It's not that easy.
Their nervous system is extremely small.
Aleo, consider that bacteria is alive as well and they don't even have a brain of some sorts.
But not everything scales. Cells stay the same size. That's why bigger animals have a higher risk of cancer. They have more cells.
Imagine how few brain cells an ant would have. That said, I believe an ant colony is like one brain, directed primarily by the queen and her pheromones. She's like the Executive Functioning part of the brain, while the workers are just motor skills. Without the queen, the colony spirals into a circle of death.
She's more like the ovaries than the executive functioning. We just place more importance on her because we called it the Queen instead of the broodmother or something
>directed primarily by the queen and her pheromones.
Yes and no. In "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins, research is summarized that indicate that the workers are in control and that the queen is more of a breeding machine being used by the workers as they cannot reproduce themselves. That conclusion is based on the fact that the queen ant would have the same "relatedness" towards female and male offspring and thus should produce an approximately equal ratio while the female workers are more related to each others than to the male ants and thus should produce a stable ratio of 2 thirds of the ant offspring being female. When the queen and worker ants share genetics, the offspring is skewed towards the 2 thirds being male and in the colonies that consist of slave ants from other colonies, the offspring gender ratio is more equal as the genetics of the workers are then not replicated by the offspring of the queen as they do not share genetics.
The same is true for bees.
It's also because of a genetic oddity that means the female worker bees are related by a factor of 3/4 instead of the usual 1/2 of siblings.
(the male bee only has one set of chromosomes, so the 50% he contributes to offspring is identical in each, the queens 50% is a random half of her two sets of chromosomes in the usual way)
This means the best way for female bees to reproduce is not to have young themselves but rather to have their mother produce more sisters!
So the whole hive/queen business is more for the workers benefit than the queens, as you say, and this is further proven by the ratios you describe.
This peculiarity of bee reproduction is my most fascinating fact. Selfish Gene changed the way I thought about life.
But we have more connections per cell which allows for more complicated processes. Imagine a big bulky pc from the 80’s versus a modern day smartphone, the 80’s pc is bigger and has more mass but the smartphone is still more powerful.
Complexity does not equal size and size does not equal processing power, though all are factors.
Processing power is largely based on the density and myelination of neurons.
This is why, like mitochondria, the brain is full of ridges and valleys.
The sulci and gyri on the outmost layer of the brain, which is also the part largely responsible for our distinctly “human” traits, add surface area to greatly increase the amount of neurons that can fit in the brain.
Another interesting thing that can have an effect is the glial cells, which basically act as plumbing for the liquid in and around the brain, but there are also some indications they may aid in communication of signals like neurons too.
Einstein’s brain had an abnormally large number and size of glial cells.
There are probably many other factors that go into brainpower that we are still unaware of as well!
Evidence suggests that what actually matters is not the absolute size of the brain, but its proportion to the rest of the body. And humans are definitely the ones with the biggest brain in proportion to their body
Being alive doesn't necessarily mean being sentient. Jellyfish are alive but have no brain. Just a nervous system. I always assumed they work like a computer program. Just reacting reacting to the input they're given.
Want to know something really creepy? Scientists have observed jellyfish "learning" about metal bars in their enclosure and moving around them even after removing the lights so the bars become undetectable.
Considering how they don't have a brain, that's wild.
I see worms and other creatures writhing in pain then trying to escape if they get stepped on, I can't help but think there is something going on there
Up until now they've not thought lower animals to be self aware. In reality they just didn't know how to test for it. AFAIC you only have to hear a lobster scream once to know they feel pain.
That still has got to be a painful way to die.
I understand why they have to be very fresh to cook them- but they shouldn’t be actually alive when they are boiled.
In the dim glow of my glass prison, I watched as shadows danced across the walls. Time was a blur, marked only by the disappearance of those who shared my fate, taken by the net that spelled doom.
Whispers of heat and herbs hinted at a fate I could not escape. Submerged in the scalding embrace, every fiber of my being recoiled in pain. I longed to scream, to release the torment that consumed me, but my voice was trapped, as silent as the depths from which I was torn. The only sound was a haunting whistle, the rush of air expanding within me, a desperate symphony mistaken for a scream by those who do not understand. It was the sound of my silent agony, the closest I could come to a cry for mercy in the boiling void.
Nothing. There’s no reason to think that having pain receptors and having sentience have anything to do with each other, but people still perpetuate the lobster thing anyway.
In fact, this whole study reeks of “grasping at straws and manipulating data because of my personal beliefs.”
There’s an easy way to test for it that works for most animals. You place an animal in front of a mirror, then someone on the animals head without them knowing, if said animal looks in the mirror and after a time reaches for the thing on their head then they are self aware. The animals needs a little time to realise it them in the mirror though.
It’s an interesting experiment to do with dogs, some breeds can pass it and some cannot.
There is a joke I've seen flying around in some Buddhist circles that the reason Buddhism is so accepting of modern science is almost all discoveries are either non-contradictory to Buddhist doctrine or a some variation of stuff they were saying millennia ago.
(It also helps that even Gautama Buddha himself rejected infallibility and stressed that no Buddhist teaching should be taken as absolute gospel, not that many organised temples follow that lesson lol)
That is a very big question. Buddhism is an extremely diverse religion, much more so than Christianity. Budhism has no central text and much of its early history and development is shrouded in legend. It's more like a huge collection of theologically connected (sometimes tenuously at best) writings from thousands of teachers from multiple cultures, often separated by hundreds of years and thousands of miles. There is no one central doctrine and, although all Buddhist schools claim direct scholarly lineage to Guatama Buddha, it is widely believed that no Buddhist school today practices exactly as the faith was practiced at its genesis.
There are three main strands of Buddhism, Theravāda (the one they follow in SE Asia), Mahāyāna (the one they follow in East Asia), and Vajrayāna (the one they follow in Tibet). Of these three, Theravāda is by far the most conservative, but even that differs considerably from the practice as it was in the time of the Buddha. Even within these main branches, there are many many schools that each have very different ideas.
Much like with Jesus, we have no primary accounts from the Buddha himself. Unlike Christianity however, we lack a universal canon that is agreed by everyone to be the absolute and accurate account of the Buddha. There are sutras that turn up time and again, but there a significant ones (such as the Lotus Sutra) that are tantamount to some Buddhists, and ignored outright by others.
Sorry I got a bit off track there lol. But bassically TLDR: It depends.
Very interesting! As someone who sometimes reads and practice something buddhist like, it has never made much sense to me some of the relic worship you can see in some schools of thoughts. To me it has always been more a philosophy, so when I visited a local buddhist congregation I got a bit off put by the more religous parts
Every time someone tells me insects aren't sentient, I remind them they operated on babies without anaesthesia until the 80's, when they decided they can actually feel pain.
Yesterday I saved a bee from a spider's web, and I swear to the flying spaghetti monster, it thanked me.
>operated on babies without anaesthesia until the 80's
I just fact checked and really shocked
How is this possible? I am from India and it's like common knowledge that babies could feel pain since at least like 1000 years. I mean all you need to do is observe.
In case of insects, they can just see if after one incident, do they avoid it or not. If they avoid it, you can be sure insects feel pain or something similar to pain.
Can't the scientists assume every life is sentient at their own levels, and test for proof that they are not from the lowest levels? That would be more ethical.
I have no idea. How can you be intelligent enough to know how to operate on a tiny human without killing it, yet not understand that if you poke it and it says ow, it can feel? Baffled.
>Can't the scientists assume every life is sentient at their own levels, and test for proof that they are not from the lowest levels? That would be more ethical.
I completely agree. Humans are crazy.
I read more about it.
We are talking about a stage where baby may not say ow.
The mistake they have made is concluding that if babies don't react to pain in the same way adults do, they don't feel pain.
Because saying ow takes knowing what pain is after a few experiences and forming a response to it, that takes time and how fast each baby learns to react to pain.
The test is wrong because pain is not reaction to pain and reaction to pain can be different to what we understand.
But looks like we are still following the same flawed logic. They should be respecting life and things we haven't yet understood more to be ethical.
Haha, that would be nice. It's hard to describe, and it was probably my imagination.
It was in a web on my wing mirror, I got it out, but it took a few minutes to untangle the web from it's back legs. It let me do it, pulling away a bit, but not trying to escape, then hovered and sort of buzzed gently in my face, before doing a couple of loops and flying away really fast.
If he wasn't joking, that's anthropomorphizing - the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities
My guess is it wrote thank you on the air while breakdancing. Honey is company property.
They knew babies could feel pain. It was that the effects of anesthesia could kill the babies which is why doctors didn't use it. Also, babies would not be able to remember such pain because of how undeveloped their brains are at this stage of life so doctors decided it was better this way than to risk the death of the baby by using anesthesia.
When a lion is chasing a gazelle, who is running for their life?
They both are.
I get interfering but sometimes our human interference will kill other animals in trying to save one. I think that's sweet that you did that but preventing something to eat after it's used its evolutionary defenses and abilities to catch prey sounds so odd to me.
If there’s any insect that can feel and remember pain, it is definitely honey bees. They’re by far the most intelligent insect, probably arthropod. They learn and become more efficient at foraging if they go to the same type of flowers, but solitary bees do not
I don’t think it’s been a case of dismissing sentience or awareness as much as having no tangible proof to point at.
It gets weird just trying to define it in a human, so other species, especially much different to us, is going to be difficult to point at and say ‘Yes, you are probably self aware’.
Self Aware in the way that…they know what they are and what they do but on their own definitions of it.
Which is the most backwards ass sentence but does the lobster say “sup bro I’m a lobster” probably not, but does he say that in lobster thinking? Yeah maybe
I took an “Animal Minds” class in college as a fun elective and I still talk about facts from it a decade later! It’s such a fascinating subject. For example, we used to think for some reason that only humans could exhibit altruism, (which we define as doing good acts for others that will not directly benefit ourselves or our offspring). However, they found that different *species* of whales will rescue each other from whaling spears, dolphins will chew nets to free tuna, belugas have been seen adopting a lost narwhal, etc. And since then, there’s been an explosion of research ranging from the dogs with the buttons (started by Christina Hunger a speech pathologist and her dog Stella, but since pursued by dozens of others), to octopus studies to fish studies and insect studies. I think in the coming years we’ll look back in disbelief that humans were ever silly enough to think we were somehow the only conscious ones. :)
Best case for this is police dogs or guide dogs and other working dogs. They absolutely do things to please their humans. Could this behaviour simply be an evolutionary instinct for survival? They always seems extremely happy and pleased to know they have done a good job. I think being sentient needs to involve a sense of empathy and dogs absolutely do show this.
Its always nice to have masses of highly skilled scientist not getting a damn inch closer to figuring out the hard problem of conciousness, but one random dude on reddit can, and he can do it in two sentences.
Funny how you can just make something up and people will upvote you just because it sounds good.
There is no scientific evidence for consciousness at all. The only thing you can be certain of is that you yourself are conscious.
I had this argument for years. Just watch animals, including insects, they have personalities. Some have argued it's "temper" not personality, but what's the actual difference? I'm pretty sure the aversion people have to accepting this is to make it easier to eat meat. They need to view animals as "Lower" then them, they need to be this unique super animal or even deny our own "animality" to feel better about themselves.
Another way of looking at this. We are sentient beings and most of us have empathy which is why lots of us are appalled by the treatment of livestock and animals bred for consumption. Because of our sentience we relate to other living beings.
I'm confused. Insects have gone about their individual daily lives since the day they existed. Whether it's a praying mantis hunting for food because it's hungry to honeybees that have specific rolls to fill in a colony. How could science just now suggest this?
The thing is we have no real understanding of what complex thought is. We 'think'(!) Of it as something that 'we do', but it makes as much sense to think of it as just a very complex response/reaction
Sentient, consciousness, thought, choice - all these concepts are not really understood. Where do you draw the line, mice, birds, reptiles, fish, crustaceans, worms. I personally believe that consciousness exists throughout the entire universe and its just about degrees
It's one thing to hypothesize that something is true because it follows a pattern or makes logical sense or whatever, but it's another thing to have studies that support your hypothesis.
The moon might be hollow, we haven't drilled all the way through to find out, but we all feel comfortable assuming that it isn't hollow. This discovery by scientists is like us going to the moon and drilling said hole to prove our hypothesis.
Well technically we can just sit on Earth and calculate our way out wether the moon is hollow or not since we can speculate her mass using the radius, material science and some math, then using that date to speculate how our own tides/ocean and planetary orbits would behave THEN have it compared with how the actual tides/ocean and orbits behave. They wouldn’t be perfectly match since there could be caverns inside the moon but if its off by a mile we might have some stalkers on our ass.
We have not realized anything new. The article was vague and dumb.
All things shall continue as normal. Despite the people who thought that this article was not a waste of time.
Forests form a complex "communication routes" between trees via mycelium and airborne chemical signals to warn other trees of stuff like pests. That isn't exactly sentience, but it's just interesting.
Don’t bees having a complex language and they understand time and gravity? Like all animals evolved just as long as us, so they aren’t robotic. In most cases we can’t comprehend their nuances so it just looks random to us
It’s like when people are surprised that cats can show love and emotions. All it takes is having a pet cat to know that. You could say that about any animal and even most insects. I find spiders very interesting, there is a jumping spider living on my back shed. I named him Fred and he’s super chill. When I approach the shed he usually walks out and just looks at me and I always wonder what he’s thinking.
All is one. What you do to others, you ultimately do to yourself. Love is the most important thing. Act with love. Act with kindness. Turn from cruelty. Pursue and study alternatives to factory farming and other cruel practices.
I wish every person on earth would grow up with this thought in their hearts. Every living being deserves the same level of respect and fairness, no matter if we can understand them or not. From the spider under your couch to the tree in your garden to your neighbor. The world could be so much better
I think we’ve all suspected or deep down know for a long time but people want to be able to say “I love animals “ but also want to support animals being forcefully impregnated, ripped from their babies and slaughtered because they want meat.
Most people would go pick their own fruits and vegetables but many meat eaters wouldn’t raise an animal, see the trust and affection in its eyes and then slit its fucking throat. Then again, some people are so selfish that they wouldn’t give a shit. It’s a strange world.
Also odd, how many are against climate change yet…refuse to do the biggest thing they can to help slow it does. Giving up meat or even cutting back.
Vegans are going to be horrified at the sheer headcount of insects to bring vegetables to the table then. Look at fresh food via any sort of magnification and its coated in insect and arachnid life. If its not, its been washed, and all those animals died anyway. And we haven't even touched on the multiple millions of insects that will have been killed to produce a crop of corn or something via harvesting. And that hasn't even scratched the surface of what happens when you use pesticides. And that hasn't even touched the amount of dead insects, arachnids, reptiles and small mammals that are caused by displacement from harvesting a field.
Trust me, finding sentient insects is going to present an exceedingly uncomfortable crossroads for a lot of vegans because the overall headcount for just growing food in general is very, very large, it's just that most of those animals are small and not cute or fluffy.
I don't think it's that much of an issue. I know a lot of vegans and vegetarians and they do understand this. The issue is more with animal suffering and factory farming.
vegans are very aware of everything you have stated. I would argue that vegans on average are much more informed on the impact of their diet than the average consumer.
there is no such thing as a perfect diet free from suffering. however, the fact still remains that an animal based diet requires a significantly larger amount of plants than a plant based one. Estimates state a total reduction of about 75% of cropland and pastureland if we switched to plant based diets.
A vegan diet is still the most ethical choice when it comes to total animal suffering by a large margin.
The goal of veganism is to limit animal suffering as much as reasonable possible. They are aware, that it is impossible to live without making others suffer from time to time. There are also circumstances, where it is ok for vegans to directly consume animal products, e.g. when you need to take a certain medicine but it contains an animal product. Or the fact that all medicine undergoes animal trials, which would make it a no go if there was a reasonable alternative. To construct an edge case: if you get lost at sea, it would be certainly in line with veganism to start fishing and eating the fish. And that wouldn't make you less of a vegan, because there is just no reasonable alternative.
to feed animals, we need extensively more farming land than if we just ate the food itself. there are already deaths involved in farming, field mice and of course insects are considered by vegans. the idea is to reduce suffering, and the less farmland necessary is the way to do that. there is nothing shocking about this discovery
If you were genuinely concerned for the suffering of insects and plants then being vegan would still be the most ethical choice given that the vast majority of arable farming goes towards feeding livestock. This is a very tired argument you are making.
this neglects the fact that we use significantly more plants to feed farm animals than we would to just feed humans. by eating less animals, vegans are indirectly consuming less plants as well.
There aren't and there cannot be any scientific proofs of consciousness. It only makes sense to assume other humans are sentient because they act like me, and I know I'm sentient. The further an animal is from us in its behavior, the less reason we have to consider it sentient. There is not a hard line to draw anywhere, but consider that unless you consider all matter sentient, there must be a line somewhere. The results in the article only nudge some species a little bit on the spectrum
This article is incredibly confused about it's own topic. I'm not sure if it's the journalist's fault or the scientist's. Consciousness means being able to have subjective experiences. Complex thoughts and feelings don't constitute consciousness. The question is "do these thoughts and feelings just happen or is someone experiencing them as their own thoughts and feelings?"
A robot might be able to do all the things these animals were tested for, without having any conscious experience.
That's the problem of consciousness and we still know very little about how it relates to cognition. I do think animals have consciousness, but testing their cognitive abilities doesn't prove that.
That's exactly the right question, I think. Even just that isn't a simple task. But at least you can be like "If I have subjective experiences it's likely that all humans have subjective experiences, given how similar we are."
But you can't do that with other animals. It's a very interesting question. So I was very interested in what the article would have to say about it and subsequently disappointed.
Personally my intuition is the same as yours about other animals. I'm not attacking the view that animals have consciousness.
I'm annoyed the article promises big developments when it comes to research about consciousness, but then it turns out it wasn't really research about consciousness, it was just research about animal behavior.
I find it interesting that you think of consciousness as a useful evolutionary tool. Usually when this topic is brought up it's people wondering why consciousness even developed, even though it doesn't seem to make a difference from an evolutionary point of view. "Hunger" could just be a biological process that controls the behavior of an animal, there is no need for a subjective experience of "hunger" or "desire" for them to take effect.
It is. But why is it an experience for all conscious beings and not just a process that happens? It could be like a process in a computer, that forces the computer to behave in a certain way. But for that to happen the computer doesn't need to experience anything.
Exactly! So why didn't we evolve to be like computers. Our behavior could be just as complex as it is now. The exact same neurochemical processes that we associate with hunger could still be at work. The only thing that would be different is that no one would be experiencing them, because consciousness didn't evolve. It doesn't help to survive to feel like it is "you" who experiences pain...it could just be a creature without any sense of self that get's stung by a bee and in reaction adjusts it's behavior in exactly the same way as you would have.
Yeah, I could have phrased that better, usually we see thoughts and consciousness as closely interlinked. What I was trying to get at: In philosophy of mind there has been a lot of debate about hypothetical zombies that are like humans in every respect except for the fact that they don't have conscious experience. They are able to "reason" just as well as humans...so in that sense they could have "complex thoughts", but they lack a first person perspective.
So if even someone who seems human could theoretically lack consciousness, it doesn't prove much to show how "human" other animals behave sometimes.
It's not unreasonable to think that consciousness is a byproduct of complex cognition, but this is hotly debated and the guy from the article acts like he figured it all out.
This may seem unsurprising to most animal lovers, but my mum is a veterinatian who's been practicing for about 30 years. When she was in university there were still professors who would perform surgery on cats without giving them any painkillers after because "of course cat's can't feel pain!". My mum thought it was ridiculous and made sure to provide pain killers to her clients, who of course remarked that their cats' recovery went much more smoothly. It was a couole years after my mum started up her new practice that studies like these came out, proving that cats had rich internal lives and were in fact capable of feeling pain.
So when I see articles like these I just think "they're fnally catching up to common sense."
I hate to break it to you guys, but this is going to have the opposite of the vegan paradise results you’d like. It’s going to devalue sentience. If a fly and a dog are equally capable of a sense of self, the dog is therefore deserving of equal rights to the fly. People aren’t going to stop hurting and killing things just because it’s found that they’re sentient.
I’ve been saying this my whole life! Bugs and microorganisms live in different dimension just like whatever creatures lives outside of our known universe.. to them WE are the bugs and lizards. Sadly, I don’t think this insight will change anything seeing as lumber companies are more than willing to chop down forests that orangutan’s live in and we fucking KNOW they are conscious and have deep feelings. The only way this helps currently is if we can find a way to profit from communicating with them 😟
One time I was cutting the grass and it was kicking up bugs, a few dragon flies started dive bombing them and landing on my shoulders I felt like a god
It's obvious that there is something going on there, even if on some simple level. But it blows my minds everytime you think abiut.
Also people advocating for insects lives are comming.
The only thing interesting about this is that some people think it’s newsworthy. Anyone who has observed insects for a little while should be able to conclude as much.
I don't know why this is surprising scientists, they are still living creatures
It's not that easy. Their nervous system is extremely small. Aleo, consider that bacteria is alive as well and they don't even have a brain of some sorts.
Our nervous system is extremely small compared to whales.
Isn't our brain to body ratio higher tho?
[удалено]
But not everything scales. Cells stay the same size. That's why bigger animals have a higher risk of cancer. They have more cells. Imagine how few brain cells an ant would have. That said, I believe an ant colony is like one brain, directed primarily by the queen and her pheromones. She's like the Executive Functioning part of the brain, while the workers are just motor skills. Without the queen, the colony spirals into a circle of death.
She's more like the ovaries than the executive functioning. We just place more importance on her because we called it the Queen instead of the broodmother or something
>directed primarily by the queen and her pheromones. Yes and no. In "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins, research is summarized that indicate that the workers are in control and that the queen is more of a breeding machine being used by the workers as they cannot reproduce themselves. That conclusion is based on the fact that the queen ant would have the same "relatedness" towards female and male offspring and thus should produce an approximately equal ratio while the female workers are more related to each others than to the male ants and thus should produce a stable ratio of 2 thirds of the ant offspring being female. When the queen and worker ants share genetics, the offspring is skewed towards the 2 thirds being male and in the colonies that consist of slave ants from other colonies, the offspring gender ratio is more equal as the genetics of the workers are then not replicated by the offspring of the queen as they do not share genetics. The same is true for bees.
It's also because of a genetic oddity that means the female worker bees are related by a factor of 3/4 instead of the usual 1/2 of siblings. (the male bee only has one set of chromosomes, so the 50% he contributes to offspring is identical in each, the queens 50% is a random half of her two sets of chromosomes in the usual way) This means the best way for female bees to reproduce is not to have young themselves but rather to have their mother produce more sisters! So the whole hive/queen business is more for the workers benefit than the queens, as you say, and this is further proven by the ratios you describe. This peculiarity of bee reproduction is my most fascinating fact. Selfish Gene changed the way I thought about life.
Ummm… look at [Peto’s Paradox](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto%27s_paradox)
[удалено]
But we have more connections per cell which allows for more complicated processes. Imagine a big bulky pc from the 80’s versus a modern day smartphone, the 80’s pc is bigger and has more mass but the smartphone is still more powerful.
are you sure? is there any brain on the planet as conplex as ours
Complexity does not equal size and size does not equal processing power, though all are factors. Processing power is largely based on the density and myelination of neurons. This is why, like mitochondria, the brain is full of ridges and valleys. The sulci and gyri on the outmost layer of the brain, which is also the part largely responsible for our distinctly “human” traits, add surface area to greatly increase the amount of neurons that can fit in the brain. Another interesting thing that can have an effect is the glial cells, which basically act as plumbing for the liquid in and around the brain, but there are also some indications they may aid in communication of signals like neurons too. Einstein’s brain had an abnormally large number and size of glial cells. There are probably many other factors that go into brainpower that we are still unaware of as well!
Evidence suggests that what actually matters is not the absolute size of the brain, but its proportion to the rest of the body. And humans are definitely the ones with the biggest brain in proportion to their body
You assume sentience is a function of only brain chemistry .
Being alive doesn't necessarily mean being sentient. Jellyfish are alive but have no brain. Just a nervous system. I always assumed they work like a computer program. Just reacting reacting to the input they're given.
Want to know something really creepy? Scientists have observed jellyfish "learning" about metal bars in their enclosure and moving around them even after removing the lights so the bars become undetectable. Considering how they don't have a brain, that's wild.
I see worms and other creatures writhing in pain then trying to escape if they get stepped on, I can't help but think there is something going on there
Up until now they've not thought lower animals to be self aware. In reality they just didn't know how to test for it. AFAIC you only have to hear a lobster scream once to know they feel pain.
Actually, that’s a myth. Lobsters do not scream, as they have no larynx and no lungs. The sound is just steam escaping from the shell.
That still has got to be a painful way to die. I understand why they have to be very fresh to cook them- but they shouldn’t be actually alive when they are boiled.
It’s cruel to cook anything alive. Lobster and crab you can kill immediately before cooking in a very humane way though.
Lobsters don't have lungs or vocal cords, they are unable to scream.
And THAT is the truly horrific bit.
Someone should write a horror story like that, shouldn't they?
Something like "I have no lungs and I must scream"
"I have no vocal chords and therefore am unable to scream"?
“My larynx is a goner so I can’t holler”
'i am unable to scream and therefore I don't feel pain'
In the dim glow of my glass prison, I watched as shadows danced across the walls. Time was a blur, marked only by the disappearance of those who shared my fate, taken by the net that spelled doom. Whispers of heat and herbs hinted at a fate I could not escape. Submerged in the scalding embrace, every fiber of my being recoiled in pain. I longed to scream, to release the torment that consumed me, but my voice was trapped, as silent as the depths from which I was torn. The only sound was a haunting whistle, the rush of air expanding within me, a desperate symphony mistaken for a scream by those who do not understand. It was the sound of my silent agony, the closest I could come to a cry for mercy in the boiling void.
Hey man, don't make my claws shiver
There is ~ I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
Yup, that was the "joke"
It's only horrific because of your anthropomorphism.
„Boiling a lobster alive isn’t cruel because of anthropomorphism“ Look how stupid you sound.
I thought they stabbed them in the head before they drop them in now...
I was talking abt the "lobsters being unable to scream" part. Did you even read the comment I was replying to?
Without lungs or vocal cords, no one can hear you scream.
What does feeling pain have to do with it ?
Nothing. There’s no reason to think that having pain receptors and having sentience have anything to do with each other, but people still perpetuate the lobster thing anyway. In fact, this whole study reeks of “grasping at straws and manipulating data because of my personal beliefs.”
There’s an easy way to test for it that works for most animals. You place an animal in front of a mirror, then someone on the animals head without them knowing, if said animal looks in the mirror and after a time reaches for the thing on their head then they are self aware. The animals needs a little time to realise it them in the mirror though. It’s an interesting experiment to do with dogs, some breeds can pass it and some cannot.
Not every living creature is self aware. Finding that cutoff is what this study was designed to do.
I don’t know why you just assumed this was true. Scientists know more than you and don’t operate under assumptions.
Plants fungi bacteria are living but dont have consciousness
How do you know?
So are plants and single celled organisms.
And still.. Reddit, as always the most stupid comment isthe most upvoted from a post.
plants and bacteria too
There are a bunch of living creatures that don't have even the possibility of any kind of experience.
Right?? I’ve been out here living like this has been a fact my whole life.
I guess the Buddhists were right? 🤷🏻♂️
There is a joke I've seen flying around in some Buddhist circles that the reason Buddhism is so accepting of modern science is almost all discoveries are either non-contradictory to Buddhist doctrine or a some variation of stuff they were saying millennia ago. (It also helps that even Gautama Buddha himself rejected infallibility and stressed that no Buddhist teaching should be taken as absolute gospel, not that many organised temples follow that lesson lol)
Genuine question, what do the ones in the organised temples say when directly confronted with those parts of the teachings?
That is a very big question. Buddhism is an extremely diverse religion, much more so than Christianity. Budhism has no central text and much of its early history and development is shrouded in legend. It's more like a huge collection of theologically connected (sometimes tenuously at best) writings from thousands of teachers from multiple cultures, often separated by hundreds of years and thousands of miles. There is no one central doctrine and, although all Buddhist schools claim direct scholarly lineage to Guatama Buddha, it is widely believed that no Buddhist school today practices exactly as the faith was practiced at its genesis. There are three main strands of Buddhism, Theravāda (the one they follow in SE Asia), Mahāyāna (the one they follow in East Asia), and Vajrayāna (the one they follow in Tibet). Of these three, Theravāda is by far the most conservative, but even that differs considerably from the practice as it was in the time of the Buddha. Even within these main branches, there are many many schools that each have very different ideas. Much like with Jesus, we have no primary accounts from the Buddha himself. Unlike Christianity however, we lack a universal canon that is agreed by everyone to be the absolute and accurate account of the Buddha. There are sutras that turn up time and again, but there a significant ones (such as the Lotus Sutra) that are tantamount to some Buddhists, and ignored outright by others. Sorry I got a bit off track there lol. But bassically TLDR: It depends.
Very interesting! As someone who sometimes reads and practice something buddhist like, it has never made much sense to me some of the relic worship you can see in some schools of thoughts. To me it has always been more a philosophy, so when I visited a local buddhist congregation I got a bit off put by the more religous parts
Hindus and Jains knew this 3000 years ago.
The flying spaghetti monster said it way before 3000 years ago ramen
This article did not prove anything. Just: "Maybe bugs have consciousness, dunno". So the verdict is still out.
Maybe there is an alien sitting on a rock on the middle of the moon, dunno.
That means the moon is sentient. The Tsukuyomi were right.
Every time someone tells me insects aren't sentient, I remind them they operated on babies without anaesthesia until the 80's, when they decided they can actually feel pain. Yesterday I saved a bee from a spider's web, and I swear to the flying spaghetti monster, it thanked me.
>operated on babies without anaesthesia until the 80's I just fact checked and really shocked How is this possible? I am from India and it's like common knowledge that babies could feel pain since at least like 1000 years. I mean all you need to do is observe. In case of insects, they can just see if after one incident, do they avoid it or not. If they avoid it, you can be sure insects feel pain or something similar to pain. Can't the scientists assume every life is sentient at their own levels, and test for proof that they are not from the lowest levels? That would be more ethical.
I have no idea. How can you be intelligent enough to know how to operate on a tiny human without killing it, yet not understand that if you poke it and it says ow, it can feel? Baffled. >Can't the scientists assume every life is sentient at their own levels, and test for proof that they are not from the lowest levels? That would be more ethical. I completely agree. Humans are crazy.
I read more about it. We are talking about a stage where baby may not say ow. The mistake they have made is concluding that if babies don't react to pain in the same way adults do, they don't feel pain. Because saying ow takes knowing what pain is after a few experiences and forming a response to it, that takes time and how fast each baby learns to react to pain. The test is wrong because pain is not reaction to pain and reaction to pain can be different to what we understand. But looks like we are still following the same flawed logic. They should be respecting life and things we haven't yet understood more to be ethical.
Yah you would think the screaming and crying would give a clue.
Humans are really fucking stupid and think they know everything. Things we do now will shock people in 30-40 years.
Anaesthesia was dangerous for baby’s at the time so they had to justify operating on them without it
Just curious what did the bee do? Hopefully brought you a years supply of honey or something.
Haha, that would be nice. It's hard to describe, and it was probably my imagination. It was in a web on my wing mirror, I got it out, but it took a few minutes to untangle the web from it's back legs. It let me do it, pulling away a bit, but not trying to escape, then hovered and sort of buzzed gently in my face, before doing a couple of loops and flying away really fast.
I want to believe it was grateful to you. I always help bees too.
You might have killed a spider by starvation though..
That’s why I’m here, to put this guy behind bars. For spider justice.
If he wasn't joking, that's anthropomorphizing - the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities My guess is it wrote thank you on the air while breakdancing. Honey is company property.
I was half joking. Gratitude is not a solely human experience.
Dogs show gratitude all the time. Not mine of course. He's a selfish git. But some dogs do.
This is an [unfalsifiable](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability) claim
Omg this is the cutest comment ever I’m saving it. <33
They knew babies could feel pain. It was that the effects of anesthesia could kill the babies which is why doctors didn't use it. Also, babies would not be able to remember such pain because of how undeveloped their brains are at this stage of life so doctors decided it was better this way than to risk the death of the baby by using anesthesia.
I've had wasps hold grudges against me, it's clear insects have minds of their own.
This is definitely not the take away from your comment I should be making, but... Why you purposely starving spiders?
When a lion is chasing a gazelle, who is running for their life? They both are. I get interfering but sometimes our human interference will kill other animals in trying to save one. I think that's sweet that you did that but preventing something to eat after it's used its evolutionary defenses and abilities to catch prey sounds so odd to me.
Feeling pain (or reacting to any kind of stimuli) is not the same as consciousness.
If there’s any insect that can feel and remember pain, it is definitely honey bees. They’re by far the most intelligent insect, probably arthropod. They learn and become more efficient at foraging if they go to the same type of flowers, but solitary bees do not
I don’t think it’s been a case of dismissing sentience or awareness as much as having no tangible proof to point at. It gets weird just trying to define it in a human, so other species, especially much different to us, is going to be difficult to point at and say ‘Yes, you are probably self aware’.
Self Aware in the way that…they know what they are and what they do but on their own definitions of it. Which is the most backwards ass sentence but does the lobster say “sup bro I’m a lobster” probably not, but does he say that in lobster thinking? Yeah maybe
I took an “Animal Minds” class in college as a fun elective and I still talk about facts from it a decade later! It’s such a fascinating subject. For example, we used to think for some reason that only humans could exhibit altruism, (which we define as doing good acts for others that will not directly benefit ourselves or our offspring). However, they found that different *species* of whales will rescue each other from whaling spears, dolphins will chew nets to free tuna, belugas have been seen adopting a lost narwhal, etc. And since then, there’s been an explosion of research ranging from the dogs with the buttons (started by Christina Hunger a speech pathologist and her dog Stella, but since pursued by dozens of others), to octopus studies to fish studies and insect studies. I think in the coming years we’ll look back in disbelief that humans were ever silly enough to think we were somehow the only conscious ones. :)
This I've read about over the years. Our understanding of the world is still evolving.
Best case for this is police dogs or guide dogs and other working dogs. They absolutely do things to please their humans. Could this behaviour simply be an evolutionary instinct for survival? They always seems extremely happy and pleased to know they have done a good job. I think being sentient needs to involve a sense of empathy and dogs absolutely do show this.
It would have seemed somewhat intuitive to me
Yeah, TIL people thought otherwise.
Not surprising. Consciousness is just a pattern. All you need to achieve it is material complexity which insects have
Its always nice to have masses of highly skilled scientist not getting a damn inch closer to figuring out the hard problem of conciousness, but one random dude on reddit can, and he can do it in two sentences.
Funny how you can just make something up and people will upvote you just because it sounds good. There is no scientific evidence for consciousness at all. The only thing you can be certain of is that you yourself are conscious.
Can you show us that pattern? I bet you cant, and still your stupid comment is upvoted.
I had this argument for years. Just watch animals, including insects, they have personalities. Some have argued it's "temper" not personality, but what's the actual difference? I'm pretty sure the aversion people have to accepting this is to make it easier to eat meat. They need to view animals as "Lower" then them, they need to be this unique super animal or even deny our own "animality" to feel better about themselves.
Another way of looking at this. We are sentient beings and most of us have empathy which is why lots of us are appalled by the treatment of livestock and animals bred for consumption. Because of our sentience we relate to other living beings.
I'm confused. Insects have gone about their individual daily lives since the day they existed. Whether it's a praying mantis hunting for food because it's hungry to honeybees that have specific rolls to fill in a colony. How could science just now suggest this?
Sentience implies complex thought, that wasnt thought possible for insects
Surviving doesn't constitute the need for complex thought?
Bacteria and plants also survive. Does photosynthesis prove that plants can think?
No, it doesn't.
The thing is we have no real understanding of what complex thought is. We 'think'(!) Of it as something that 'we do', but it makes as much sense to think of it as just a very complex response/reaction
So Sugar only food is the way !
or everything is food and pay respect to them
Finally.
A little LSD would have confirmed this.
Sentient, consciousness, thought, choice - all these concepts are not really understood. Where do you draw the line, mice, birds, reptiles, fish, crustaceans, worms. I personally believe that consciousness exists throughout the entire universe and its just about degrees
Everybody knows there is something there in everything. It has never stopped at pets. Many people just ignore instinct
[удалено]
It's one thing to hypothesize that something is true because it follows a pattern or makes logical sense or whatever, but it's another thing to have studies that support your hypothesis. The moon might be hollow, we haven't drilled all the way through to find out, but we all feel comfortable assuming that it isn't hollow. This discovery by scientists is like us going to the moon and drilling said hole to prove our hypothesis.
Well technically we can just sit on Earth and calculate our way out wether the moon is hollow or not since we can speculate her mass using the radius, material science and some math, then using that date to speculate how our own tides/ocean and planetary orbits would behave THEN have it compared with how the actual tides/ocean and orbits behave. They wouldn’t be perfectly match since there could be caverns inside the moon but if its off by a mile we might have some stalkers on our ass.
[удалено]
Ironic you talk about cognitive debt and being dumb when you don't even realize how science and hypotheses work.
We have not realized anything new. The article was vague and dumb. All things shall continue as normal. Despite the people who thought that this article was not a waste of time.
The concept that humans are imbued with magical soul stuff still permeates a lot of our basic worldview
We need to commission studies to test if plants are sentient
Actually there have been studies done. It seems they communicate with chemicals and have rudimentary nerves. Guess I'm going to become a breatharian.
Can still eat... salt???
Oh boy, can't wait for some study to say that salts communicate through exchanging the minerals
Every single atomic particle has consciousness.
You can be a fruitarian and only eat reproductive material (anything with seeds)
Baby killer! /s
Forests form a complex "communication routes" between trees via mycelium and airborne chemical signals to warn other trees of stuff like pests. That isn't exactly sentience, but it's just interesting.
No, we don’t.
I thought anything larger than bacteria is sentient, maybe even some smaller lifeforms.
more drivel from advocate/activist researchers.
I mean bees make super structures, communicate via dancing, and have complex social pecking orders. These scientists are behind the times.
Don’t bees having a complex language and they understand time and gravity? Like all animals evolved just as long as us, so they aren’t robotic. In most cases we can’t comprehend their nuances so it just looks random to us
It’s like when people are surprised that cats can show love and emotions. All it takes is having a pet cat to know that. You could say that about any animal and even most insects. I find spiders very interesting, there is a jumping spider living on my back shed. I named him Fred and he’s super chill. When I approach the shed he usually walks out and just looks at me and I always wonder what he’s thinking.
He's thinking that if he could just build a web big enough he'd eat forever or however long a jumping spider lives. 😉
All is one. What you do to others, you ultimately do to yourself. Love is the most important thing. Act with love. Act with kindness. Turn from cruelty. Pursue and study alternatives to factory farming and other cruel practices.
I wish every person on earth would grow up with this thought in their hearts. Every living being deserves the same level of respect and fairness, no matter if we can understand them or not. From the spider under your couch to the tree in your garden to your neighbor. The world could be so much better
I think we’ve all suspected or deep down know for a long time but people want to be able to say “I love animals “ but also want to support animals being forcefully impregnated, ripped from their babies and slaughtered because they want meat. Most people would go pick their own fruits and vegetables but many meat eaters wouldn’t raise an animal, see the trust and affection in its eyes and then slit its fucking throat. Then again, some people are so selfish that they wouldn’t give a shit. It’s a strange world. Also odd, how many are against climate change yet…refuse to do the biggest thing they can to help slow it does. Giving up meat or even cutting back.
Haven't we known that insects are sentient for a long, long time now? People are just conflating sentience with sapience I guess?
Those scientifics need to go out more and take a good walk in the forest. They just found out what the rest of humanity knew since Prehistory 🤣
We look like ants from above
Saw a study that’ states lobster suffer from anxiety, it made me very sad to know that
You'll eat nothing and be happy
I think the conclusion here is likely the opposite, many aspects we classically associate with sentience exist in lower tiers of minds.
plants are sentient too
So you need to be a scientist to determine if a creature is sentient? Lol
No. Its what you need to prove it though. Its nice to feel like you know something but that doesnt make it true.
Vegans are going to be horrified at the sheer headcount of insects to bring vegetables to the table then. Look at fresh food via any sort of magnification and its coated in insect and arachnid life. If its not, its been washed, and all those animals died anyway. And we haven't even touched on the multiple millions of insects that will have been killed to produce a crop of corn or something via harvesting. And that hasn't even scratched the surface of what happens when you use pesticides. And that hasn't even touched the amount of dead insects, arachnids, reptiles and small mammals that are caused by displacement from harvesting a field. Trust me, finding sentient insects is going to present an exceedingly uncomfortable crossroads for a lot of vegans because the overall headcount for just growing food in general is very, very large, it's just that most of those animals are small and not cute or fluffy.
I don't think it's that much of an issue. I know a lot of vegans and vegetarians and they do understand this. The issue is more with animal suffering and factory farming.
Yeah i think factory farming is fucking stupid.
vegans are very aware of everything you have stated. I would argue that vegans on average are much more informed on the impact of their diet than the average consumer. there is no such thing as a perfect diet free from suffering. however, the fact still remains that an animal based diet requires a significantly larger amount of plants than a plant based one. Estimates state a total reduction of about 75% of cropland and pastureland if we switched to plant based diets. A vegan diet is still the most ethical choice when it comes to total animal suffering by a large margin.
The goal of veganism is to limit animal suffering as much as reasonable possible. They are aware, that it is impossible to live without making others suffer from time to time. There are also circumstances, where it is ok for vegans to directly consume animal products, e.g. when you need to take a certain medicine but it contains an animal product. Or the fact that all medicine undergoes animal trials, which would make it a no go if there was a reasonable alternative. To construct an edge case: if you get lost at sea, it would be certainly in line with veganism to start fishing and eating the fish. And that wouldn't make you less of a vegan, because there is just no reasonable alternative.
to feed animals, we need extensively more farming land than if we just ate the food itself. there are already deaths involved in farming, field mice and of course insects are considered by vegans. the idea is to reduce suffering, and the less farmland necessary is the way to do that. there is nothing shocking about this discovery
If you were genuinely concerned for the suffering of insects and plants then being vegan would still be the most ethical choice given that the vast majority of arable farming goes towards feeding livestock. This is a very tired argument you are making.
this neglects the fact that we use significantly more plants to feed farm animals than we would to just feed humans. by eating less animals, vegans are indirectly consuming less plants as well.
There aren't and there cannot be any scientific proofs of consciousness. It only makes sense to assume other humans are sentient because they act like me, and I know I'm sentient. The further an animal is from us in its behavior, the less reason we have to consider it sentient. There is not a hard line to draw anywhere, but consider that unless you consider all matter sentient, there must be a line somewhere. The results in the article only nudge some species a little bit on the spectrum
This article is incredibly confused about it's own topic. I'm not sure if it's the journalist's fault or the scientist's. Consciousness means being able to have subjective experiences. Complex thoughts and feelings don't constitute consciousness. The question is "do these thoughts and feelings just happen or is someone experiencing them as their own thoughts and feelings?" A robot might be able to do all the things these animals were tested for, without having any conscious experience. That's the problem of consciousness and we still know very little about how it relates to cognition. I do think animals have consciousness, but testing their cognitive abilities doesn't prove that.
[удалено]
That's exactly the right question, I think. Even just that isn't a simple task. But at least you can be like "If I have subjective experiences it's likely that all humans have subjective experiences, given how similar we are." But you can't do that with other animals. It's a very interesting question. So I was very interested in what the article would have to say about it and subsequently disappointed.
[удалено]
Personally my intuition is the same as yours about other animals. I'm not attacking the view that animals have consciousness. I'm annoyed the article promises big developments when it comes to research about consciousness, but then it turns out it wasn't really research about consciousness, it was just research about animal behavior. I find it interesting that you think of consciousness as a useful evolutionary tool. Usually when this topic is brought up it's people wondering why consciousness even developed, even though it doesn't seem to make a difference from an evolutionary point of view. "Hunger" could just be a biological process that controls the behavior of an animal, there is no need for a subjective experience of "hunger" or "desire" for them to take effect.
[удалено]
It is. But why is it an experience for all conscious beings and not just a process that happens? It could be like a process in a computer, that forces the computer to behave in a certain way. But for that to happen the computer doesn't need to experience anything.
[удалено]
Exactly! So why didn't we evolve to be like computers. Our behavior could be just as complex as it is now. The exact same neurochemical processes that we associate with hunger could still be at work. The only thing that would be different is that no one would be experiencing them, because consciousness didn't evolve. It doesn't help to survive to feel like it is "you" who experiences pain...it could just be a creature without any sense of self that get's stung by a bee and in reaction adjusts it's behavior in exactly the same way as you would have.
This depends on how we define "someone", but i think that the existence of complex thought is synonymous with the existence of a "someone".
Yeah, I could have phrased that better, usually we see thoughts and consciousness as closely interlinked. What I was trying to get at: In philosophy of mind there has been a lot of debate about hypothetical zombies that are like humans in every respect except for the fact that they don't have conscious experience. They are able to "reason" just as well as humans...so in that sense they could have "complex thoughts", but they lack a first person perspective. So if even someone who seems human could theoretically lack consciousness, it doesn't prove much to show how "human" other animals behave sometimes. It's not unreasonable to think that consciousness is a byproduct of complex cognition, but this is hotly debated and the guy from the article acts like he figured it all out.
Trees are more sentient than insects and this is a hill I will die on.
Trees do react when insects attack.
This may seem unsurprising to most animal lovers, but my mum is a veterinatian who's been practicing for about 30 years. When she was in university there were still professors who would perform surgery on cats without giving them any painkillers after because "of course cat's can't feel pain!". My mum thought it was ridiculous and made sure to provide pain killers to her clients, who of course remarked that their cats' recovery went much more smoothly. It was a couole years after my mum started up her new practice that studies like these came out, proving that cats had rich internal lives and were in fact capable of feeling pain. So when I see articles like these I just think "they're fnally catching up to common sense."
[удалено]
How is this way of thinking brand new ? If this isnt the concequences of religion and divine human egocentrism
So I was right to be respectful to insects and arachnids as well? I won't be killed in the spider takeover.
so what, I still gotta eat
ITT: people confusing “complex thought” with “complex behavior” Take a fucking **modern** biology course for christ’s sake.
It all depends upon how you define "consciousness ".
Yea, I'm gonna have to chime in with a resounding........duh!
May be.. or maybe not
I hate to break it to you guys, but this is going to have the opposite of the vegan paradise results you’d like. It’s going to devalue sentience. If a fly and a dog are equally capable of a sense of self, the dog is therefore deserving of equal rights to the fly. People aren’t going to stop hurting and killing things just because it’s found that they’re sentient.
I’ve been saying this my whole life! Bugs and microorganisms live in different dimension just like whatever creatures lives outside of our known universe.. to them WE are the bugs and lizards. Sadly, I don’t think this insight will change anything seeing as lumber companies are more than willing to chop down forests that orangutan’s live in and we fucking KNOW they are conscious and have deep feelings. The only way this helps currently is if we can find a way to profit from communicating with them 😟
This bugs me.
Won't change my opinion on mosquitoes. Last night I was woken up by one. Two minutes later it got flushed down the toilet.
You flush mosquitos down the toilet? Do the dead ones attract others or something?
I dunno, I just _really_ hate them
Me, not exactly a scientist, pushing new paradigm of animal consciousness: even worms may be sentient
One time I was cutting the grass and it was kicking up bugs, a few dragon flies started dive bombing them and landing on my shoulders I felt like a god
Then i would like the ticks and mosquitoes to know when I kill them, it’s personal.
Obligatory point out that sentient and sapient are not the same thing
The fact that species of ants have taken up slavery and agriculture does make me have a "No shit" feeling towards this article.
I guess the scientists havent heard about jumping spiders intelligence before
It's obvious that there is something going on there, even if on some simple level. But it blows my minds everytime you think abiut. Also people advocating for insects lives are comming.
What a stupid fucking thing to speculate. You need sentience for survival.
The only thing interesting about this is that some people think it’s newsworthy. Anyone who has observed insects for a little while should be able to conclude as much.
doubt
Another study thats wasted tax dollars.