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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

#201

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

> How else would they be convinced to avoid dangerous situations, than by an unpleasant sensation?

Moderate heat and cold, certain textures, a feeling of resistance against my movements... I react to many kinds of potentially-harmful stimuli that aren't pain. Unpleasantness is not a synonym for pain.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#202

Post by andai »

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…

I'm wondering now.. if you could replace just an ant's brain with an artificial, neuron-for-neuron copy, such that the ant would continue on the outside to behave in an identical way in identical situations, what if you went one step further, and replaced the hardware neural network with a virtual one running on a general purpose, ant-brain sized CPU? Or what if you had one third of the original ant's brain intact, one third replaced with artificial neurons, and the last third virtualized? Would you end up with three separate, yet closely interacting consciousnesses?

For that matter, if you take a human being, and cut the fibers connecting the two hemispheres, you end up with two separate minds, as demonstrated in experiments. Presumably you end up with two separate consciousnesses too.

If you replaced the neurons in your head one by one (say, 1% per day, over 100 days) with tiny machines functionally equivalent to neurons, what would be the effect from your point of view? To the outside, you would remain the same.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#203

Post by Retric »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #197
Retric wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Down regulated withdrawal reflex is the opposite of avoidance behavior. It’s effectively increasing an organism’s tolerance for putting it’s limb in fire.

So, no what you’re describing does not mean learning to avoid stimulus. Learned avoidance behavior really requires a negative perception not just a neutral reflexive one.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#204

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #148
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" (…

>> My point was that reacting to noxious stimuli does not a priori require the conscious experience of pain (which includes a suffering component).

Like Retric says, this leaves open the question of how noxious stimuli (thanks) lead to avoidance behaviours, if they are not unpleasant.

My explanation is that the unpleasant sensation of pain makes the animal try and avoid the stimulus that causes the pain. What is the alternative?

Edit: also, why most animals but not insects? What is different about insects?

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#205

Post by cgriswald »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #198
cgriswald wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's like saying if a doorbell is made of atoms, we've made atoms a useless term. A doorbell either has consciousness or it does not have consciousness. (I might agree that if a doorbell has agency we might be making agency a useless term.)

Consciousness as we understand it is defined in an ineffable way. We have individual experiences which we call 'consciousness' which roughly coincides with our subjective experience. As it stands, the term is fairly useless. Where we use it, we generally make the assumption that it applies or doesn't apply; almost exclusively in a self-serving way.

If a doorbell is conscious and we can prove it, we will necessarily have a much greater understanding of consciousness and will have refined the term consciousness, making it more useful.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#206

Post by Dylan16807 »

deogeo wrote: post #123
toasterlovin wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is reasonable to entertain the hypothesis. It is unreasonable to assume that it is true.

I (and Occam's razor) would say the exact opposite - one should assume the effect will be the similar as for an older human, unless proven otherwise. Otherwise you're making the unproven assumption that an infant's mind responds to pain differently - why would you think that? And which other subgroups of humans could you make evidence-free assumptions that they are different from the default (however chosen) human?

> Otherwise you're making the unproven assumption that an infant's mind responds to pain differently - why would you think that?

Babies are very bad at remembering things. It might be that remembering isn't a big factor, but it's a pretty obvious basis for the idea.

> And which other subgroups of humans could you make evidence-free assumptions that they are different from the default (however chosen) human?

So you're not only going to associate everyone that disagrees with you with racism, you're going to say it's "evidence-free" that babies are different from the default human?

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#207

Post by saltcured »

andai wrote: post #202
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…

I'm wondering now.. if you could replace just an ant's brain with an artificial, neuron-for-neuron copy, such that the ant would continue on the outside to behave in an identical way in identical situations, what if you went one step further, and replaced the hardware neural network with a virtual one running on a general purpose, ant-brain sized CPU? Or what if you had one third of the original ant's brain intact, o…

This line of inquiry is generally referenced as the Ship of Theseus argument. The underlying philosophical question about identity holds even for inanimate objects whose parts are replaced.

But, this argument has also been extensively reapplied to brains, bodies, and minds as well. The Chinese Room thought experiment is one common reference for this, where a functional system is trained to translate Chinese texts but framed in a way to cast doubt on whether there is any understanding of Chinese.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#208

Post by Dylan16807 »

cgriswald wrote: post #205
Dylan16807 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's like saying if a doorbell is made of atoms, we've made atoms a useless term. A doorbell either has consciousness or it does not have consciousness. (I might agree that if a doorbell has agency we might be making agency a useless term.) Consciousness as we understand it is defined in an ineffable way. We have individual experiences which we call 'consciousness' which roughly coincides with our subjective experi…

"atoms" isn't a useless term, but describing real-world observable objects as "atomic" is useless.

In the same way we can talk about a spectrum and study of consciousness, but if the definition is to sense and respond to stimulus then the yes/no of "conscious" is always yes and therefore useless.

I'm not sure what you mean by "prove it". A doorbell very clearly responds to a stimulus. ...if you mean the definition of the word, no word's definition has ever been "proven". People assign definitions to words.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#209

Post by itpainsmetosay »

dlkf wrote: post #157
Der_Einzige wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 1. Most neural network architectures have fewer "neurons" than 10^5. Maybe the word you are looking for is "parameters" That's a fair point, I shouldn't have said "typically." But some of the larger models probably have that many linear filters. > 2. A neuron in the brain and a neuron in a neural network are totally different things. There are certainly disanalogies between biological neurons and neurons in a vanil…

I entirely disagree. The onus of proof is on you to explain how a highly idealized ANN has the same expressivity as a fly's wetware.

Just because neural networks are tech's Zeitgeist, doesn't make them the perfect explanation for all physical phenomena. Fifty years ago there were people equating thought and consciousness with artificial intelligence programs; and 200 years before it was the watchmaker's clockwork holding that regard.

Yes, as a man of science I subscribe to reductionism. Brains are made of neurons which are made of molecules which are made of atoms and so on, all governed by the laws of physics. But there's no reason to believe ANNs have the required intrinsic complexity to behave like ganglia.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#210

Post by scotty79 »

kranner wrote: post #86
scotty79 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was just explaining why focusing on moral aspect is the wrong reaction to this research. It's wrong because there are no moral insights from this research. They didn't obtain any new indications that insects feel pain.
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