ive been reserching the possibility of insects being able to feel pain but really it is very difficult, are there any scientists or biologists or someone here who could point me in the direction of some information on how pain is felt because i feel i need a basic understanding in that area to really progress at this point.

some things people have said when ive emailed them:

"You could try searching on google. But most people won't answer this question
because you can't get into an insect's head to determine whether they are feeling
pain. However, their nervous systems are similar to ours, and many of the
standard insecticides affect the nervous system. If you treat an insect or human
with a chemical insecticide like parathion, the nerve impulses to the muscles
stop - and both are killed - it's something like dying from cyanide - which can
be painful for humans. But as I said initially, we just can say whether insects feel
pain in the same way we do.


Hope this helps."


another conversation:

Hello,

We here at the Lorquin Entomological Society do not promote the extermination of insects and spiders. We promote the study of natural methods to control and rid common household pests. You can contact a local extermination company for their insight about pesticide options.

Insects, like other animals, do have sensory capabilities to protect themselves. It is part of their evolutionary biology. Humans feel pain as an unpleasant sensation to warn the rest of the body of potential damage. Humans experience pain most commonly on the surface of the skin. Insects have an exoskeleton so the distress they experience cannot be equated. Studies have shown that insects to exhibit distress that is comparable to the pain humans feel but there is no simple answer.

If you have anymore questions feel free to ask and I will direct you to someone that can provide a more detailed response on this topic. "


basically what i seem to be finding is that no one knows because we cant talk to insects, but when people say no one knows the only reason we know other humans feel pain is that they say so and for animals that they writhe and move away from the source of pain and cry out and things like that and that they learn not to return to the source of pain which suggests very strongly to me that its not a reflex becuase they learned.

surely if we could find the point at which the mutation occoured that made it possible for things to feel pain we could say that everything that evolved from that can feel pain and the things before cannot, no?

thanks

illustration of part of what i was trying to say

I completely agree with your second post, Ruairi. I don't know which animals can suffer. The standard answer seems to be invertebrates and possibly some invertebrates.
You might find help here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-animal/#currsci,
and you might want to seek further direction from Alan Dawrst from this very forum.
Any public utilitarian ought to have something to say about this issue, so you'd be well within your rights contacting anyone from Peter Singer to Toby Ord to Torbjörn Tännsjö to Julian Savulescu. Whether you can actually get them to read your email is another question.

Thanks for the great detective work, Ruairi! And like RyanCarey, I completely agree with your evolution point.

As for reading on the subject, you've likely come across my "Can Insects Feel Pain?." One of the best citations within that piece is Section 2.1 - 2.4, pages 15-36 (PDF pages 62-84), of “Aspects of the biology and welfare of animals used for experimental and other scientific purposes,” a lengthy document summarized here. RyanCarey's suggested article is great as well, and Google has plenty more resources. Google Scholar is excellent; there are lots of very readable academic papers on animal-welfare measurement. Searches like "Can fish feel pain?" may bring up helpful discussions.

I still say that pain is punishment in the classical conditioning sense. If an insect can learn, it can feel pain.

I don't believe that they feel much pain on the basis that tiny pieces of the human brain would be equally sentient. Also, doomsday reasoning. If animals are more sentient, it's unlikely to be a human.

DanielLC wrote:I still say that pain is punishment in the classical conditioning sense. If an insect can learn, it can feel pain.

I don't believe that they feel much pain on the basis that tiny pieces of the human brain would be equally sentient. Also, doomsday reasoning. If animals are more sentient, it's unlikely to be a human.

*squeals*! your first sentence is really awesome cause ive been trying to put that in a really bite sized way thanks

i need to research on your second point, if you could link me to stuff that would be great thanks, but even if suffering is related to brain size the problem is still massive and totally neglected


@alan: yea i read the summary in that, i wanna read those studies about the complex learning cause really i think if they can learn they must be able to suffer. cool thanks

still though i hear about things like some insects still eating while being eaten, can anyone explain this?

thanks everyone !

dudes i frickin love this place

DanielLC wrote:I don't believe that they feel much pain on the basis that tiny pieces of the human brain would be equally sentient. Also, doomsday reasoning. If animals are more sentient, it's unlikely to be a human.

i just finished the felicifia thread on sentience and brain size and im very unconvinced that insects suffer less than humans, however if they do theres still an absoluttely enormous number of them and the issue is recieving basically no attention i can see in popular charitable giving.

sorry i dont understand your second point "Also, doomsday reasoning. If animals are more sentient, it's unlikely to be a human."

Ruairi wrote:still though i hear about things like some insects still eating while being eaten, can anyone explain this?

Yeah, that is odd, and it's one of the best arguments I've heard against insect suffering. However, it's quite possible that insects just aren't sensitive to that particular kind of bodily damage, although they are sensitive to others. Here's from Jennifer A. Mather's “Animal Suffering: An Invertebrate Perspective”:

Insects, for instance, can walk normally with a couple broken-off legs and survive with apparent unconcern as a parasite is eating them up inside, when presumably we would be in excruciating pain. Does that mean they cannot feel pain? I asked a friend who works with ants what she thought about this apparent inability to feel the pain we do. She said that she spilled a drop of acetone on an ant by accident one day and that it had recoiled and tried to wipe the substance off its abdomen. Maybe it is still pain, just responding to different stimuli. Alternately, maybe it is just an automatic grooming reaction. Because nuclear radiation can kill us without our feeling a thing, humans too do not always respond with pain to possible tissue destruction.

Alan Dawrst wrote:Yeah, that is odd, and it's one of the best arguments I've heard against insect suffering. However, it's quite possible that insects just aren't sensitive to that particular kind of bodily damage, although they are sensitive to others.

exactly!:) the radiation argument is excellent

i emailed Torbjorn and i think you guys will find his response very interesting, to be honest i expected him to have more to say on the issue.

heya, i was wondering what you think about the possibility that insects suffer terribly from the use of pesticides?
many thanks,

ruairí

-----------

Hi,
My guess is that it takes a cortex to feel pain or to suffer, so I don't think they suffer.

Cheers,

Torbjorn

------------

but they are able to learn to avoid things which cause them damage, how would they learn without feeling pain?

------------

Hi,
I think it is possible to adapt to an environment and to "avoid" things even if you have no experience. Does that mean that you "learn"? It depends on how we use words. Perhaps learning implies experiencing but in that case I would guess that they do not learn. They adapt through other mechanisms than through learning.

Cheers,
Torbjorn

-----------

ok awesome thanks, very interesting:) what kind of other adaptive mechanisms do you mean?

---------------

I'm no expert on insects but even computer programs can "learn" from
experience.

cheers,

Torbjorn

-------end--------

Hi Ruairi,

I agree with Torbjorn that learning isn't proof of being able to feel pain. As he says, computers can also learn. And it's also true that conscious experience isn't necessary for intelligent behavior; the phenomenon of blindsight is a good illustration.

As I often say, the criterion that I think decides whether an organism deserves ethical consideration is whether it has self-reflective awareness of the "goodness" and "badness" of its own emotional states in a way that's "conscious," whatever that means exactly. (We have an intuitive sense of the concept, so we just need to pin down its "neural correlates," as they say, and understand the algorithms behind it.)

This is why I'm still not sure whether insects do suffer. However, insects are much closer to us than computers, and they exhibit many behaviors that look an awful lot like our own. See, e.g., this recent Wired article, "Honeybees Might Have Emotions." Incidentally, the last two paragraphs seem relevant to our other discussions:

In future studies, Bateson hopes to elicit from honeybees other forms of apparent emotion, such as happiness. She also wonders about the mental effects of chemicals and disease.

“It would be interesting to know if pesticides were altering their cognition, creating states similar to depression,” she said.

As he says, computers can also learn.

What exactly are you referring to? Computers can learn things by being told, but this has nothing to do with classical conditioning, and thus doesn't generate pleasure or pain. They can be programed to do classical conditioning, such is in the game Creatures, but in this case the issue is that we can't be sure they aren't generating pain. There are a lot of people who oppose torturing norns in Creatures on the basis that they actually can feel pain.

It seems quite unlikely that it's impossible to program a computer to feel pain just because of its substrate, so the only question to tell when the computer starts feeling pain is what exactly it takes, which brings us back to the original question. It's no easier to tell if a given program feels pain than it is to tell if an insect does.

DanielLC wrote:What exactly are you referring to?

Yes, I was referring to things like reinforcement learning (aka operant conditioning?), perhaps like the Creatures example.

DanielLC wrote:but in this case the issue is that we can't be sure they aren't generating pain.

I would guess that the algorithms aren't sufficiently close to what I think of as "conscious" mental processes that I wouldn't care about them. However, I would like to learn more about how they work! (So thanks for the reference.)

DanielLC wrote:It seems quite unlikely that it's impossible to program a computer to feel pain just because of its substrate

Agree.

DanielLC wrote:so the only question to tell when the computer starts feeling pain is what exactly it takes, which brings us back to the original question. It's no easier to tell if a given program feels pain than it is to tell if an insect does.

Well, we can read the computer's source code, so we know exactly what algorithm it's using. That helps a lot in deciding whether we care about something. If there's no part of the algorithm that corresponds to the self-reflective process that we mean when we say "consciousness," then I wouldn't care about it. Of course, there's a lot of work yet to be done to figure out what algorithm it is in animals that brings about this consciousness. But I would guess the algorithm is hard to write, so I doubt humans have yet written programs that instantiate it.

Sorry for the hand-waviness. To some extent, "consciousness" is like "pornography" -- you know it when you see it. That said, our sentiments about exactly what processes count as conscious can be changed by intuition pumps.

If there's no part of the algorithm that corresponds to the self-reflective process that we mean when we say "consciousness," then I wouldn't care about it.

People are capable of self-reflection, but they aren't constantly doing it. Am I not conscious when I'm not thinking about my consciousness?

the phenomenon of blindsight is a good illustration.

i dunno exactly what you mean here, those people arnt conscious visually but there are other ways of determining things sub-consciously; by other peoples reactions, etc. i feel im really missing your point sorry, i dont see how you relate this to insect suffering

As I often say, the criterion that I think decides whether an organism deserves ethical consideration is whether it has self-reflective awareness of the "goodness" and "badness" of its own emotional states in a way that's "conscious," whatever that means exactly.

if i understannd you correctly i probably disagree

What exactly are you referring to? Computers can learn things by being told, but this has nothing to do with classical conditioning, and thus doesn't generate pleasure or pain. They can be programed to do classical conditioning, such is in the game Creatures, but in this case the issue is that we can't be sure they aren't generating pain. There are a lot of people who oppose torturing norns in Creatures on the basis that they actually can feel pain.

i dont know this game or anything about it but surely the things in this game that appear to be conscious have been programmed to "avoid everything that causes tissue damage" or something simialr, this is the same as something having a reflex to "avoid everything that causes tissue damage". this does not show learning. or is the game very different from what im describing?

i dont know this game or anything about it but surely the things in this game that appear to be conscious have been programmed to "avoid everything that causes tissue damage" or something simialr

They have been programmed to avoid things that cause damage, but they don't necessarily know what they are. They generally have instincts telling them not to eat poisonous mushrooms and such, but they don't just know by instinct, and they can be genetically engineered to not have them. They certainly don't know what might provoke you to slap them. They have to learn.

As I often say, the criterion that I think decides whether an organism deserves ethical consideration is whether it has self-reflective awareness of the "goodness" and "badness" of its own emotional states in a way that's "conscious," whatever that means exactly.

sorry do you mean that if an organisms likes and dislikes certain things, in other words has preferences, then you care about it? i thyink i probably agree with that, sorry i didnt understand what you meant.

@daniel: oh o.O thats pretty cool

DanielLC wrote:People are capable of self-reflection, but they aren't constantly doing it. Am I not conscious when I'm not thinking about my consciousness?

You are conscious when you're not explicitly thinking about your consciousness. Even in those moments, you're still "aware" of your emotions.

However, to give negative examples: You're not conscious under general anaesthesia, nor are you conscious of nociception in your intestine.

Ruairi wrote:i dunno exactly what you mean here, those people arnt conscious visually but there are other ways of determining things sub-consciously; by other peoples reactions, etc. i feel im really missing your point sorry, i dont see how you relate this to insect suffering

Replace "sight" with "pain". People are often conscious of their pain, and when they are, that's bad. However, it's possible for organisms to respond intelligently to stimuli without being conscious that they're doing it. In such a way, it's possible to respond to painful stimuli without being aware of it and hence without consciously suffering.

Ruairi wrote:sorry do you mean that if an organisms likes and dislikes certain things, in other words has preferences, then you care about it? i thyink i probably agree with that, sorry i didnt understand what you meant.

A good way to illustrate my point is this: I don't care about the bodily responses to injurious stimuli that occur when a person is under general anaesthesia.

You are conscious when you're not explicitly thinking about your consciousness. Even in those moments, you're still "aware" of your emotions.

In what sense? Creatures constantly do calculations involving their drives and such. They're certainly processing their emotions.

However, to give negative examples: You're not conscious under general anaesthesia, nor are you conscious of nociception in your intestine.

How do you know? I certainly don't remember being conscious under anaesthesia, but that's a statement of my memory now, not my consciousness then. I am not conscious of nociception in my intestine, but I'm also not conscious of your thought processes. It could be part of a conscious experience. It's just not part of mine.

Alan Dawrst wrote:

Ruairi wrote:i dunno exactly what you mean here, those people arnt conscious visually but there are other ways of determining things sub-consciously; by other peoples reactions, etc. i feel im really missing your point sorry, i dont see how you relate this to insect suffering

Replace "sight" with "pain". People are often conscious of their pain, and when they are, that's bad. However, it's possible for organisms to respond intelligently to stimuli without being conscious that they're doing it. In such a way, it's possible to respond to painful stimuli without being aware of it and hence without consciously suffering.

ok cool but i suspect eprhaps the blindsight people determine the colour of things, etc, by other people (who have vision) reactions to the object, perhaps this is very subtle and sub conscious and maybe it appears they are determining it by themselves but in reality it seems more likely to me they would determine it from someone elses reactions who can see it no? or am i still missing the point :s ?

as regards what daniel is saying is there anyone doing research into what can suffer? it seems very very utilitarian, one could argue without this knowledge its not really possible to make any utilitarian decisions. if no one is doing this research what would you suggest i look into to get more educated on the subjects involved? nuero science? evolutionary biology? etc

thanks

Ruairi, patients with blindsight aren't just taking cues from people around them. It's science, as you can see explained with my favourite neurologist, Ramachandran, here. Being conscious of knowing that something has moved is different from seeing something that has moved.

My philosophical intuition is that the movement of information should all be conscious. But for some reason, the passage of information along the new pathway (see the video for explanation) is conscious, but the passage of information along the old pathway is unconscious. So the story of consciousness has become more complicated. We need to explain why the passage of information through the old pathway is unconscious.

There is a broader question of consciousness vs reflexes. Like our old pathway, the nervous system that wraps around our gut, the enteric nervous system, seems not to communicate much with our conscious selves at all. It seems like everything it does is just an unconscious reflex. Like when I touch the tendon below my knee and I straighten it, without thinking or deciding to do so. If a creature was made up of just 'old pathways', then from a utilitarian point of view, they would not be morally important. Animals that have pathways that pathways that resemble our new one are animals that matter.

I think there's also the possibility that consciousness is structured in different layers. Like there's a top layer consciousness which is our regular consciousness, but subsystems of our mind could have their own consciousness that doesn't communicate with the top level consciousness directly. What if certain "old pathways" in our mind are conscious after all, but not for "us"? Then there's also the question whether these partial consciousnesses can experience pain or pleasure.

Now I don't think that this is terribly likely, but I don't know how such a claim could be disproved.

I think consciousness isn't discrete. That is, something isn't either conscious or not conscious; it can be any amount of conscious. As such, I'd consider something having exactly zero consciousness to be virtually impossible. The only question is how conscious our subconscious minds are.

But Daniel, forget consciousness. Consider matter. I would consider that matter is continuous. But is that really a proper place for intuitions? Of course not. Whether matter is forever divisible is disproved by discovering a really small particle and trying really hard to divide it. It's a matter for science. Similarly, just because you and I think that consciousness ought to be continuous, doesn't make it true!

Do you agree or disagree?

It's not necessarily true. I just find it more likely.

I don't mean discrete as in that there are separate conscious things, I mean discrete as in something either is conscious or it isn't.

as soon as i replaced the word "insect" with "invertebrate" google started doing really cool things especially googling stuff like "nuerobiology of pain"

i havnt read any of these in depth at all yet but i plan to tomorrow morning but they look cool

http://www.vkm.no/dav/413af9502e.pdf

http://www.parl.gc.ca/Content/SEN/Commi ... elly-e.htm

http://www.sciencechatforum.com/viewtop ... 37&t=15343

RyanCarey wrote:If a creature was made up of just 'old pathways', then from a utilitarian point of view, they would not be morally important. Animals that have pathways that pathways that resemble our new one are animals that matter.

Exactly.

DanielLC wrote:How do you know? I certainly don't remember being conscious under anaesthesia, but that's a statement of my memory now, not my consciousness then.

Yes, you're right. I would guess that people who work with anaesthesia would have studied this? For example, they could check whether memory-formation processes are inhibited by anaesthesia. However, I'm ignorant of the research.

DanielLC wrote:I am not conscious of nociception in my intestine, but I'm also not conscious of your thought processes. It could be part of a conscious experience. It's just not part of mine.

I suppose it's possible. Maybe guts all over the world are suffering in silence, with no way to bring an end to the pain because they have no control over the executive functions of their host organisms. But, along with Mike, I'm not too concerned; I find it unlikely I'll decide to care about gut nociception, but there are lots of kinds of suffering that trouble me greatly.

Ruairi wrote:i havnt read any of these in depth at all yet but i plan to tomorrow morning but they look cool

Awesome! Those are some of the more skeptical writings on the subject, but definitely worth reading.

sorry i dunno if this paper ( http://dels-old.nas.edu/ilar_n/ilarjour ... Elwood.pdf ) has been posted already but what hes saying is very interesting, this bit is about crabs priorities:

"When shocks of a single intensity were applied, at
a level that was hoped would not cause evacuation, some
crabs evacuated and were more likely to do so from a less
preferred shell species (Elwood and Appel 2009). Similarly,
when the shocks increased in intensity, crabs evacuated the
shell at a lower shock intensity if they were in a less preferred
shell species (Appel and Elwood 2009b). Thus, the
animals’ response to the shock was determined in part by
their normal preference for particular species of shell. Further,
they were much less likely to evacuate after being
shocked when the odor of a predator was present, suggesting
a tradeoff between shock avoidance and predator avoidance
(Wilson and Elwood, unpublished observations). These responses
cannot be a refl ex response as they required information
from sources other than the noxious stimulus to have
an effect on the response."

the guy who wrote the paper is in queens university belfast too! i could go there if i wanted

edit: i dont suppose norns can do the kinda stuff hes talking about?

Great paper, Ruairi. I'm adding that one to my to-read list!

I wrote a review of one of Elwood's previous papers on pain in prawn for my cognitive-science class 2.5 years ago.

i dont suppose norns can do the kinda stuff hes talking about?

They have drives. They will constantly weigh them against each other to see if, for example, they'd rather eat or sleep. I don't know that much about them, but I imagine that they'd be more likely to stop what they're doing when slapped if they don't care that much about it in the first place.

DanielLC wrote:They have drives.

Thanks, Daniel! Here's a quote from that link:

If a creature has no drives, it does not feel the need to do anything - this is why gengineering your creatures to remove their need for food or making them super-resistant to disease can result in a very boring game!

Hmm, doesn't bode optimistically for the motivations of people who might run sentient simulations (if norns are not such already).

The Buddhists would not be pleased.

What's bad about that? Norns having no drives doesn't just mean they don't suffer. They also don't have happiness. I find this page much more ominous.

DanielLC wrote:What's bad about that? Norns having no drives doesn't just mean they don't suffer.

Norns might still be able to suffer without having drives? But certainly having unfulfilled drives seems like one way to make them suffer.

DanielLC wrote:They also don't have happiness.

Could they be made happy without drives? For instance, could they experience liking without wanting?

DanielLC wrote:I find this page much more ominous.

For instance, could they experience liking without wanting?

I don't think that would work. If you don't want something, than in what sense do you like it?

DanielLC wrote:If you don't want something, than in what sense do you like it?

Well, it seems as though liking is implemented by different brain circuits than wanting. So we'd run the liking circuits only. That's basically how I envision utilitronium: Efficient liking circuits running over and over, in the absence of desire. (Perhaps the Buddhist nirvana is similar?)

How do you tell the difference between someone who likes something and someone who doesn't?

I still wonder though. Would it be possible to make something fun, but anti-addictive, so that you end up being neutral about it?

DanielLC wrote:How do you tell the difference between someone who likes something and someone who doesn't?

Start with self-reports. See what brain processes are invoked during moments of reported liking. Then look for similar brain processes in animals that can't talk to us. Then, to create utilitronium, build efficient computational systems as close to that as possible.

Hopefully the "liking" process looks very different from the "disliking" process. If not, we'd need to be really careful, and maybe it would be safest not to try building them at all.

DanielLC wrote:Would it be possible to make something fun, but anti-addictive

Sure. In theory, you could shut down the wanting system to prevent addiction but leave the liking system. I'm not sure if it could be done in practice (dopamine antagonists??) in current minds or if you'd have to engineer the minds to be more resilient to this type of manipulation.

At least, we know of several instances in which people experience wanting without liking -- e.g., certain addictions.

See what brain processes are invoked during moments of reported liking.

This suggests a thought experiment. What causes people to report liking?

... and maybe it would be safest not to try building them at all.

That would require them being so similar that we're actually more likely to be wrong than right. This is not likely.

In theory, you could shut down the wanting system to prevent addiction but leave the liking system.

I meant turn on the reverse of addiction. It wouldn't be as obvious as addiction, since you wouldn't do anti-addictive stuff, so it's not surprising that such a thing isn't well-known. If it exists, it's just a question of tuning it right to perfectly cancel out the wanting.

DanielLC wrote:That would require them being so similar that we're actually more likely to be wrong than right.

Oh, I was speaking from my own negative-utilitarian-leaning perspective, according to which a few disliking computations are as bad as lots of liking computations are good. I would rather not risk it unless we're 99.99...% sure we're not creating disliking computations.

DanielLC wrote:I meant turn on the reverse of addiction.

Maybe learned avoidance? Usually that's accompanied by intense disliking, but yeah, it probably is possible for an organism to avoid something without disliking that thing.