Insects have something going on. It's not anything massive, but they have individual preferences and those can change.
They have likes and dislikes and trauma and favourite spots and many can recognise to some extent different humans, certainly Mantises which have complex visual processing but even stick insects seem to recognise individuals by smell and they're not exactly smart.
As an anecdote, one male hated me, absolutely would not me happily held by me. Went into threat pose and flew away at first opportunity. One day he got sick, and I nursed him back to health by holding him in my hand and drip feeding him watered down honey.
After that, he would willingly crawl out onto my hand, and would vibrate his mandibles in the way they do when something to eat is next to them.
Now, maybe that's not "you saved me and you're not a threat and you are warm and feed me things so this is actually nice." maybe it's an entirely simple mechanical response to the association of food and a smell and there's nothing going on inside.
But that's an awfully complex set of behavioural changes cascading from that, which are similar to more complex animals, and I'm inclined to think the simplest answer is that experiential pain and pleasure is extremely basal in motile animals.
Thanks for your contribution. I've posted a comment elsewhere in the thread that touches upon what I think about this. 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 that 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?
Really though, thank you for sharing. As I was drafting my longer comment I had this one in mind as well.
Insects have something going on. It's not anything massive, but they have individual preferences and those can change.
They have likes and dislikes and trauma and favourite spots and many can recognise to some extent different humans, certainly Mantises which have complex visual processing but even stick insects seem to recognise individuals by smell and they're not exactly smart.
As an anecdote, one male hated me, absolutely would not me happily held by me. Went into threat pose and flew away at first opportunity. One day he got sick, and I nursed him back to health by holding him in my hand and drip feeding him watered down honey.
After that, he would willingly crawl out onto my hand, and would vibrate his mandibles in the way they do when something to eat is next to them.
Now, maybe that's not "you saved me and you're not a threat and you are warm and feed me things so this is actually nice." maybe it's an entirely simple mechanical response to the association of food and a smell and there's nothing going on inside.
But that's an awfully complex set of behavioural changes cascading from that, which are similar to more complex animals, and I'm inclined to think the simplest answer is that experiential pain and pleasure is extremely basal in motile animals.
Thanks for your contribution. I've posted a comment elsewhere in the thread that touches upon what I think about this. 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 that 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?
Really though, thank you for sharing. As I was drafting my longer comment I had this one in mind as well.