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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

#81

Post by rv-de »

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…

> In any case, the simplest hypothesis is that all animals can feel pain. The null hypothesis should be the opposite.

Following the interpretation that "The null hypothesis is generally assumed to be true until evidence indicates otherwise." I'd argue for H° being that all living beings feel pain until evidence indicates otherwise. That approach wouldn't be very economical though which is why do the opposite.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#82

Post by pbhjpbhj »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #79
Hendrikto wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pa…

I don't see why we have to assume that a robot would feel pain. We can explain its behaviour easily without recourse to pain: we 've programmed it to avoid certain situations that we deem dangerous. On the other hand, I don't see why we have to assume that an animal does not feel pain. Have we designed them? No. Don't we, who are also animals, feel pain? And isn't it reasonable to assume that pain is one mechanism by…

Indeed, I think the support for insects feeling pain probably extends to saying cars with accident avoidance feel pain.

That is to say, I'm not convinced: pain is a perceptual result.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#83

Post by spodek »

nabla9 wrote: post #68

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 sentien…

> > 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.

From a quick search: "Only 45% of doctors who do circumcisions use any anesthesia at all. Obstetricians perform 70% of circumcisions and are least likely to use anesthesia - only 25% do."

From https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moral-landscapes/201...

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#84

Post by scotty79 »

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.

Why wouldn't they be concious?

They probably are concious in some form but their pain might be so much simpler than ours as their conciousness is.

They lack a lot of hardware to expeirience what we expeirience.

The risk of using a word like 'pain' is because it's a very sharply defined word for most people. While in fact expeiriencing pain evolved and your pain might be very different than fish pain or insect pain or nematode pain.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#85

Post by scotty79 »

kranner wrote: post #57
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?

Because they didn't prove that insects expeirience pain as people understand it. They just proven that expeiriencing injury sensitizes an insect.

Article tries to balance between biting the audience with insect pain but then trying to not be completely false calls it 'pain' and nociception which is the only scientifically accurate term for what is observed.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#86

Post by kranner »

scotty79 wrote: post #85
kranner wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because they didn't prove that insects expeirience pain as people understand it. They just proven that expeiriencing injury sensitizes an insect. Article tries to balance between biting the audience with insect pain but then trying to not be completely false calls it 'pain' and nociception which is the only scientifically accurate term for what is observed.

GP seemed to say it doesn't matter whether they experience pain or not because the convenience of experimenting on them outweighs any suffering they may undergo. That's not specific to this experiment.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#87

Post by jbotz »

Hendrikto wrote: post #70
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 pa…

You feel pain, right? Well, an insect is a lot more like you than a robot... the mechanism by which it it decides what to seek and what to avoid is based on an infrastructure that's very similar to your own, even if much simpler. And the experience of pain appears to be something very fundamental in the wiring of living things, its avoidance being very directly connected to evolutionary success. So it is absolutely logical to assume this mechanism is fundamentally equivalent in humans and insects. The behavior is the same, the wiring is the same, why not use the same word?

For now, most robots's decision-making apparatus isn't anything like yours. So it really doesn't make much sense to use the same vocabulary. But that could change if we use neural-network computing in a way that appears to more directly simulate the functioning of living organisms. Maybe building an ant-robot that's really a functional copy of a biological ant isn't that far off, and in that case, sure, it might feel pain.

I don't see anything simplistic about this.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#88

Post by Retric »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #82
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why we have to assume that a robot would feel pain. We can explain its behaviour easily without recourse to pain: we 've programmed it to avoid certain situations that we deem dangerous. On the other hand, I don't see why we have to assume that an animal does not feel pain. Have we designed them? No. Don't we, who are also animals, feel pain? And isn't it reasonable to assume that pain is one mechanism by…

Indeed, I think the support for insects feeling pain probably extends to saying cars with accident avoidance feel pain. That is to say, I'm not convinced: pain is a perceptual result.

Cars with accident avoidance don’t learn to avoid things after experiencing them. For entities that do, pain seems like an obvious term.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#89

Post by pbhjpbhj »

zimpenfish wrote: post #77
brighter2morrow wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They used to think black people don't feel pain too, Who thought this? White people?

https://www.history.com/news/the-father-of-modern-gynecology... > While some doctors didn’t trust anesthesia, Sims’s decision to not use it—or any other numbing technique—was based on his misguided belief that black people didn’t experience pain like white people did. See also https://www.pnas.org/content/113/16/4296.full > These findings suggest that individuals with at least some medical training hold and may use f…

I don't really understand this contention in the second link:

>Today, many laypeople, scientists, and scholars continue to believe that the black body is biologically and fundamentally different from the white body and that race is a fixed marker of group membership, rooted in biology (26⇓–28). //

Okay, I'd fit there.

I've never heard the concept of different pain tolerance (only across the sexes), but black and 'coloured' people are clearly morphological distinct in a way that suggests genetic differences ... are they saying light and darked skinned people are genetically and biologically identical?

That doesn't correspond at all with things like sickle-cell disease / malaria insensitivity which are reported to be found more in people with a long ancestry in sub-saharan Africa.

FWIW suffering from pain signals appears at least in part social and learned -- toddlers can often be tricked in to not finding something painful. I certainly don't feel the identical physical stimulus of nettle stings in the age way as my older children. The v toddler doesn't know it's supposed to hurt and carries on, the older child seems to be hurt with very little damage because they anticipate the pain. I feel the pain as I've always done (maybe my reception of pain stimulus is weakened?) but can easily ignore it because I know a few nettle stings isn't really anything to bother with.

Personally I'd expect almost everything to show some variation with "race", and also with geographical heritage, and also with societal tradition in groups you assosiate with. (Eg maybe diet affects pain perception and historical cultural background affects die, maybe?)

The idea that we're all identical is silly. I see where the desire to say that comes from: but ignoring reality doesn't get us further forward because it doesn't fit reality.

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