I am an il/lit/erate. My brother is a /sci/entautist. Today he was telling me about a research experiment he's participating in where they glue flies to hooks and watch the fly brains as the flies walk. He said he forgot to unglue one of the flies yesterday and so it was glued to the hook overnight. Also all the flies die anyway for some reason. Pretty grisly stuff. Apparently you don't need ethics committee approval for experiments on flies.

Anyway, I was sad about this and we started talking about the ethics. He said that the flies weren't in pain or anything because they empirically were too brainless for pain, like a plant. I mentioned recent research I've heard of (just through some popsci garbage website) where plants exhibit avoidance behaviour to damaging stimuli. I said that the avoidance behaviour IS pain. He said that they can't experience pain without a brain to experience it in.

This brings me to the crux of the issue:
I said that if you peel back the layers of a plant and look at what it's doing when the avoidance behaviour is happening all you'll see is a bunch of chemical reactions. And if you peel back the layers of your brain when you're in pain, you'll see the same thing - just a bunch of chemical reactions. So either the plants are in pain, or we aren't. We both experience it differently, but we're both experiencing the same thing and having the same reaction - danger; avoidance. It's only that their experience is unintelligible to us, so we get to pretend or delude ourselves into thinking it doesn't happen or isn't important.

But I'm not really qualified to talk about the chemical or neurological action of pain, so I wanted my argument vetted by someone with actual knowledge in the field. FOr the record, my bro just said "that's interesting, I didn't think of that" and then we talked about boats.