Do Insects Feel Pain?

Consider the lobster

    The fact that even the most highly evolved nonhuman mammals can’t use language to communicate with us about their subjective mental experience is only the first layer of additional complication in trying to extend our reasoning about pain and morality to animals. And everything gets progressively more abstract and convolved as we move farther and farther out from the higher-type mammals into cattle and swine and dogs and cats and rodents, and then birds and fish, and finally invertebrates like lobsters.

If you’ve never listened to the Philosophy Bites podcast, here’s a relevant episode on the status of animals:https://philosophybites.libsyn.com/christine-korsgaard-on-th...

Also here’s a thought: unnecessary harming of an entity is bad for its effect on you, ie one should refrain from killing an insect even if it did not feel pain. Same holds for a nice rock formation.

The Jain religion has quite a bit to say on this topic:

https://voices.uchicago.edu/religionculture/2017/11/22/atten...

Side note: the author also notes a very unusual consideration of electricity as consisting of a living force, that should therefore not be used needlessly.

Morality surrounding suffering depends on personal feeling and has no basis in practical life except inasmuch as one might calculate that an interest group will act on such a feeling. For instance: I can be recruited to save a dog from suffering, but not to save a spider. It’s not reason that drives me here, but feelings alone. My rational parts understand that my existence is predicated on non-rational equipment. I am not ashamed of this, and neither should you be.

No one lives except by occupying space and resources, and refraining from actions (such as killing yourself to feed hungry worms) that would otherwise create pleasure and ease suffering of some other creature. Life under finite resources is inherently tragic.

The coming of oxygen to the atmosphere of Earth was a disaster for anerobic bacteria! We’re not going to repeal oxygen!

As I age, I find that I want to avoid gratuitous harm of animals— even pests. I am less cruel than I used to be. But I have no justification for changing, and have no argument to make about it.

But many organisms demonstrate behaviors which are reactive to stimuli, and can be called sentient, but those organisms don’t necessarily possess cognitive abilities which demonstrate self-consciousness. I disagree that sentience should ever have been included as determinant of consciousness, and only demonstrating self-consciousness defines an inner mental state that is more than just a sum of chemical reactivity. So, I don’t think insects have any awareness other than impulses driven by genetic programming.

That said, insects of all types, including mosquitoes, sustain ecosystems through their existence, which are vital for food chains and so on. I don’t think insect control should be put off necessarily because insects feel pain (because they don’t feel pain in the way that a self-aware animal does), but because overdoing insect control can ruin ecosystems which people need to live.

Other than that I respect all of them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3Hq7zTb1J4

Most insects do not exhibit the classic signs of pain responses (the new findings discussed in this New Yorker article, notwithstanding). For example insects generally don't groom or guard an amputated limb. This puzzling (lack of) response can be explained as being aligned with their reproductive strategy: they reach breeding age quickly and die soon after. Thus, it's better not to waste energy avoiding limb loss for a future that won't happen.

Despite this lack of sentience, insects can be quite intelligent and learn complex cues and behaviors. Other invertebrates that look superficially like insects, prawns for example, have quite different life cycles and lifespans and often do exhibit signs of pain / sentience.

Basically pain/sentience emerge when there is a reason for the organism to protect the body from damage, and does not evolve (or is subsequently lost!) when there are more important short term goals. One wonders, for example, whether salmon experience pain when they fling their bodies up rivers, over and onto rocks, damaging them horribly in the process: all for purposes of spawning.

Billions of us, most of them children.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/50403455-metazoa

Breaking it down - what we think of as pain perception is not one thing but several, as you'd expect for one of the major functions in a ninety-giganeuron brain.

There's something not much more than a low-level reflex response - "Ouch" - and most animals have that.

There's wound-grooming behaviour, which is mostly linked to capacity to heal, and shows up in perception as the longer-lasting (minutes to days/weeks) pain from an injury. A lot of animals with exoskeletons have very limited healing capacity, so there's no point in attempting to heal. This is thought to be why, for example, a severely and probably fatally damaged ant will just keep on trucking, whereas even the simplest mammals and reptiles will attempt to rest and heal.

Then there's awareness of mortality. Simply, an animal that doesn't know it's alive can't connect pain to the concept of death. To what extent this exists across the animal kingdom is one of the great unknowns.

And then finally there's placing a value on one's life (and so negative value on harm to it), and the way in which we humans understand that is intimately bound up with concepts like love, grief, friendship, family and so on - these likely exist for animals that care for their young.

Those are traits mostly limited to higher vertebrates, and it's not entirely clear to what extent birds and mammals have a common ancestor with that capability (therefore some commonality in "experience") or whether that's convergent evolution. It's pretty clear that it exists across all mammals, but has independently developed to much higher levels in the most intelligent ones (cetaceans, elephants, apes), despite these groups being very far apart on the mammal tree of life, having diverged almost at the origin of placental mammals (which makes more sense when you consider what a placenta is for).

So what the pain experience is "like" for a hive-society animal like Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, ants), where caste roles are biologically determined, is impossible to say, if indeed there is any experience there. The skin (or exoskeleton) they have in the game is so different to ours that it's hard to reason about it.

Capability to feel pain doesn’t have anything to do with this, in my mind.

What is pain but a chemical signal something is wrong?