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> 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 t

> 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 pain is too sinplistic.

deleted 7y ago
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YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
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 which we learn to avoid dangerous situations? Yes. So, no good reasons to assume animals don't feel pain. Animals don't need to not feel pain just because robots don't need to feel pain.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  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.
  - Retric 7y ago
    Cars with accident avoidance don’t learn to avoid things after experiencing them. For entities that do, pain seems like an obvious term.
  - derangedHorse 7y ago
    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.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
    I don't understand what you mean by "perceptual result". Animals avoid dangerous behaviours because they cause them pain. Robots, including self-driving cars avoid dangerous behaviours, because they are programmed to do so. Why is the existence of robots programmed to avoid dangerous behaviour indicative of whether animals feel pain?
    - hackinthebochs 7y ago
      >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 starts to move from a hot stove before I consciously feel the pain. Or, our programming of accident avoidance might in fact endow a conscious experience of pain for all we know.
      - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
        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 arise in an animal's environment would be immense. It seems much more economical to "program" behavious that avoid any painful stimulus (e.g. by setting some "pain threshold" and programming the animal to avoid anything that causes a sensation of pain above that threshold). This is particularly so for insects that have a limited number of neurons in which to store their stimulus-specific programs.
        hackinthebochs 7y ago
        >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.
  - pessimizer 7y ago
    I think it extends to saying that people who aren't me feel pain. another thing I have no evidence of. Being a black American, at points there has actually been a scientific consensus that I myself don't feel pain. Just because I react similarly to you when you feel pain doesn't mean that you're not anthropomorphizing.
jbotz 7y ago
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 logical to assume this mechanism is fundamentally equivalent in humans and insects. The behavior is the same, the wiring is the same, why not use the same word? For now, most robots's decision-making apparatus isn't anything like yours. So it really doesn't make much sense to use the same vocabulary. But that could change if we use neural-network computing in a way that appears to more directly simulate the functioning of living organisms. Maybe building an ant-robot that's really a functional copy of a biological ant isn't that far off, and in that case, sure, it might feel pain. I don't see anything simplistic about this.
- dlkf 7y ago
  > 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 YeGoblynQueenne has suggested our starting point should be the hypothesis that "that all animals can feel pain." This is certainly strong enough to explain the behaviour, but it's implausible given the size of an insect's brain. A fruit fly's brain has O(10^5) neurons; ours have O(10^10). Modern artificial neural network architectures typically fall somewhere in the middle. Now, certainly both human brains and insect brains have sophisticated architectural features that we haven't figured out yet. But given that robots, ANNs, etc can exhibit the same sorts of behaviours as insects given similar hardware constraints, I don't think we need to attribute pain (or any sort of mental life) to insects in order to explain their behaviour. It would be cool if a neuroscientist could weigh in on this.
  - Der_Einzige 7y ago
    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.
air7 7y ago
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.
- merpnderp 7y ago
  Robots don’t anguish over their pain.
  - pessimizer 7y ago
    You could program them to feel whatever you mean by "anguish" here, although it just sounds like a synonym to me.
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
>> 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 them from, say, jumping into the fire? Does that help clarify what I mean?
- dlkf 7y ago
  > 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 insects don't have feelings - it shows that an agent doesn't need to be conscious to exhibit these sorts of behaviours. Where I disagree is your claim that it has no bearing at all on the argument. It does bear on the argument, because it presents an alternative hypothesis that doesn't involve attributing mental life to insects. Very (very) roughly speaking the alternative is something like "an insect brain is a neural network, which, while not created by conscious designer, was chiseled by evolution to respond to stimuli in such a way that dangerous behaviours are avoided - in much the same way that an atari-playing artificial neural network trained by reinforcement learning avoids dangerous behaviours that will end the game - and just like the ANN playing atari, no consciousness is required - just the right model parameters. And similarly, no conscious designer ever explicitly told the neural network what to do. The programmer just set up the right incentives, in the same way that nature set up the right incentives for the insect." I can see the arguments on both sides, but I think the "insects are kinda like robots" hypothesis is more plausible because an insect brain has a more similar number of model parameters to a deep q learning network than it does to a human brain.
  - cgriswald 7y ago
    > 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.
nickpsecurity 7y ago
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.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

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 which we learn to avoid dangerous situations? Yes. So, no good reasons to assume animals don't feel pain. Animals don't need to not feel pain just because robots don't need to feel pain.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
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.
- Retric 7y ago
  Cars with accident avoidance don’t learn to avoid things after experiencing them. For entities that do, pain seems like an obvious term.
- derangedHorse 7y ago
  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.
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  I don't understand what you mean by "perceptual result". Animals avoid dangerous behaviours because they cause them pain. Robots, including self-driving cars avoid dangerous behaviours, because they are programmed to do so. Why is the existence of robots programmed to avoid dangerous behaviour indicative of whether animals feel pain?
  - hackinthebochs 7y ago
    >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 starts to move from a hot stove before I consciously feel the pain. Or, our programming of accident avoidance might in fact endow a conscious experience of pain for all we know.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
      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 arise in an animal's environment would be immense. It seems much more economical to "program" behavious that avoid any painful stimulus (e.g. by setting some "pain threshold" and programming the animal to avoid anything that causes a sensation of pain above that threshold). This is particularly so for insects that have a limited number of neurons in which to store their stimulus-specific programs.
      - hackinthebochs 7y ago
        >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.
- pessimizer 7y ago
  I think it extends to saying that people who aren't me feel pain. another thing I have no evidence of. Being a black American, at points there has actually been a scientific consensus that I myself don't feel pain. Just because I react similarly to you when you feel pain doesn't mean that you're not anthropomorphizing.

jbotz 7y ago

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 logical to assume this mechanism is fundamentally equivalent in humans and insects. The behavior is the same, the wiring is the same, why not use the same word? For now, most robots's decision-making apparatus isn't anything like yours. So it really doesn't make much sense to use the same vocabulary. But that could change if we use neural-network computing in a way that appears to more directly simulate the functioning of living organisms. Maybe building an ant-robot that's really a functional copy of a biological ant isn't that far off, and in that case, sure, it might feel pain. I don't see anything simplistic about this.

dlkf 7y ago
> 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 YeGoblynQueenne has suggested our starting point should be the hypothesis that "that all animals can feel pain." This is certainly strong enough to explain the behaviour, but it's implausible given the size of an insect's brain. A fruit fly's brain has O(10^5) neurons; ours have O(10^10). Modern artificial neural network architectures typically fall somewhere in the middle. Now, certainly both human brains and insect brains have sophisticated architectural features that we haven't figured out yet. But given that robots, ANNs, etc can exhibit the same sorts of behaviours as insects given similar hardware constraints, I don't think we need to attribute pain (or any sort of mental life) to insects in order to explain their behaviour. It would be cool if a neuroscientist could weigh in on this.
- Der_Einzige 7y ago
  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.

air7 7y ago

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.

merpnderp 7y ago
Robots don’t anguish over their pain.
- pessimizer 7y ago
  You could program them to feel whatever you mean by "anguish" here, although it just sounds like a synonym to me.

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

>> 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 them from, say, jumping into the fire? Does that help clarify what I mean?

dlkf 7y ago
> 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 insects don't have feelings - it shows that an agent doesn't need to be conscious to exhibit these sorts of behaviours. Where I disagree is your claim that it has no bearing at all on the argument. It does bear on the argument, because it presents an alternative hypothesis that doesn't involve attributing mental life to insects. Very (very) roughly speaking the alternative is something like "an insect brain is a neural network, which, while not created by conscious designer, was chiseled by evolution to respond to stimuli in such a way that dangerous behaviours are avoided - in much the same way that an atari-playing artificial neural network trained by reinforcement learning avoids dangerous behaviours that will end the game - and just like the ANN playing atari, no consciousness is required - just the right model parameters. And similarly, no conscious designer ever explicitly told the neural network what to do. The programmer just set up the right incentives, in the same way that nature set up the right incentives for the insect." I can see the arguments on both sides, but I think the "insects are kinda like robots" hypothesis is more plausible because an insect brain has a more similar number of model parameters to a deep q learning network than it does to a human brain.
- cgriswald 7y ago
  > 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.

nickpsecurity 7y ago

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.