Plants though... Act a lot like simple animals when you watch a time lapse. They react to stimuli, seek nutrients, and physically move just more slowly. They even chemically communicate. They don't seem any less advanced or aware than a clam.
I've responded to this idea at length elsewhere in the thread, but thanks for your contribution. I had this comment in mind as I was drafting the larger one. It may be that what makes ‘pain’ and ‘suffering,’ and perhaps then their corollary positives like ‘pleasure’ important is the subjective and conscious experience of those things. Those are fundamental to the way that we as humans understand them, but if you remove that element of it, it may be that we are observing something like ‘pseudo-pain’ or ‘pseudo-pleasure.’ It looks like 'pain' from the outside, and certainly our first intuition as an empathetic species is to assume it is, but maybe it’s just not a comparable experience? Or if it is, to what degree? Does it outweigh other competing interests when not considered in isolation?
there's literally nothing different about a bee and a fly/ant. it's just that bees are helpful pollinators, that doesn't give them magical vertebrate-consciousness status
Who is to say. Humans have been known to exibit that exact same behavior. And if I found myself coverned with the sent of my rotting family I might not hang out around the dinner table. Especially if I live in a society without antibiotics
I will have to look up the name of the delusion but there are fairly rare cases of people becoming convinced they are dead. Usually as the result of some kid of brain damage. I have, seen some people have a similar episodes during amphetamine psychosis but I think the two are unrelated.
However in this case also, we must consider another analogous behavior. We would find being coated with a goop that smelled like rotting flesh highly traumatic and avoid people as well. Either out of mortal terror or politeness.
It is hard to say which if these two situations is the closest analogue.
You are welcome to. I won't understand it. My study of insect cognitive science is lacking but shoot your shot. I'd appreciate to learn some more about their cortisol response or whatver mechanism you postulate is at play in those behaviors.
I mean you are right. In a real sense any guess is just as likely to be true based on our knowlege.
So I looked it up. The last estimated common ancestor between us and ants was 510 million years ago. It was after the cambrain explosion so complex survival systems would likely have been well established in the population. However that is far enough back I wouldn't expext to see strongly analogous neuroanatomy.
As a datapoint. This one seems to indicate that consenus of ant neuroanatomy is that is is fully complex enough to contain a rich inner life. However the organization is alien enough that I couldn't speculate about the analogy of structures especially given the noted variability across a population. I am gonna say it would be surprising if ants didn't have complex metacognition as that seems a prerequisite for eusociality and their close relatives seem to posses that.
"This large body of knowledge on honeybee behavior has been complemented by the identification of many behaviorally relevant neurons. Integrating this information in a standardized 3D atlas provides an important tool to understand brain circuits (Brandt et al., 2005). This approach has further been pursued by Menzel, Rybak and colleagues who developed the “The honeybee standard brain” (HSB) database, an interactive tool to integrate morphologies and the reference atlas of neurons in the honeybee brain (Brandt et al., 2005; Rybak et al., 2010). The approach to develop a 3D standard brain has also been used for other insects"
That is just rad as shit and I am gonna read up on that.
Pretty different to have like brain damage and hallucinations vs. a normal person sniffing something on their hand and reliability wandering into a pile of other people who also smelled their hand and just laid down to die
Unless one of us gets real friendly with a prank youtuber we will likely never be able to run the experements of covering people with corpse juice and observing their reactions.
I think the wording you used in perhaps intresting. As tiktok tells me the urge tonjust lay down and die among the teens is a pretty common responce to plenty of situations.
That's the thing, humans react to the stimuli and then feel pain. The reaction is subconscious. What if that's all 'pain' was? Subconscious and automatic withdrawal from a source of stimuli? That's not really pain as we conceive of it, and that brings on the question of whether or not it deserves the same moral consideration? If that's all certain animals experience, lets say bugs, then should we consider that tantamount to the consciously felt and misery inducing pain humans have?
Infact pain is the perception of that signal. Some kinds of brian damage render unable to feel pain despite the signal reaching the brain just fine. So, we say that despite having a clear pain responce signal plants do not feel pain as they cannot process it.
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Plants though... Act a lot like simple animals when you watch a time lapse. They react to stimuli, seek nutrients, and physically move just more slowly. They even chemically communicate. They don't seem any less advanced or aware than a clam.
I've responded to this idea at length elsewhere in the thread, but thanks for your contribution. I had this comment in mind as I was drafting the larger one. It may be that what makes ‘pain’ and ‘suffering,’ and perhaps then their corollary positives like ‘pleasure’ important is the subjective and conscious experience of those things. Those are fundamental to the way that we as humans understand them, but if you remove that element of it, it may be that we are observing something like ‘pseudo-pain’ or ‘pseudo-pleasure.’ It looks like 'pain' from the outside, and certainly our first intuition as an empathetic species is to assume it is, but maybe it’s just not a comparable experience? Or if it is, to what degree? Does it outweigh other competing interests when not considered in isolation?
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there's literally nothing different about a bee and a fly/ant. it's just that bees are helpful pollinators, that doesn't give them magical vertebrate-consciousness status
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Hoverflies are helpful pollinators too. Nature is wild, flies are a huge category of insects that is very diverse.
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Who is to say. Humans have been known to exibit that exact same behavior. And if I found myself coverned with the sent of my rotting family I might not hang out around the dinner table. Especially if I live in a society without antibiotics
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I will have to look up the name of the delusion but there are fairly rare cases of people becoming convinced they are dead. Usually as the result of some kid of brain damage. I have, seen some people have a similar episodes during amphetamine psychosis but I think the two are unrelated.
However in this case also, we must consider another analogous behavior. We would find being coated with a goop that smelled like rotting flesh highly traumatic and avoid people as well. Either out of mortal terror or politeness.
It is hard to say which if these two situations is the closest analogue.
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You are welcome to. I won't understand it. My study of insect cognitive science is lacking but shoot your shot. I'd appreciate to learn some more about their cortisol response or whatver mechanism you postulate is at play in those behaviors.
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I mean you are right. In a real sense any guess is just as likely to be true based on our knowlege.
So I looked it up. The last estimated common ancestor between us and ants was 510 million years ago. It was after the cambrain explosion so complex survival systems would likely have been well established in the population. However that is far enough back I wouldn't expext to see strongly analogous neuroanatomy.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnana.2014.00166/full
As a datapoint. This one seems to indicate that consenus of ant neuroanatomy is that is is fully complex enough to contain a rich inner life. However the organization is alien enough that I couldn't speculate about the analogy of structures especially given the noted variability across a population. I am gonna say it would be surprising if ants didn't have complex metacognition as that seems a prerequisite for eusociality and their close relatives seem to posses that.
"This large body of knowledge on honeybee behavior has been complemented by the identification of many behaviorally relevant neurons. Integrating this information in a standardized 3D atlas provides an important tool to understand brain circuits (Brandt et al., 2005). This approach has further been pursued by Menzel, Rybak and colleagues who developed the “The honeybee standard brain” (HSB) database, an interactive tool to integrate morphologies and the reference atlas of neurons in the honeybee brain (Brandt et al., 2005; Rybak et al., 2010). The approach to develop a 3D standard brain has also been used for other insects"
That is just rad as shit and I am gonna read up on that.
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Pretty different to have like brain damage and hallucinations vs. a normal person sniffing something on their hand and reliability wandering into a pile of other people who also smelled their hand and just laid down to die
Unless one of us gets real friendly with a prank youtuber we will likely never be able to run the experements of covering people with corpse juice and observing their reactions.
I think the wording you used in perhaps intresting. As tiktok tells me the urge tonjust lay down and die among the teens is a pretty common responce to plenty of situations.
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That's the thing, humans react to the stimuli and then feel pain. The reaction is subconscious. What if that's all 'pain' was? Subconscious and automatic withdrawal from a source of stimuli? That's not really pain as we conceive of it, and that brings on the question of whether or not it deserves the same moral consideration? If that's all certain animals experience, lets say bugs, then should we consider that tantamount to the consciously felt and misery inducing pain humans have?
Infact pain is the perception of that signal. Some kinds of brian damage render unable to feel pain despite the signal reaching the brain just fine. So, we say that despite having a clear pain responce signal plants do not feel pain as they cannot process it.