There are sushi places that serve live shrimp. Imagine being eaten alive and feeling that first bite crushing you in half.
Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests
111–120 of 236 posts
Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests
#112Rethink Priorities (which focuses on foundational research on neglected causes) has carried out a massive amount of research recently on invertebrate welfare and sentience.
Their findings are well worth a read:
> Rethink Priorities reviewed the scientific literature relevant to invertebrate sentience. We selected 53 features potentially indicative of the capacity for valenced experience and examined the degree to which these features are found throughout 18 representative biological taxa. These data have been compiled into an easily sortable database that will enable animal welfare organizations to better gauge the probability that (various species of) invertebrates have the capacity for valenced experience. This essay details what we’ve done, why, and the strengths and weaknesses of our approach.
https://www.rethinkpriorities.org/blog/2019/6/7/invertebrate...
Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests
#113It looks like if this is extrapolated into our understanding of pain then using diatomaceous earth (DE) as non toxic pest control would imply quite some discomfort by insects as it acts mechanically as well as a desiccant. But on the other hand insects are unlikely to evolve around a mechanical opponent.
Well, I think evolution has never met something it can not overcome.... I think the point of the non toxic chemical approach is more about human health, or being organic...
True but it would take insects away from being insects and it would take much longer to evolve than it takes to evolve against chemical agents.
Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests
#114Infant 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…
Experiences of stress will even impact the neurological development of an embryo or a fetus. It's totally realistic to assume that a human will have to suffer psychologically even decades later from a psychological scarring caused by such surgery without anesthesia.
It is reasonable to entertain the hypothesis. It is unreasonable to assume that it is true.
Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s ridiculous. This sort of mutilation should be flat out illegal. It’s physical child abuse, plain and simple.
"I understand that this procedure will remove healthy and functioning tissue from my son's penis, and involves similar risk as other prophylactic or cosmetic surgeries, including infection, disfigurement, and death. I understand that the procedure may be performed without anaesthesia at the doctor's discretion. I understand that the doctor has recommended my son undergo circumcision because studies have shown a reduc…
> studies have shown a reduction in the risk for serious diseases in circumcised men
What are those studies? It is very uncommon to cut off parts of children in Europe, Russia, South America and China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_circumcision) and such serious deseases should be much more common there. So what are they? On this scale we should see a pattern.
Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests
#116Earlier 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.
I don't understand what you mean by "perceptual result".
Animals avoid dangerous behaviours because they cause them pain. Robots, including self-driving cars avoid dangerous behaviours, because they are programmed to do so. Why is the existence of robots programmed to avoid dangerous behaviour indicative of whether animals feel pain?
Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
The argument, then, would be whether a being can or does experience suffering, in the emotional sense, as a result of the pain. Is it reasonable to assume a bacteria has the same internal emotion responses to sensation?
I don't know.
Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 'col…
But fundamentally (quote) different? Morphological differences seem more superficial.
Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests
#119>> “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…
>> Equating reaction to stimuli with pain is too sinplistic.
Just to clarify this- my comment says that animals react to stimuli and that pain is a stimulus that they use to avoid dangerous situations (or behaviours). Not that reaction to stimuli entails the ability to feel pain.
So I'm asking: if (some) animals don't feel pain, then how do they know to avoid dangerous behaviours? What is the mechanism that keeps them from, say, jumping into the fire?
Does that help clarify what I mean?
Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I understand that this procedure will remove healthy and functioning tissue from my son's penis, and involves similar risk as other prophylactic or cosmetic surgeries, including infection, disfigurement, and death. I understand that the procedure may be performed without anaesthesia at the doctor's discretion. I understand that the doctor has recommended my son undergo circumcision because studies have shown a reduc…
> the doctor has recommended my son undergo circumcision because studies have shown a reduction in the risk for serious diseases in circumcised men Source? Especially that this risk reduction outweighs the risks of the procedure is not proven as far as I know.
Looks like most medical organizations range from advising against circumcision, to considering making it illegal, with the notable exception of the US [1]. As for the protection against disease:
"Male circumcision reduces the risk of HIV infection among heterosexual men in sub-Saharan Africa [..] The effectiveness of using circumcision to prevent HIV in the developed world is unclear;" [2]
Since newborns are unlikely to have sex [3], there should be no harm in waiting until puberty, and getting the boy's input on what is an irreversible change.
[1] http://www.cirp.org/library/statements/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision
[3] C'mon man.