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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

#61

Post by raverbashing »

kranner wrote: post #56
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which similarities?

Insects have a much, much simpler nervous system. They don't even have a spinal chord, and they have an exoskeleton.

I think maybe only cnidarians have a simpler (or similarly complex) nervous system.

Pain on a chordate might be comparable to pain in humans, with some exceptions like the Octopus (maybe) but that's about it.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#62

Post by monort »

root_axis wrote: post #49
whatshisface wrote: post #21

Does my computer feel pain when I decrement %eax?

Why would it? A computer has no nervous system or self preservation biology that would make use of pain signals.

We are talking about pain, not a pain signal. Decrementing register can be a pain signal, but it can't produce feeling of pain (qualia). If humans can be simulated on a Turing machine, we can't feel that definition of pain too.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#63

Post by red75prime »

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.

Using the word "pain" as such, you conflate behavior related to negative stimuli, nociceptors' signals processing, and subjective feelings. Only the first one can drive evolution.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#65

Post by fiblye »

godelski wrote: post #25
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.

No one is saying only humans. Clearly dogs feel pain. The question is about a nervous system and response. Defining pain is difficult, just as defining life.

You'd think this, but no, it's very recent that people accepted animals feel actual pain. I mean, even now there are people saying that sure, crustaceans get hurt and respond negatively to harmful stimulus, but it's not really pain because their nervous system is different or they lack some specific body component or don't respond to one specific test that's designed such that only mammals can pass.

And to risk sounding crazy, people didn't believe babies felt pain. Only within the past few decades did humanity realize the obvious fact that, no shit, of course babies feel pain. [1]

[1]: https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/07/28/when-babies-fel...

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#66

Post by easytiger »

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/... )

What about every motor vehicle, horse and cart journey ever taken killing insects is that inhumane? Those have killed trillions of insects.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#67

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

>> “People don’t really think of insects as feeling any kind of pain,” said Associate Professor Neely. “But it’s already been shown in lots of different invertebrate animals that they can sense and avoid dangerous stimuli that we perceive as painful. In non-humans, we call this sense ‘nociception’, the sense that detects potentially harmful stimuli like heat, cold, or physical injury, but for simplicity we can refer to what insects experience as ‘pain’.”

I don't understand the insistence of the article to place quotes around the word pain when referring to what insects feel. These are animals that can sense their surroundings and react to stimuli. How else would they be convinced to avoid dangerous situations, than by an unpleasant sensation?

In any case, the simplest hypothesis is that all animals can feel pain. The null hypothesis should be the opposite. And it has to be a complex hypothesis that explains why some animals can feel pain while others don't (which is tricky).

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#68

Post by nabla9 »

Infant surgery without anesthesia was common still in the mid 80's https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/17/opinion/l-why-infant-surg...

> surveys of medical professionals indicate that as recently as 1986 infants as old as 15 months were receiving no anesthesia during surgery at most American hospitals.

It's unknown where the consciousness starts (the hard problem sense) is but it's not unreasonable to assume that sentience (ability to feel pain and pleasure and experience subjectively) and ability to suffer that comes with it happens long before the ability to form long term memories, object permanence, or other any other cognitive abilities.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#69

Post by AQuantized »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #39
AQuantized wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why plants are particularly relevant to this equation. Your sentimentality for the young plants is irrelevant to whether or not they can suffer.

The parent was commenting that knowing that insects feel pain has made it harder for him to act in a way that feels ethical. I suggested that we need to just believe that we are more important than those dumb(er) lifeforms, but we should still avoid unnecessary killing whenever possible. Like not killing bugs/spiders unless they are actually annoying you, and not planting so many plants that you'll need to kill the e…

I suppose I don't understand the conflation of the very real mass slaughter of nonhuman animals, with harvesting plants.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#70

Post by Hendrikto »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #67

>> “People don’t really think of insects as feeling any kind of pain,” said Associate Professor Neely. “But it’s already been shown in lots of different invertebrate animals that they can sense and avoid dangerous stimuli that we perceive as painful. In non-humans, we call this sense ‘nociception’, the sense that detects potentially harmful stimuli like heat, cold, or physical injury, but for simplicity we can refer…

> I don't understand the insistence of the article to place quotes around the word pain when referring to what insects feel. These are animals that can sense their surroundings and react to stimuli. How else would they be convinced to avoid dangerous situations, than by an unpleasant sensation?

If you build a robot which senses dangerous stimuli and avoids them, does it feel pain?

Equating reaction to stimuli with pain is too sinplistic.

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