Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests • Hacker News Board

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#131

Post by hackinthebochs » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 1:52 PM UTC

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.

Because they're acknowledging that they didn't actually establish that they feel pain in the sense of a conscious experience of suffering.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#132

Post by dlkf » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 1:52 PM UTC

jbotz wrote: post #87

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…

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 l…

> an insect is a lot more like you than a robot

If you mean that insects are more similar to humans than they are to robots, I'm actually not convinced.

When we are deciding what kind of mental mechanism to attribute to insects to explain their behaviour, there are two desiderata we need to satisfy:

- Our hypothesis has to be strong enough to explain the behaviour

- It has to be plausible given insect hardware

YeGoblynQueenne has suggested our starting point should be the hypothesis that "that all animals can feel pain." This is certainly strong enough to explain the behaviour, but it's implausible given the size of an insect's brain.

A fruit fly's brain has O(10^5) neurons; ours have O(10^10). Modern artificial neural network architectures typically fall somewhere in the middle. Now, certainly both human brains and insect brains have sophisticated architectural features that we haven't figured out yet. But given that robots, ANNs, etc can exhibit the same sorts of behaviours as insects given similar hardware constraints, I don't think we need to attribute pain (or any sort of mental life) to insects in order to explain their behaviour.

It would be cool if a neuroscientist could weigh in on this.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#133

Post by merpnderp » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 1:53 PM UTC

air7 wrote: post #91

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…

Rationally, there is no difference what-so-ever between your ability to assess how another human feels pain, and how the robot feels pain (or any other "life" form in between). In all cases, you can only observe behavioral responses to stimuli and make conclusions based on that. Therefor, everyone (else) "feels" "pain" equally as far as you can tell. There are 2 differences to speak of but they still don't change the…

Robots don’t anguish over their pain.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#134

Post by yyyk » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 1:55 PM UTC

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…

Non-poisonous spiders are actually benign. You may wish to keep it alive the next time you see it. They can catch the things that might really harm, and for me, a spider is much less annoying than a fly.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#135

Post by swebs » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 1:58 PM UTC

linnaeus wrote: post #110

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/... )

Brian Tomasik argues that we should avoid insect farming entirely since it's likely worse (ethically speaking) than farming larger nonhuman animals: > Entomophagy (eating insects for food) is sometimes proposed as an alternative to factory farming because it has lower environmental impact. But entomophagy is not necessarily more humane than factory farming of livestock all things considered, and along some dimensions…

That makes the silly assumption that all organisms are equal. I'm sure we can all agree that a human's life is more valuable than a bacterium's. Or else you'd have to admit to genocide every time you use hand sanitizer.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#136

Post by nabla9 » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 1:59 PM UTC

toasterlovin wrote: post #114

rv-de wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is evidence supporting that hypothesis. The idea that pain trauma mainly works trough personal memories processes was the reason why PSTD in adults was long seen as character weakness.

The idea that infants nervous system is more fragile should be the starting point.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/ejn.12414

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4253046/

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#137

Post by hanniabu » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 2:01 PM UTC

cdolan wrote: post #125

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…

I’m surprised abortion has not been mentioned yet. Regardless of your stance on the topic, I wonder if this type of information (insects feel pain) could mean a developing child can also feel pain when it is aborted?

I'm simply not seeing how you made a connection between insects and aborted babies

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#138

Post by dontbenebby » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 2:04 PM UTC

new_guy wrote: post #104

This makes me feel even more terrible about burning spiders to death with a magnifying glass when I was a kid.

I also am feeling quite guilty reading this.

I think every kid in the midwest pulled a leg off a daddy long legs[1] at some point. They would keep moving afterwards, and to a kid this was fascinating (and reinforced the belief they were not like animals and could not feel pain.)

Regardless, now that I'm older I think most living things have a purpose and try not to bother anything that doesn't bother me, but yes, reading this I feel guilty :(

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pholcidae

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#139

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 2:09 PM UTC

hackinthebochs wrote: post #121

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>Animals avoid dangerous behaviours because they cause them pain. Robots, including self-driving cars avoid dangerous behaviours, because they are programmed to do so. We don't know a priori whether these are in fact two distinct sets or just two descriptions of the same set. That is, nature may have "programmed" the insect to avoid dangerous stimuli without any conscious awareness of it, similar to how my hand start…

If I understand correctly, you're suggesting that animals could react to stimuli that we would consider painful by following the same behaviours that they would if they felt pain, not because they feel pain but because they have been programmed to follow those behaviours in response to those stimuli?

I find this unlikely. The set of stimulus-response behaviours necessary to avoid every possible danger that might arise in an animal's environment would be immense. It seems much more economical to "program" behavious that avoid any painful stimulus (e.g. by setting some "pain threshold" and programming the animal to avoid anything that causes a sensation of pain above that threshold). This is particularly so for insects that have a limited number of neurons in which to store their stimulus-specific programs.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#140

Post by 420codebro » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 2:13 PM UTC

hanniabu wrote: post #137

cdolan wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m surprised abortion has not been mentioned yet. Regardless of your stance on the topic, I wonder if this type of information (insects feel pain) could mean a developing child can also feel pain when it is aborted?

I'm simply not seeing how you made a connection between insects and aborted babies

Yeah because until it pops outta the vagina it has absolutely no status or ability to feel.

/s

(Dumbass)