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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

#91

Post by air7 »

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…

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 above statement imo: 1. You have knowledge of the experience of pain within yourself. You then extrapolate that other people probably have the same internal experiences because they look like you and their external behavior matches your external behavior. But of course, that is just a thought and cannot be proven. Maybe some people feel pain differently to you or not at all (like the idea of "is my blue the same as your blue")

2. The robot was programmed but the nervous system wasn't. Therefor one might say, we know the robot doesn't feel anything but at least I know that I do. If you don't believe in a divine element of being, then a brain is itself merely a computer in the broad sense of being 100% governed by the same laws of physics as a CPU (and everything else). So any experience or behavioral response in you or anybody/thing else has a physical casual link to the stimuli (with a quantum RNG in the mix).

Therefor I'd say that rationally, every feeling of pain, is equally valid, even if it's a program. But we have decided, for emotional and practical reasons, to give more validity to the pain of some creatures than others on an almost continuous scale.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#92

Post by kieukkieuk »

easytiger wrote: post #66
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/... )

What about every motor vehicle, horse and cart journey ever taken killing insects is that inhumane? Those have killed trillions of insects.

Probably still orders of magnitude less than the number that would be killed in insectivorous agriculture.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#93

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

rv-de wrote: post #81
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…

> 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?

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#94

Post by maurimo »

whatshisface wrote: post #21

Does my computer feel pain when I decrement %eax?

Isn't the most painful instruction a conditional jump? Especially when the CPU had preloaded the following instructions and realizes it has to abruptly branch somewhere else. If there is a mechanism of pain in the CPU it should be triggered by this unpredicted waste of power and time.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#96

Post by losvedir »

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 dunno, do trees feel pain? They react to stimuli. Do you feel pain when you're unconscious? People react to stimuli when they're asleep, in a coma, braindead...

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#97

Post by derangedHorse »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #82
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #79

Earlier 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.

What people on this thread are trying to say is that things like cars and robots are created and seemingly understood by us humans. We took inanimate objects and pieced them together using principals we've learned from observation of these inanimate objects.

Insects on the other hand are what we've scientifically classified as biological things. Creatures that share some of the same biological qualities we have. Unfortunately, humans don't understand all parts of their own biology to even recognize how similar another living thing is.

What I'm saying is that if pain is a perceptual result, we have no way of saying insects cannot perceive it the same way we do. All we know is that they have brains, like most other biological creatures, and that the base assumption should be that they do have pain.

Take any other creature like a dog. Why would a dog feel pain? Their brain's may be more complex than something like an ant, but who's to say the rise in brain complexity has brought about the emergence of pain? Humans know too little about the world but a lot of people insist on taking the opinion most convenient to them. If they don't have to think about the fact that they inflict pain on insects, they can keep killing them in a variety of ways without any moral apprehension in the slightest.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#98

Post by bsanr2 »

xvector wrote: post #95
jacobush wrote: post #90

I didn't realise the impact until I remembered how common circumcision is in the US.

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 reduction in the risk for serious diseases in circumcised men; or else, that I have requested a circumcision be performed in observation of a deep and abiding religious or cultural belief which I reasonably believe my son will share when he would have been of age to consent himself."

Parents should have to sign a statement like this before it's performed. It should no longer be the default, and parents should understand that they don't have to be railroaded into the decision.

Re: Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

#100

Post by jacobush »

bsanr2 wrote: post #98
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.

"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…

Hm, what is unreasonable about this comment?
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