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Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

sydney.edu.au

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Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#51

Post by jobigoud »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #35
nefitty wrote: post #2

Well, this makes being faithful to my ethical commitments a little more complicated.

This morning I spent 20 minutes trying to hunt down a spider near my desk at home. I didn't want to clear all the wires and papers and hardware on the desk, and the spider used those to juke around me and my big napkin. Eventually I left and surfed the net on my phone; when I came back an hour later it was nowhere to be seen. But I was absolutely prepared to murder it the moment I got a chance. On the other hand, I'v…

Regarding spiders: at some point I got interested in macro photography and one day a big spider happened to be on my desk. It stayed still for more than an hour and I could get really magnified shots from several angles, and study its little eyes and minute details on the legs. Got me interested in its species, how to recognize them, etc. This mostly cured me from arachnophobia for some reason.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#52

Post by org3432 »

blodovnik wrote: post #20

Why wouldn't they feel pain? It's such a superior attitude to even consider that only humans could feel pain. It's also obvious that any complex organism feels pain... It the most basic evolutionary protection mechanism. Anything that didn't feel pain would soon be evolved out.

They used to think black people don't feel pain too, it would be good to do a long term study to determine if they feel pain since they clearly can't determine if others do.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#53

Post by [deleted] »

devoply wrote: post #38
deftnerd wrote: post #33

All the comments discussing the moral implications of harming insects are focusing on the wrong part of how useful this information is. As the link says, this research indicates that we can use insects to do basic research on Neuropathic pain. Insects, being easy and fast to breed, and easy to manage in large quantities, makes this especially useful for research. Now they can try all sorts of methods of tackling the…

Nice going there bug Dr. Mengele.

[deleted]

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#54

Post by brighter2morrow »

org3432 wrote: post #52
blodovnik wrote: post #20

Why wouldn't they feel pain? It's such a superior attitude to even consider that only humans could feel pain. It's also obvious that any complex organism feels pain... It the most basic evolutionary protection mechanism. Anything that didn't feel pain would soon be evolved out.

They used to think black people don't feel pain too, it would be good to do a long term study to determine if they feel pain since they clearly can't determine if others do.

>They used to think black people don't feel pain too,

Who thought this? White people?

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#55

Post by xenonite »

zaroth wrote: post #10
xenonite wrote: post #8

TLDR: They damaged a nerve in one leg of the drosophila fly. The injury was then allowed to fully heal. After the injury healed, they found the fly’s other legs had become hypersensitive through loss of the pain inhibitors (GABA).

I believe they cut off a leg. I don't really get the part where they say they "allowed it to fully heal". [1] Maybe that was a different experiment in the same paper? [1] - https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D_JUvnmUwAAj7Sa.jpg:large

Well the text I posted was from the journalistic article. The scientific paper indeed says they let the animal recover from the amputated leg. However, as you say, I now agree that it is not clear what they mean with “recovery”.

> We amputated the right middle leg of wild-type Canton S flies, allowed the animals to recover, and then evaluated escape responses at different temperatures. While intact animals displayed minimal escape attempts when exposed to a 38°C surface, after amputation, flies showed significantly more escape behaviors.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#56

Post by kranner »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #30
blodovnik wrote: post #20

Why wouldn't they feel pain? It's such a superior attitude to even consider that only humans could feel pain. It's also obvious that any complex organism feels pain... It the most basic evolutionary protection mechanism. Anything that didn't feel pain would soon be evolved out.

Even the featured article puts pain in quotes and is like, “for simplicity, we’ll call it ‘pain’” So actually it’s not obvious that animals perceive the world as we do. Maybe you can only generalise our experience to warm blooded vertebrates.

Given the similarities between us and other animals, it should make more sense to have to disprove that they don't feel pain, rather than having to prove that they do, i.e., that they must feel pain should be the default assumption in the absence of data.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#57

Post by kranner »

deftnerd wrote: post #33

All the comments discussing the moral implications of harming insects are focusing on the wrong part of how useful this information is. As the link says, this research indicates that we can use insects to do basic research on Neuropathic pain. Insects, being easy and fast to breed, and easy to manage in large quantities, makes this especially useful for research. Now they can try all sorts of methods of tackling the…

Why are the moral implications 'the wrong part'?

If we found a species of aliens that clearly suffered like us but bred as fast as insects and were as easy to manage, would the moral implications of experimenting on them still be irrelevant compared to the utility of experimenting on them?

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#58

Post by saagarjha »

lone_haxx0r wrote: post #42
whatshisface wrote: post #21

Does my computer feel pain when I decrement %eax?

If the computer is running a complex algorithm that tries to keep the value of %eax as high a possible, then I think it would feel pain if you decremented that value.

Is reinforcement learning just hurting the computer until it does what we want it to do?

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#59

Post by ambrop7 »

xenonite wrote: post #8

TLDR: They damaged a nerve in one leg of the drosophila fly. The injury was then allowed to fully heal. After the injury healed, they found the fly’s other legs had become hypersensitive through loss of the pain inhibitors (GABA).

Wondering what's genetic about this experiment.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#60

Post by SargeZT »

DKnoll wrote: post #50
gupe wrote: post #24

I wonder if one could make a case for having to be more humane in insect farming? Current practices include steaming and crushing insects to death. (The Economist | Grub’s up https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/07/06/... )

There are 'humane' electric shock machines available for crabs. They supposedly cause instant painless death. Obviously the size would make it impossible to use the same machine but maybe something similar. http://www.polar-systems.co.uk/industries-applications/seafo...

Just spitballing here, but two plates with a significant high voltage charge difference lowered to the level of the insects would seem to fit the bill.
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