One might initially say it’s obvious that even simple animals respond to pain in a way that indicates they feel it, squirming and wriggling in distress. But things are not so straightforward. Many responses to bodily damage that seem to involve pain probably do not. For example, rats with a severed spinal cord, and hence no channel from the site of body damage to the brain, can exhibit some of what looks like “pain behavior,” and can even show a form of learning that responds to the damage. Various reflex responses in animals might look to us like pain, because we empathize with them. We need
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