animal to 'stumble across' their response to pain?

[C C]

Scientific breakthrough - mice go grey when you torture them. Apparently they were being tortured for some other reason (What? Why?) when the breakthrough was made. [...] Why and what kind of a thing do you have to be doing to a small animal to 'stumble across' their response to pain?

A study about pain itself?

"We were conducting a study on pain using black C57 mice, a dark-furred laboratory strain," he said. "In this model, we administered a substance called resiniferatoxin to activate a receptor expressed by sensory nerve fibers and induce intense pain. Some four weeks after systemic injection of the toxin, a PhD student observed that the animals' fur had turned completely white." https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/...012120.php

I kept hamsters for many years - sometimes they had accidents and sometimes they were ill but when recovered they looked pretty much good as new.

These mice aren't ordinary ones, so you have to wonder how universal and permanent the results could really be with respect to both the conventional ones and other animal species. Still, they seem confident they found the protein causing damage to their melanocyte stem cells, and it might potentially apply to us.

"C57 has many unusual characteristics that make it useful for some work and inappropriate for other: It is unusually sensitive to pain and to cold, and analgesic medications are less effective in it. Unlike most mouse strains, it drinks alcoholic beverages voluntarily. It is more susceptible than average to morphine addiction, atherosclerosis, and age-related hearing loss."

[confused2]

Shakespeare is credited with 'inventing' (or discovering) 'humanity'.

“If you prick us [Jews], do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?".

If there is a humanity test then I think we have failed it. I do not accept that anything justifies injecting 'pain' into a sentient being - mouse/Jew or whatever or whoever.

[C C]

Shakespeare is credited with 'inventing' (or discovering) 'humanity'.

“If you prick us [Jews], do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?".

If there is a humanity test then I think we have failed it. I do not accept that anything justifies injecting 'pain' into a sentient being - mouse/Jew or whatever or whoever.

How would one communicate (via language) the actual experience of pain to this person: The woman who doesn't feel pain?

She could watch and listen to the outer behavior of individuals in pain, but those actions merely correspond to what is publicly "invisible" to onlookers (it can even be faked). The function of pain can be described to her (she gets that). But words and other communicatory methods lack symbol grounding for a person who has never encountered the sensations and corporeal manifestations which they represent or serve as placeholders for.

Would we attribute pain to a puppet acting as if it was in agony, or a cartoon character, or to a robot? Which is to say, external actions are not truly it. Scientifically, the experience of pain itself isn't publicly detectable apart from either that outward behavior (including verbal reports and noises) and (possibly) measurements of microscopic interactions or neural patterns indicating its potential presence to the subject. Damage isn't an absolute indicator since the woman above didn't feel it when physically injured. Presence of a nervous system isn't an absolute indicator of the capacity since she has one of those.

If a person reported that they were feeling the spirit of God, they might be humoured in that respect, but most researchers probably wouldn't believe it. (What is some unique "feeling God" even supposed to be like? In that regard, I'm like the woman who can't experience pain.) There might also be activity detected in a brain region that could be held responsible for causing the subject to report a God feeling. But the outer appearance of the latter isn't the private manifestation.

If robots were conducting science instead of humans, the idea of pain or other feelings and inner presentations would seem to be utter BS to them, just like our gods and spirits. The only reason scientists with biological bodies believe in phenomenal consciousness (or hopefully most anyway), is because it is privately available to them.

So you can see why today's physicalists -- of the illusionism or eliminative materialism ilk -- may doubt or deny such qualia or phenomenal happenings being legit. I don't agree with such -- as Galen Strawson expressed, it's "just about the craziest claim that has ever been made in the history of human thought". But in superficially(?) similar context, some theists also assert that denying God is crazy, as if that should be similarly as obvious. Yet they're instead held by explicit atheists or scientism advocates to be the ones on the nutty side of the fence.