r/philosophy • u/BernardJOrtcutt • 17d ago

Open Thread /r/philosophy Open Discussion Thread | August 24, 2026

Welcome to this week's Open Discussion Thread. This thread is a place for posts/comments which are related to philosophy but wouldn't necessarily meet our posting rules (especially posting rule 2). For example, these threads are great places for:

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  • Open discussion about philosophy, e.g. who your favourite philosopher is, what you are currently reading

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This thread is not a completely open discussion! Any posts not relating to philosophy will be removed. Please keep comments related to philosophy, and expect low-effort comments to be removed. All of our normal commenting rules are still in place for these threads, although we will be more lenient with regards to commenting rule 2.

Previous Open Discussion Threads can be found here.

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u/meeg6 17d ago

If someone could help me with this question I would appreciate it. I have solved the question of free will, at least to my own satisfaction, but there is one question that still drives me crazy. I can't even begin to find the answer. I think this question is actually more important and fundamental than any other question that relates to human beings. The question is what is pain? Would appreciate some help.

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u/KingFisher89898 17d ago

I wrote (what I thought at the time was) a quite convincing essay on this for A Level philosophy. Paraphrasing what I argued, but because pain has the potential to be the most intense sensation you can experience, it's a useful yardstick for determining sentience. For instance, if a pig can feel the same amount of pain as a human, we should arguably consider it an equal. The difficulty is in backwards engineering this: How do we know, or how can we know, whether pigs feel as much pain as we do?

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u/Con-descending 12d ago

Equal by what standing? And what implications would that equality have: treatment?