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Insects are more sensitive than they seem
- spaetzleesser 5y agoI hope more research along these lines will come so people stop thinking that humans are fundamentally different and superior from animals.
- brnt 5y agoInteresting to think how we got so full of ourselves that we ever thought we were.
- assbuttbuttass 5y agoThis idea comes from Mechanical Philosophy, and is represented in the writings of Descartes. According to his dualist view of the world, the soul and body are opposed, but only humans have a soul. He wanted to show that animals are just automata, and believed that they are incapable of feeling pain.
- spaetzleesser 5y agoI think the Bible also made a big contribution to that thinking by telling humans to rule over the world.
- klipt 5y agoProbably just evolution. Contemplating the morality of eating antelope doesn't help the lion survive. Assuming that antelope are for eating does.
- User23 5y agoI too eagerly await the spider symphony that shows up Mozart’s “Jupiter.” Obviously I’m not going to be unfair to the bugs and expect Bach or Schiller tier work.
- throwanem 5y agoWhy would you expect even to recognize, much less be able to understand, the art of a spider? What arrogance gives you to imagine that our terms can suffice to capture their experience, or vice versa? I can't speak to spider art, but I can somewhat to spider smarts. We hosted an orb weaver on our porch this year, and she found the best place to build her web for prey capture was right across the porch steps. Unfortunately, this also led to importunate apes occasionally blundering face-first into, and thus disarranging, her careful work - even when you're trying not to break anything, you can't help but snap a thread or two in disentangling yourself. So, after a couple nights studying the problem, she started building her webs shorter but wider and higher up, maintaining roughly the same capture area but keeping the structure a good couple inches above human head height. (Or my and my boyfriend's height, anyway, we being both about 5'10".) She kept that up the rest of the season, and we got along just fine - I've had human houseguests who were less courteous and less skilled at finding a modus vivendi.
- mitchdoogle 5y agoThis comment is quite insulting to humans. You know, it is possible to be critical without self-loathing.
- mdp2021 5y ago...Humans clearly show large areas of superiority. Your use of 'fundamentally' is improperly (sub)defined. You do not clearly show to be expressing out of reason, as opposed to other faculties involving "preference".
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- tomrod 5y agoFascinating! I never considered insects could have emotion.
- sinbadTheMad 5y agoNeed to mention the book "Children of Time" in this thread for finding empathy for spiders
- tomrod 5y agoLoved the book. But there, the uplift was through artificial means. This basically suggests that brain == emotional capacity
- quocanh 5y agoI 100% can believe this. Especially the insects that form colonies are capable of some sort of rudimentary communication based on body language, can form bonds, can be annoyed instead of just threatened, and can differentiate humans from objects. This from my experience rehabilitating (raising?) a hornet to flight.
- jhncls 5y agoThis[0,1] article suggests ants communicate by vomiting chemicals into each other's mouths. [0] https://www.livescience.com/ants-vomit-to-form-social-bonds https://www.livescience.com/ants-vomit-to-form-social-bonds [1] https://elifesciences.org/articles/20375.pdf https://elifesciences.org/articles/20375.pdf
- echelon 5y ago> This from my experience rehabilitating (raising?) a hornet to flight. This begs for further elaboration.
- drclau 5y ago> Especially the insects that form colonies are capable of some sort of rudimentary communication based on body language Honey bees definitely do it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance
- throwanem 5y ago> This from my experience rehabilitating (raising?) a hornet to flight I would dearly love to hear more about this!
- pleb_nz 5y agoInterested in hearing more of the hornet story. Could you elaborate?
- swayvil 5y agoWoah! On the surface they seem so cool and collected. I'd never have guessed that a volcano of passion dwelt within the insectile breast. It's like that spider vegetarian philosopher from Cenotaph Road.
- friedman23 5y ago> I'd never have guessed that a volcano of passion dwelt within the insectile breast. There likely isn't. Despite the article trying to sell the idea that cockroaches are like your pet dog, all their claims are qualified.
- swayvil 5y ago>There likely isn't. That's a pretty large statement about the inner life of bugs. How many legs have you got?
- mitchdoogle 5y agoThe article anthropomorphizes bugs even though the studies themselves warn against it. They describe the insects' experiences as emotional primitives
- brohoolio 5y agoIt's one of the underlying threads of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. Both the Anime and Manga are fantastic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nausicaä_of_the_Valley_of_the_Wind_(manga) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nausicaä_of_the_Valley_of_the_...
- bolangi 5y agoEven single-cell organisms have neurotransmitters, the "molecules of emotion"
- tsimionescu 5y agoSo do our stomachs and intestines. Does that mean our intestines can become sad?
- throwanem 5y agoArguably yes. Pop sci but not terrible: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/the-brain-gut-connection%3famp=true https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/...
- mdp2021 5y agoMany people would suppose so, yes. Organisms of multiagent systems where agents can cry for distress. (Sorry: this is irregardless of any context of biochemistry and «neurotransmitters», which some would just call a concretion, an implementational side.)
- SubiculumCode 5y agoOne of the biggest obstacles in this kind of research is 1) the human tendency to anthropomorphize in our explanations, 2) to over interpret findings from a behavioral task that is based on analogies, but can be solved in multiple ways. The latter is very dangerous in the brain sciences:For example, inhibition can happen in a microcircuit of neurons to reduce neuron firing, or inhibition can be thought of as the cognitive capacity to refrain from a behavior you are predisposed to do using cognitive control. These are not the same things.
- brnt 5y agoOn the other hand, primatologist Frans de Waal argued that many behaviorologists go too much out of their way to _not_ antropomorphize and come up with all manner of (contrived) mechanical explanations.
- SubiculumCode 5y agoPrimatology definitely can make a case that human to non-human-primate analogies have a certain inherent validity!
- goda90 5y agoI was reading Reddit comments the other day from people who keep pet jumping spiders. They report them to have personalities and a degree of intelligence.
- fumar 5y agoIf you find that interesting, then I recommend the book Children of Time. It is a sci fi novel spanning the demise of humans and the rise of another species.
- User23 5y agoSounds like a cousin of the pathetic fallacy. Human beings are very good at anthropomorphism.
- colordrops 5y agoWhy is it any less plausible for them to have personalities than to not have personalities? Patronizing dismissals such as yours without any reasoning and facts are extremely frustrating.
- goatlover 5y agoBecause they we have a hundred billion neurons and they have a few thousand. Also, because humans are known to anthropomorphize an awful lot. One common example is thinking that dogs feel guilty when you scold them for naughty behavior. Instead, they are reacting to the scolding.
- mdp2021 5y agoBoth reasons weigh very little. The first one makes a jump from quantity to quality. But, counting to three and counting to whatever is not a qualitative difference. A definition of "personality" is required to define where it starts, and it is easy to conceive interpretations which allow for broad labelling. The second one is just a caveat. As John had to tell his wife as he surprised her in bed with Frank, and she went "Yes but you know you are jealous and a bit paranoid".
- bamurphymac1 5y agoWithout speaking to any greater ethical obligation to “higher” animals: it feels very good to foster a conscious pattern of not harming bugs.
- melony 5y agoBut they are delicious! I can't help eating them.
- mdp2021 5y agoConsider that they may have some self-restraint module you are unaware of, and you should start letting them bite you. Edit: I do not see how anyone can find this (contentful) statement disagreeable, which I see as purely logical conclusion (in form of a joke) after a few really simple assumptions. I am starting to assume disagreement comes from masochist insects which are part of the poster's collection, as they probably cannot type.
- sweetheart 5y agoWe _should_ speak to the greater ethical obligations: animals feel a lot, including things like pain, discomfort, suffering, fear, anxiety, etc. Some more than others, certainly. This means that things we unnecessarily do to them which cause these feelings aren’t okay. And since we don’t need to eat any animals to be happy and healthy, raising and killing them in any capacity falls under “unnecessary suffering”. Don’t eat things that feel. You don’t need to and they don’t want to be consumed.
- tempestn 5y agoDon't treat farm animals cruelly I'm fully on board with. But if you don't eat animals at all, farm animals won't exist in the first place. The choice is between the animal having a life that ends as food, or no life. If the life is a miserable factory farm one, I can see how no life would be superior, but I don't believe that's always the case.
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- tormeh 5y agoThese articles are getting tiresome. Anything thinking must have feelings to motivate their thoughts, otherwise the brain is useless. The basic assumption should be that anything with a brain has feelings.
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- mdp2021 5y agoIn other words: the nervous system is there for action, hence specifically to take decisions, and decisions imply a notion of the peri-optimal and counteroptimal. Your jump to "feelings" is not that short; but one could note that, as «brain» is above better replaced by "nervous system", the one directly apparent thing of the nervous system is the peripheral side of sensation (feeling - that of "action" being the clearly functional one).
- uap 5y agoEmotions are a useful learning signal, that abstracts a range of sense experiences into a coherent or gestalt impression, so this is not surprising. But it's nice to see people care about insects, or at least provide a basis for doing so. This synthesis, the emotional synthesis of experience, then aids decisions. And is a key component probably of the biological OODA learning loop. Emotions may be necessary for AGI. Or at least help us get there.
- freeflight 5y agoWhen I was younger I had a couple of terantulas as pets, tho they were different species, and a lot of their behavior is usually ascribed to that, so I never could make any direct comparisons. But at the conventions were breeders would sell them, and let people handle them for photos and such, they'd often explain how that particular spider was the more "laid back" one. Part of that is probably just to calm people down, but I don't see why a spider shouldn't be able to have a bad day. Mine certainly weren't 100% predictable but also had their more active/passive phases, would sometimes skip on food or sometimes be still aggressive even after being fed. Putting all that down to pure biological determinism feels a bit too simplistic.
- frereubu 5y agoFrans de Waal's book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? is also very good on the topic of scientific research not allowing empathy between animals as a prior in research, due to the decades-long stranglehold of behaviorism in research. He argues that it's more ridiculous to suggest that we start from a point of treating animals as if they don't have complex emotional lives than the other way around (although in that book he's talking primarily about mammals). He still thinks you should try to prove things scientifically, just that the starting point of treating them like input-output machines is a really weird one.
- netizen-936824 5y agoWe are input-output machines though. Being so doesn't preclude us from having vivid internal emotional experiences, I don't know why it would. Both things are true
- drekk 5y agoThere's a difference between literally being cellular automata (all life, including you and me) and being treated like a robot. I imagine aliens putting babies in boiling water and explaining the unpleasant noise as air escaping the lungs as an example. Pretty much any vertebrate meets the definition of sentience (can feel pain). And we still torture them because we assume their internal experience of pain is not as rich as our own If we accept that dogs are pretty smart and deserve protections similar to that of a person (eg if you beat your dog to death you're going to jail) then pigs are even more emotionally complex, and our other "food sources" are in similar territory.
- netizen-936824 5y agoRight I agree, our view of non-human organisms (and even young humans) has been significantly flawed for a long time and we're barely improving with this realisation. Computers may even have some sort of sentience or awareness that we can't comprehend right now, but they get "treated like robots"
- beebeepka 5y agoEveryone that says animals, including insects, don't have a conscience is a complete moron in my book. I realize how people are raised is an important part of it, and yet adults should not be 5his stupid by choice. One time, I had my dentist proudly proclaim animals don't have consciousness because it has been proven by scientists that animals don't know about death. I am no longer a client of this otherwise hot lady
- ArjenM 5y agoMany people seem to barely understand other humans have feelings to begin with. Let alone that Bees have a more successful political system than us. As always we still have plenty to learn, even if it's under a rock besides us.
- krylon 5y agoThis entire year, I have been coming across instances of animals displaying signs of much richer inner lives than I had given them credit for. It is tempting to anthropomorphize, but it is just as tempting do dismiss displays of intelligence or emotion and see animals as mindless automata. One observation that never ceases to amaze me is watching crows interact with common buzzards. It looks as if the crows are harassing the buzzards until they retreat. AFAIK, these birds do not compete for the same food, nor do buzzards eat crows. I don't think it likely, but I would not be surprised to learn the crows do this just for fun, or as a kind of "team building exercise". And I still wonder if dogs think it is weird when humans pick up their poop.
- burntoutfire 5y ago> And I still wonder if dogs think it is weird when humans pick up their poop. Or "my shit's so valuable it needs to be saved, I must be important".
- claviska 5y agoI’m convinced my cats think we harvest their waste by the way they watch me clean the litter box.
- agumonkey 5y agoI had this analogy not long ago, insects might be 8 bit while we're 3D vulkan compute shader in 4K, but we still have the same game dynamics at the core.
- mdp2021 5y agoThere do exist quantitative differences, and there do exist qualitative differences. 1Kb vs 1Mb is quantitative. No-FPU vs FPU is qualitative.
- natmaka 5y agoSorry but I don't understand. Does 'qualitative' stands here for 'something is missing, limiting what can be done with the device'? What can a FPU do which isn't doable using a CPU?
- mdp2021 5y agoA CPU can do "anything" by definition (Turing Machine), but does it do it? :) You still need the function implementation to be present. It is in terms of software, not on hardware - or, of hardware structures that perform functions. Sometimes, yes, «something is missing». Olfactory difference between man and bear could be possibly quantitative; control of the individual fingers is qualitative (a present or missing module).
- throwanem 5y agoI dunno about that one. I mean, a few months ago this "3d Vulkan" whatever blundered into the middle of a late-season fig tree also hosting a couple hundred bald-faced yellowjackets, which you'd normally expect to end badly except that the "8-bit" wasps recognized I meant no harm and opted not to interrupt their boozing to deal with me. Considering that every fruit still on the tree was quite literally crawling with burly black-and-ivory wasps - which, despite a lively interest in such animals, I totally failed to notice in my single-minded quest for bindweed roots - I think they might actually have been smarter than me. I do like wasps, and I have some skill and maybe a little talent at being very close to them without eliciting dismay, but even I would hesitate to wander into a yellowjacket bar! Even so, their own skill, which I have often observed, at telling whether or not a human means them harm, no doubt saved me any number of stings. I even later the same day got some handsome macro shots of one of them who'd had too much and ended up crashing on my front porch windowsill to sleep it off: https://aaron-m.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/img_8240.jpg https://aaron-m.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/img_8240.jpg
- mdp2021 5y agoI have read in this page many instances of the idea of "anthropomorphize the idea of animals". It seems to be not unnecessary to note, that some, in history (prominently, authoritatively), have clearly advanced the idea that the same (or similar) principle applies to humans. Such "humanity" as a goal, not as a given. And "dishumanity" an intrinsic risk.
- arzeth 5y agoThat would be bad news. There are one quadrillion ants. Unlike humans, most ants are born women. Only female ants work (aka slaves), while males are mating (raping?) with the queen (at least queens can mate only once in life) and then males die shortly after that. Males live for a week (but their sperm lives for years), workers (all female) live for about a year, a queen lives for decades. Sometimes I see ants eating almost dead ants. Which means that while I write this, several billion women are being eaten alive and feeling all kinds of emotions. When there is no queen, the ant that eats the most protein becomes the queen. And spiders with their webs... it's always such a horror to look at their captives. And if souls exist and they possess the first available just born organism (FIFO queue) after we die, then that would mean it is a low chance to be born human again, at least for now. I was mentally prepared to become even a broiler chicken, but not an insect. Or if there is suddenly a multiverse, but every universe can have only one consciousness which tries to live everyone's life one-by-one (also FIFO). That would mean we would have to live many quadrillion lives before becoming a human again. And also if we suddenly have to also live every possible route/branch within the many-worlds interpretation, that becomes too depressing.
- throwanem 5y agoI wouldn't overthink it too much. Normally it'd be rude so baldly to note how wildly off base you are about so much of how ant societies work, but in this case it's worth mentioning because what does that say about your chances of accurately apprehending the parts of this analysis that aren't tangible? You almost certainly do not need to fear living ten million lives as an ant before reincarnating as a human again. (If you are going to reincarnate as a hymenopteran, go for Polistes, that's my advice. Social, but on a smaller scale and in a looser style than Vespula and hornets, and with size and brains enough to manage a degree of personality that ants in my experience don't seem to. Also, you'll be able to fly! That seems like a considerable benefit entirely in its own right.)
- rowanG077 5y agoBig assumptions that souls and reincarnation exist. Which have literally 0 known facts going for it.
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