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

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#191

Post by zaroth » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 4:21 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #186

zaroth wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a quote from Wikipedia where the footnote references an abstract which does not include that statement. Here’s what the abstract does say; > Following the three randomized trials in Africa demonstrating the protective effects of male circumcision on HIV infection, studies have reported other benefits of circumcision including protection from certain STIs, including human papillomavirus and herpes simplex virus…

Circumcision does nothing to protect against herpes, hepatitis, chancroid, HPV, Chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis etc. So the child is being exposed to risk of death or disfigurement for a hypothetical benefit for one STI where there are existing better protections for that, and other STIs.

I’ll take the moving goalposts as a positive sign.

Here’s another one that appears after a quick Google search;

Male Circumcision Reduces Risk of Genital Herpes and HPV Infection, but Not Syphilis

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/male-circumcis...

When you google for circumcision risk of death, on the one hand is CIRP claiming over 100 infant boys die each year from complications arising from circumcision, and in the other hand the CDC saying they looked at every single infant death in 2010 and could not find a single one related to circumcision.

So I’ll be done with this topic for the day!

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#192

Post by stallmanite » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 4:21 PM UTC

torbjorn wrote: post #158

xvector wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s ridiculous. This sort of mutilation should be flat out illegal. It’s physical child abuse, plain and simple.

Oof the circumcision topic, this is one where everyone argues for however their own personal penis looks and reasons backward from that.

Nope. I was circumcised and think it’s a fucking barbaric procedure and the supposed reasons it is done seem to coveniently change every couple years.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#193

Post by zaroth » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 4:23 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #187

zaroth wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it turns out the protective benefits are rather durable after the procedure is performed. Similar to the HPV vaccine which is given to 9 year olds, presumably long before they have started having sex. I’m really not interested in ideological battle here.

If the benefit exists, which is doubtful, it only exists for one STI and has no protective effect for the rest. > I’m really not interested in ideological battle here. You're defending zero-benefit mutilation of children, in the face of overwhelming medical advice. It's hard to see that as anything other than ideological.

I think we already agreed there’s not “zero benefit” so I fear this is no longer a productive discussion.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#194

Post by stallmanite » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 4:41 PM UTC

mikelevins wrote: post #156

dontbenebby wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, rea…

I never pulled legs off arthropods, nor did I ever use magnifying glasses to burn them. I did witness other children doing these things, and it always upset me intensely. I'm probably an outlier. My mother tells me that from the time I could walk I captured bugs in the house and carried them outside to prevent them being killed. I've continued the habit of rescuing animals from bad situations into adulthood and rapid…

You’re not alone. I never tortured any insects or animals as a child and it weirds me the fuck out that that is apparently considered normal behavior. I haven’t seen signs of this in my own kids but then again I’ve taught them explicitly that harming sentient beings is wrong.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#195

Post by Retric » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

hackinthebochs wrote: post #183

Retric wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would have to experience some negative stimulus to avoid it. Disagreement with the term pain does not remove the resume that learned avoidance requires detection of a negative stimulus. Further, while we separate negative stimulus into say thirst and pain, the fact you can torture people with either means the difference is ethically more semantic than meaningful.

There is a distinction in biology between sensory perception of noxious stimuli (nociception) and the experience of suffering in response to noxious stimuli. The distinction is in higher order brain processing. An organism does not need to experience suffering to react to noxious stimuli: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_reflex

Withdraw reflex does not mean learning. You can see this in cases where the withdrawal reflex is repeatedly triggered without learning.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#196

Post by cgriswald » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

dlkf wrote: post #160

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 the…

> 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? This is exactly why the robot analogy originally raised by Hendrikto is so powerful. Robots/neural nets/etc illustrate that it is possible for an agent to avoid dangerous behaviours without being motivated by feelings. I agree that this doesn't prove that in…

> I agree that this doesn't prove that insects don't have feelings - it shows that an agent doesn't need to be conscious to exhibit these sorts of behaviours.

This conclusion requires an understanding of what endows something with consciousness. (I won't use the word agent, because the relationship between consciousness and agency isn't clear. Agency may require consciousness, but consciousness needn't necessarily require agency.)

We do not know what part of the human brain is responsible for human consciousness. Anything which we create may also, as a byproduct or an emergent property, create consciousness. Perhaps the only thing consciousness needs is an ability to sense and respond to stimuli.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#197

Post by hackinthebochs » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 5:11 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #195

hackinthebochs wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a distinction in biology between sensory perception of noxious stimuli (nociception) and the experience of suffering in response to noxious stimuli. The distinction is in higher order brain processing. An organism does not need to experience suffering to react to noxious stimuli: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_reflex

Withdraw reflex does not mean learning. You can see this in cases where the withdrawal reflex is repeatedly triggered without learning.

Withdraw reflex also doesn't preclude learning. We see learning in all sorts of reflex arcs that get over-triggered and thus become downregulated. So the fact that the fly "learned" to be more sensitive to noxious stimuli does not rule out a reflex mechanism at play in its behavior.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#198

Post by Dylan16807 » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 5:25 PM UTC

cgriswald wrote: post #196

dlkf wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? This is exactly why the robot analogy originally raised by Hendrikto is so powerful. Robots/neural nets/etc illustrate that it is possible for an agent to avoid dangerous behaviours without being motivated by feelings. I agree that this doesn't prove that in…

> I agree that this doesn't prove that insects don't have feelings - it shows that an agent doesn't need to be conscious to exhibit these sorts of behaviours. This conclusion requires an understanding of what endows something with consciousness. (I won't use the word agent, because the relationship between consciousness and agency isn't clear. Agency may require consciousness, but consciousness needn't necessarily re…

If a doorbell is conscious then we've made "conscious" into a useless term.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#199

Post by nickpsecurity » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

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…

Most creatures that are injured seem to react physically and mentally like we do when we feel pain. From an evolutionary perspective, they also all probably do for the same reasons. So, my default assumption is that animals feel pain.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#200

Post by iams- » Sun, Jul 14, 2019, 5:34 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…

Farmed insects live their full lifespan as opposed to larger animals which only live around ten percent on average.

I personally do not advocate anyone to eat plant-based meats because of the harmful effects on health (this coming anecdotally from myself after eating them for 2+ years). The phytates in almost all grains / legumes / beans bind to almost all free zinc copper and iron which has a very negative effect on health.

Insects (similar to ruminants) are able to naturally assimilate the high protein foods and filter out the phytates. Eating a half-pound per day of insects helped me to greatly recover my health after following a vegan diet for almost three years.