Comment by slothtrop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slothtrop | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Sentience is the capacity to experience sensations like pain or emotions. Insects have a nervous system and consequently feel pain, which makes them sentient. That doesn't appear to be the key metric we consider when culling/killing things, in the end. It's not clear that they have the capacity for "anguish", let alone understand it.

The old practice of cooking crab and lobsters was to subject them to pain for a needlessly lengthy period of time which I think is what the statuses is meant to curb. On the other hand, pesticide use is probably painful, albeit necessary. Seems rather arbitrary not to consider insects sentient, because they exhibit the same things. Intelligence is necessary for suffering, however. We're not good at measuring this capacity for suffering, we just know that certain animals exhibit it and for that reason we (should) take care to avoid it. Are there different levels of it? I would intuit that a bee slaughtered by a wasp suffers, but is that a level of suffering that should matter to us?

No easy answer but in the end I understand playing it safe in broadstrokes fashion

> Insects have a nervous system and consequently feel pain, which makes them sentient.

I'm not so sure about this. To feel pain requires consciousness. Behavior is not consciousness. It often indicates it in animals like humans with complex nervous systems. But it's very unclear when we get to something with a few thousand neurons. They likely won't any of the neural correlates of consciousness that we do. If insects or crustaceans are conscious of anything, it's not the kind of consciousness we have.

I don’t think that pain requires consciousness, but not in a way you probably think I am right now. I think that we don’t feel pain either. It’s a combination of a prediction and a sensation that assembles to pain. And when you split pain into parts, interesting things happen.

First, it is a unconditional limb/muscle reaction that is hard-coded. It’s uncomfortable but doesn’t constitute “suffering”. Then there is a sensation: burning, broken, cold, etc that makes you do something in the range of acting to reduce the damage to screaming (message danger to others and maybe get help) and kicking erratically (to counteract a predator). It’s more close to “suffer”, but short episodes don’t really add up to long-term or intensive “anguish”. Some people have high pain tolerance, but it doesn’t mean they don’t feel it, they simply don’t change their state of minds so much. And then may come the understanding that you’re going to unfair die or become disabled for life, and these feelings and thoughts may be comparable to a situation of no physical pain at all, e.g. if you end up with an unfair life sentence. So basically my idea is that dying in pain is just a very negative sum of these negative components, but consciousness is not the key. It only helps to see your fate, whatever it is.

Which parts of “pain” we are trying to reduce by these laws is unclear.

This is why I'm making a distinction between pain and suffering. Pain is physiological, insects have the neurological capacity for it. Whether that translates to "anguish" in a conscious sense, that is unclear. So too would it be for lobster and crab. The problem is it's not possible to have an accurate gauge of consciousness, capacity for which. We ballpark either a lot or a little, you can't really say there's "nil". So how much does it take before it matters? Really we just intuitively approach insects differently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com