The line drawn on pain still holds

  • Merker B
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Abstract

The many substantive criticisms raised against Key by me and by many of the other commentators will not disappear by ignoring or waving them aside with meta-discourse about anthropomorphism, just-so stories, or celestial teapots. The conceptual edifice Key inhabits and defends with such gusto may look like an impregnable fortress from the inside – and Key behaves as if it were. From the outside, however, it looks more like a ramshackle structure gaping with holes and pieced together from imperfectly understood neuroscience and often faulty literature citations. Bjorn Merker is a neuroscientist with longstanding interest in brain mechanisms of consciousness: He has worked on subcortical mechanisms of orienting behavior in rodents and cats, mirror self-recognition in gibbons, and structural principles intrinsic to the neural organization of a conscious state. Fjälkestadsv. 410-82, SE-29194 Kristianstad, Sweden. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Björn_Merker This is my third and final commentary on Brian Key's (2016a) article " Why fish do not feel pain " and his replies to critics (Key, 2016b, 2016c), specifically to my own two previous commentaries (Merker, 2016a, 2016b). I say final, because by now it is abundantly clear that pointing out conceptual flaws and evidentiary errors in Key's arguments is to no avail when Key chooses to either ignore them altogether (as he does with most of the many specifics of both kinds raised against him in my original commentary) or adds new errors in attempted rebuttal. I pointed out such new errors in my second commentary, and in replying to it, Key now compounds them by additional ones, as follows.

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APA

Merker, B. H. (2016). The line drawn on pain still holds. Animal Sentience, 1(3). https://doi.org/10.51291/2377-7478.1104

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