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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

#141

Post by GordonS »

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

I think the parent is attempting to ridicule the GP or trilialise the way they see circumcision - some Americans get practically religious with their defence of mutilating their newborn boys' penises.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#142

Post by GordonS »

swebs wrote: post #135
linnaeus wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's an interesting point though - if we remove human life from the equation, how do you define the "value" of an animal or insect life?

It will even vary from culture to culture; for example, cows are revered in much of India, and in much of the west we seem to place more value on values we perceive as "cute", such as dolphins, or "magnificent", such as whales.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#145

Post by Der_Einzige »

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

The connection is apparent to everyone else reading.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#146

Post by Der_Einzige »

dlkf wrote: post #132
jbotz wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 YeGobl…

1. Most neural network architectures have fewer "neurons" than 10^5. Maybe the word you are looking for is "parameters"

2. A neuron in the brain and a neuron in a neural network are totally different things.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#147

Post by Der_Einzige »

monort wrote: post #64

Somewhat related essay from a negative utilitarian about consequences of insects feeling pain: https://reducing-suffering.org/the-importance-of-insect-suff...

It's nice to see folks becoming aware of negative utilitarianism.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#148

Post by hackinthebochs »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #139
hackinthebochs wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 aris…

>by following the same behaviours that they would if they felt pain

This is taking the claim I made too far. My point was that reacting to noxious stimuli does not a priori require the conscious experience of pain (which includes a suffering component). When it comes to analyzing sets of possible behaviors, that provides more evidence with which to decide between nociception and pain. I do think that most "animals" (excluding insects) probably experience pain due to, as you said, the varieties of possible behaviors being too large to be merely reflex based. But it's not obvious to me that this holds for insects.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#149

Post by strainer »

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…

General anesthesia on infants has been indicated to cause "reduced gray matter density in certain brain regions" that results in a 5-6 point lower IQ on average in adults who had undergone surgery involving general anesthesia before the age of 4.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/294966.php

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