<story><title>Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests</title><url>https://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2019/07/11/thwack--insects-feel-chronic-pain-after-injury.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Hendrikto</author><text>&amp;gt; I  don&amp;#x27;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?&lt;p&gt;If you build a robot which senses dangerous stimuli and avoids them, does it feel pain?&lt;p&gt;Equating reaction to stimuli with pain is too sinplistic.</text></item><item><author>YeGoblynQueenne</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt; “People don’t really think of insects as feeling any kind of pain,” said Associate Professor Neely. “But it’s already been shown in lots of different invertebrate animals that they can sense and avoid dangerous stimuli that we perceive as painful. In non-humans, we call this sense ‘nociception’, the sense that detects potentially harmful stimuli like heat, cold, or physical injury, but for simplicity we can refer to what insects experience as ‘pain’.”&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;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?&lt;p&gt;In any case, the simplest hypothesis is that all animals can feel pain. The null hypothesis should be the opposite. And it has to be a complex hypothesis that explains why some animals can feel pain while others don&amp;#x27;t (which is tricky).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jbotz</author><text>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&amp;#x27;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?&lt;p&gt;For now, most robots&amp;#x27;s decision-making apparatus isn&amp;#x27;t anything like yours.  So it really doesn&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s really a functional copy of a biological ant isn&amp;#x27;t that far off, and in that case, sure, it might feel pain.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t see anything simplistic about this.</text></comment>
<story><title>Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests</title><url>https://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2019/07/11/thwack--insects-feel-chronic-pain-after-injury.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Hendrikto</author><text>&amp;gt; I  don&amp;#x27;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?&lt;p&gt;If you build a robot which senses dangerous stimuli and avoids them, does it feel pain?&lt;p&gt;Equating reaction to stimuli with pain is too sinplistic.</text></item><item><author>YeGoblynQueenne</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt; “People don’t really think of insects as feeling any kind of pain,” said Associate Professor Neely. “But it’s already been shown in lots of different invertebrate animals that they can sense and avoid dangerous stimuli that we perceive as painful. In non-humans, we call this sense ‘nociception’, the sense that detects potentially harmful stimuli like heat, cold, or physical injury, but for simplicity we can refer to what insects experience as ‘pain’.”&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;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?&lt;p&gt;In any case, the simplest hypothesis is that all animals can feel pain. The null hypothesis should be the opposite. And it has to be a complex hypothesis that explains why some animals can feel pain while others don&amp;#x27;t (which is tricky).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>air7</author><text>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 &amp;quot;life&amp;quot; form in between). In all cases, you can only observe behavioral responses to stimuli and make conclusions based on that. Therefor, everyone (else) &amp;quot;feels&amp;quot; &amp;quot;pain&amp;quot; equally as far as you can tell.&lt;p&gt;There are 2 differences to speak of but they still don&amp;#x27;t change the above statement imo:
1. You have knowledge of the &lt;i&gt;experience&lt;/i&gt; 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 &amp;quot;is my blue the same as your blue&amp;quot;)&lt;p&gt;2. The robot was programmed but the nervous system wasn&amp;#x27;t. Therefor one might say, we know the robot doesn&amp;#x27;t feel anything but at least I know that &lt;i&gt;I&lt;/i&gt; do. If you don&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x2F;thing else has a physical casual link to the stimuli (with a quantum RNG in the mix).&lt;p&gt;Therefor I&amp;#x27;d say that rationally, every feeling of pain, is equally valid, even if it&amp;#x27;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.</text></comment>