[HN Gopher] Joys and pains of insects
___________________________________________________________________
Joys and pains of insects
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 113 points
Date : 2023-08-17 20:05 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| [deleted]
| jylam wrote:
| "Back then, my views were in line with the mainstream. Pain is a
| conscious experience, and many scholars then thought that
| consciousness is unique to humans. "
|
| I don't understand that. Anyone knows that a cat or a dog or a
| lizard or a chicken can feel pain, that's so obvious. How can
| scientists deny something so obviously obvious ?
| [deleted]
| melagonster wrote:
| this is based on modern society, was not obvious for everyone
| in any time.
| myshpa wrote:
| > How can scientists deny something so obviously obvious
|
| Doctors not so long ago operated on newborns without anesthesia
| for the same reason.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| The things with newborns not feeling pain is a bit different.
| It was wrong, but not stupid.
|
| The idea was that newborns aren't "complete" (which is true)
| and that their pain system wasn't fully active yet (which is
| wrong), something about myelin if I remember correctly.
|
| Anesthesia is not something to be taken lightly, and if you
| can operate without it that's one risk less.
| tough wrote:
| If the baby can't sue the doc, we're fucked
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Pain as a signal to "stop doing what you're doing" or "avoid
| that" is one thing -- pain as something that causes emotional
| suffering is another.
|
| It's clear that many creatures feel pain, it's less clear that
| it causes them anguish or distress in the way we would
| experience it.
| rolandog wrote:
| Because accepting it would make them feel bad about having done
| so many experiments in a cruel way.
| tome wrote:
| Sydney the Bing bot also reacts _exactly like_ it 's feeling
| offence. Is it also obvious it's _feeling_ offence?
| FoodWThrow wrote:
| One is a biological being that we share ancestry with
| (however far), and the other is a probability machine that
| tries its best to guess the next token based on literature
| and online chat that it was trained with.
|
| We are very, very far from asking the same questions as
| Deckard, and sharing his doubts.
| mostlylurks wrote:
| It is quite believable that AI might have a sufficiently
| detailed understanding of how humans express feelings (via
| text) that it is capable of emulating such behaviors quite
| accurately even without experiencing those emotions itself
| (possibly experiencing some other unrelated and unfathomable
| emotions in the process of doing so), the same way we humans
| can understand and model the behavior of other creatures
| without any emotional involvement (see various mathematical
| models of swarm behavior etc).
|
| Such sophisticated capabilities (to understand and imitate
| our behavior to that extent) are clearly beyond those of
| animals, and animals express emotions even when no humans are
| present and even when their evolutionary history has not
| involved interaction with humans, so we can rule out the
| imitation hypothesis when it comes to animals. Thus, the
| comparison to AI is fairly nonsensical.
| smusamashah wrote:
| How about Eliza the first popular chatbot.
| tux3 wrote:
| There is a scale from less obvious things (plants, programs)
| to more obvious things (your self, other people)
|
| If you try to turn the scale into a category (not conscious,
| doesn't feel pain vs conscious and feels pain) you will have
| to haphazardly throw a dart somewhere based on vibes.
|
| My personal vibes say Sydney does not feel pain, but many
| animals do. I'd love to learn more and see some interesting
| replies, although empirically, it's pretty hard to change
| people's opinion on a sensitive ethical topic like this.
|
| If we were wrong, that would potentially be very bad.
| jchanimal wrote:
| I think it's clear that no matter what an LLM outputs, the
| "experience" of its transistors is not related to the
| content of the program.
| tux3 wrote:
| The transistor level is not the part to focus on
|
| If I grow human neurons in a dish, such that they are
| connected in 2D layers to approximate the linear algebra
| in GPT-2, and the human neurons start generating tokens
| that express hurt, is my petri dish monster feeling any
| more pain, now that the substrate isn't transistors?
|
| It has to be something more subtle than the contents of
| the program in isolation, or the substrate in isolation,
| otherwise it's easy to reach very non-intuitive results
| that we won't like by transposing whatever we've tried to
| isolate to a less familiar situation.
| goatlover wrote:
| Do neurons produce tokens? They're not artificial
| networks that we need to feed some form of tokenized data
| that we've already generated.
| tux3 wrote:
| Bio neurons produce action potentials by depolarizing
| when reaching a threshold voltage, they're certainly very
| different from matrix multiplication operations.
|
| The thought experiment is that a group of bio neurons can
| perform the same simple mathematics primitive that
| artificial neural nets use (demonstration: you can do a
| simple fused multiply-add in your head). So there is in
| principle a way of hard-wiring them that will approximate
| the function that a digital neural net based on matrix
| multiplication computes
|
| Then it's a matter of taking your digital tokens and
| converting them to the encoding you use for your bio-
| neuron circuit, which is maybe a concentration of calcium
| in presynaptic neurons, a voltage, or whatever else is
| more convenient.
|
| You don't directly take a brain and feed it tokens
| somehow. You emulate a digital circuit on squishy
| substrate in an extremely inefficient way, such that it
| runs the exact same program/does the exact same
| computation with a substrate made of biology instead of
| transistors. You make an injective function from boolean
| functions to cells and proteins, just to belabor the
| point that in principle GPT-3 can talk like GPT-3 and say
| it feels pain, without a single transistor being
| involved.
| mycologos wrote:
| Did you read the article? It attempts to explain why verifying
| "pain" is difficult: simply reacting to a stimulus is an
| unacceptably low bar, unless you're living your life believing
| that all the plants you've eaten and the bacteria you've soaped
| off your hands were murdered, so they're attempting more subtle
| analysis to pull back the curtain on the inner states of
| animals, point being that the inner state is what's necessary
| for pain.
| throwanem wrote:
| > all the plants you've eaten and the bacteria you've soaped
| off your hands were murdered
|
| Yes. And? A few years ago I watched paper wasps hunt
| caterpillars to dismember alive and chew up into meatballs,
| then fly them home to feed their baby sisters. Would the
| wasps have been more virtuous to embrace pacifism, and let
| their sisters starve? Were the caterpillars ennobled by
| whatever suffering inheres in being torn apart? Was I wrong
| to document without interfering, or would I have been wrong
| to chase the wasps away? It was beautiful and hideous to
| watch, enough of both to beggar all the human concepts I know
| of how the world "should be". What I do know is that all life
| in this world subsists on death, and we are not so special as
| to escape that - not while we live and kill to eat, nor when
| we die and are eaten in our turn.
|
| That's not a question of should or shouldn't, just a
| statement of what is. Certainly it takes some reckoning with,
| at least for anyone who isn't satisfied merely to revel in
| base sadism. But it seems more ethically hazardous to try to
| establish a concept of which life it's permissible to kill
| and not care one way or another about it - "biological
| robots", one might perhaps say, forgetting this name has been
| given by humans to other humans well within living memory,
| and also that every such line we've drawn in the past we've
| gone on to rub out on "learning" - rediscovering, more like -
| that, no, this doesn't after all suffice to pretend we're not
| "really" killing, not in a way that counts.
| trabant00 wrote:
| The bar for "scientists" is basically ground level. So is the
| bar for articles. I don't think there was ever a time when pain
| was thought to depend on consciousness, even before modern
| science.
| rvba wrote:
| Because they are paid to ignore it.
|
| You can find a "scientist" that will tell you whatever you want
| as long as you sponaor their "research".
|
| Look at the cigarette tests, or cola tests, or whatever else is
| sponsored by polluting companies. Very easy to get a shill.
|
| Not to mention that lots of research is manipulated or straight
| out faked.
|
| There is also a subset of people who dont have any empathy,
| especially if they pay depends on it.
| K0balt wrote:
| One of the thought provoking consequences of our progress with AI
| is how we are being forced to re-examine the philosophical
| underpinnings of "existence" as a being.
|
| "I think, therefore I am" has been the gold standard for
| millennia, but is falling into a crisis in the face of thinking
| machines that are algorithmically incapable of an inherent sense
| of existence.
|
| LLMs have demonstrated that symbolic intelligence is a product of
| a vast corpus of symbolically represented memetic data. It can be
| taught to and interpreted by both biological and digital neural
| networks, and it enables us to reason about the world. Much of
| what we understand as being human lies within this cultural-
| linguistic framework of data, so it is unnerving to watch a
| machine parse this data with a similar facility as a person.
|
| Despite their uncanny ability to access and express the memetic
| code of human culture, LLMs are merely windows into human
| intelligence, devoid of an existence or a self outside of
| symbolic manipulation.
|
| On the other hand, we experience a state of "being" that is
| impulsive and emotional in character, that can exist without the
| use of symbols or tokens. In this framework we can experience
| pain, pleasure, desires, needs, happiness, and distress. We have
| no reason to expect that this experience exists within a large
| language model, and we can derive that this is the critical
| feature of sentience through the process of elimination now that
| we have evidence that "thinking" can exist outside of "being".
|
| Yet, we can see clear evidence of this experience in other
| animals, including insects.
|
| Is it then, "I feel, therefore I am?"
|
| This has extremely profound implications across the board that we
| have yet to touch on as a species.
|
| One of the most obvious and far reaching of these implications is
| what it is to be human.
|
| If we are to accept that a sense of being does not a human make,
| and neither does the ability to think in symbolic terms, then
| what?
|
| Are we -primarily- genetic in nature, or primarily memetic
| creatures?
|
| Which is less human? A specimen of homo-sapiens with no access to
| the memetic code, or an LLM augmented dog that shares both our
| experience of existence and our culture?
|
| What if it were an LLM enhanced honey bee?
|
| We can easily presume that a lab gestated biological human, given
| access to culture is fully a human. What if they were gestated
| from fully synthesised germ cells? What if they were modified to
| include synthetic inference instead of biological inference, but
| maintained the biological sense of self? What if it was all
| digital?
|
| We have a new tool to differentiate the human experience, and it
| is going to change humanity in ways we have not even imagined
| yet.
| mannykannot wrote:
| One response is to abandon the attempt to capture what it is to
| be human in an aphorism, and to accept that we are animals that
| differ from other animals only by degree, and not on account of
| some sharply unique property or characteristic that only humans
| can possess.
| hobs wrote:
| I think this is the only obvious and correct conclusion to
| any of this, it would be stupid to assume there is some magic
| "level" you "achieve consciousness" with.
| goatlover wrote:
| Why not, if consciousness arises from some sort of brain
| activity? It would mean you need a nervous system that can
| produce that activity. It would also mean you need a
| nervous system, which many organisms do not have. Some
| animals have a nervous system, but no brain.
| K0balt wrote:
| I think this is the ground truth, that there exists a scale ,
| and size / taxonomy isn't always predictive.
|
| The implications of this from an ethical perspective deeply
| call into question out overall ethical framework, and I'm not
| talking about only the way we treat animals. I suspect there
| are fundamental structural problems with our entire ethical
| scaffold from the foundational level.
| lioeters wrote:
| A word I learned recently, Hylozoism.
|
| > Hylozoism is the philosophical doctrine according to which
| all matter is alive or animated, either in itself or as
| participating in the action of a superior principle, usually
| the world-soul (anima mundi).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylozoism
|
| > Architect Christopher Alexander has put forth a theory of the
| living universe, where life is viewed as a pervasive patterning
| that extends to what is normally considered non-living things,
| notably buildings.
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| Similarly, I've been thinking about how all our experience of
| things that are "intelligent" overlaps with things that are
| "alive," and how AI breaks that connection which makes it hard
| to reason about.
|
| On the one hand, if you asked what's the most complex
| intelligence humans have created, or where ChatGPT falls on
| intelligence spectrum between bacteria and humans, the median
| HN response might be somewhere between chimps and humans.
|
| On the other hand, if you asked what's the most complex _life_
| humans have created... maybe an attenuated virus vaccine would
| qualify? We've mapped the entire brain of a nematode but have
| no idea how to get an artificial version of that to actually
| behave with the agency, goals, motivations, etc, of a nematode.
|
| But most discussions about ASI assume that it's both
| "intelligent" and "alive". Are we really close to creating
| "human-level" "living" "intelligence", or are we really far
| away? How many of the discussions that make analogies of ASI
| and humans to humans and chimps are conflating "intelligence"
| and "life"? Does it even make sense to do so?
| K0balt wrote:
| We are about to start exploring just how deep the rabbit hole
| goes. We took the red pill when we embraced the emergent
| properties of LLMs, exposing that human intelligence is
| actually not structural or algorithmic, but rather encoded
| into the data of our memetic identity and may be accessed
| through simple inference algorithms either in a brain or on a
| computer.
|
| This is the deep implication of data == calculation identity.
| tux3 wrote:
| What does it mean, for something that is not you to experience
| feelings, qualia? How would you be able to write any meaningful
| definition, from the outside?
|
| You categorically reject that an LLM running in a loop could
| have a sense of being, however, neither you nor I have
| experienced what it is like to be an LLM, if it is like
| anything at all. You're making assertions about the inner state
| of something you've only observed from the outside.
|
| The point is often repeated, but it's an important reminder. We
| have been alarmingly wrong before about whether other beings
| feel pain (compared to contemporary consensus), based on just
| what we could see from the outside, and the idea that humans
| occupy a higher special place.
|
| I think that you're very quick to see "clear evidence" in
| animals, but not in digital large language models. Both, you've
| only seen from the outside.
|
| If you're trying to improve upon Descartes, how can you be so
| certain about what's outside your own head.
| K0balt wrote:
| You are right in that I am making some pretty bold
| assumptions without any empirical way to measure accuracy.
|
| My conjecture is that LLMs give us the example to separate
| thought from feeling by category.
|
| And we can individually experience both tokenized/symbolic
| experiences and non-tokenized states of being.
|
| LLMs cannot function, by definition, without language. But we
| know there is an experience of being without language.
|
| LLMs are an access algorithm, like human thought, to the vast
| n-dimensional memetic data-store.
|
| The data store imbeds the calculations, like a multiplication
| table vs arithmetical multiplication... or it might be more
| accurate to say that the mathe-memetics embeds infinite
| lookup tables in a finite space- it is compression. The
| algorithm to decode this compression into comprehension is
| much simpler than the encoded intelligence.
|
| So now we suppose that thought, at least, does not require
| the experience of being that can be accomplished without
| language.
|
| Of course, there could be "magical" happenings outside of the
| token processing algorithm in an LLM, but I think that the
| "it could be magic" hypothesis can be ignored as untestable.
| tux3 wrote:
| >LLMs cannot function, by definition, without language. But
| we know there is an experience of being without language.
|
| Take a sufficiently big LLM, remove the input and the
| output, but let it run in a loop regardless, in a complete
| vacuum. Past the encoding and decoding layers, there is
| still math, computation, some sort of thinking happening,
| there is just no clear tie to human language anymore.
|
| The LLM with inputs and outputs sheared off is not useful
| to us, but if you keep it running, how would we know
| whether or not it has a sense of being, inside? If you
| presuppose that it did not before, it still doesn't after,
| of course.
|
| A stroke of the ventral pons can sometimes leave people
| entirely unresponsive. No language, no observable behavior.
| Except for some of them, who can still move their eyes.
| People with locked-in syndrome do not very much 'function',
| but they are as far as we can guess, still conscious.
|
| Being quadriplegic, they lose almost all external stimulus,
| they can't feel very much in that sense. They still have
| intelligence, and emotions, and thoughts, by extrapolation
| from those whose eyes still move to those more thoroughly
| disconnected.
|
| Furthermore, some people don't have an "inner voice". They
| simply don't use language for thinking, only for reading,
| hearing, and talking. These people have an inner experience
| that is pure thought and intuition, without translating it
| into any particular language in their head.
|
| So, we already knew that there can be experience of being
| without much or any language. Language happens, mostly, at
| the interface with the outside world. I think LLMs give us
| new data points to think about being, but not in this
| particular way. We already had being without language.
|
| Certainly small humans are born without knowing any
| language, language comes from the outside in, much in the
| way that the experience of being doesn't.
|
| >So now we suppose that thought, at least, does not require
| the experience of being that can be accomplished without
| language.
|
| That's reasonable to suppose in the abstract, but then
| applying that supposition to LLMs is just as untestable as
| your other hypothesis. We simply aren't aware of any way to
| know.
|
| Otherwise, I could apply the same supposition to people
| suffering of the most comprehensive forms of locked-in
| syndrome, who we are pretty sure still think, but show
| otherwise no externally observable proof of their inner
| experience of being. Just a disconnected brain, floating in
| the dark, sending action potentials in a complex loop.
|
| I think this reduces to a feeling that LLMs are
| categorically different, because they look so much simpler,
| and so different from us. If we were cleverer, perhaps we'd
| think of ourselves as relatively simple, too.
| K0balt wrote:
| I think that LLMs are evidence that we are simple as
| well.
|
| The locked in LLM still uses tokens, which is language.
| It cannot operate without these tokens.
|
| My conjecture is that since LLMs are built on a
| technology designed to mimic biology (neural networks)
| that they probably work in a very similar way to us.
|
| But also that thinking symbolically, as an LLM does, is
| only part of the experience of existence.
|
| Other animals arguably experience self awareness, and
| have passed the tests that we use to demonstrate this.
| Even some insects.
|
| This non-linguistic part is what I am arguing that LLMs
| do not possess (discounting magic), ergo have no sense of
| self. It might be inherent in modelling a corporeal
| existence, or inherent to some other process of being.
|
| I do not posit however that this neural function of self
| could not be replicated. Actually, since it is apparently
| possessed by insects, I would suggest that it may
| actually be very, very simple, some kind of neural REPL
| perhaps.
|
| Regardless, LLMs in their current form do not seem to
| possess this sort of self awareness.
|
| Im pretty sure we could achieve it though if we worked on
| it a bit... but should we?
| tux3 wrote:
| >The locked in LLM still uses tokens, which is language.
| It cannot operate without these tokens.
|
| I think that's incorrect on a technicality. Input
| sentences are tokenized, but then the first step is to
| convert tokens into their high-dimensional embeddings.
| LLMs work with high dimensional piles of numbers, which
| start as embeddings in the first layer, and quickly
| become a nigh-incomprehensible weighted average of many
| different low-level computations, until something
| statistically interesting comes out the other side again
|
| >But also that thinking symbolically, as an LLM does, is
| only part of the experience of existence.
|
| I think the symbols are entirely an interface used to
| communicate with us. Two neural networks can be grafted
| to one another, making a deeper whole, and information
| will flow between the two using a shared floating-point
| representation far away from anything humans would
| recognize as language, tokens, symbols. LLMs internally
| are really piles of highly-dimensional numbers, which
| turns out to be really hard to interpret, despite efforts
|
| Whatever else they're doing that is not the part
| manipulating symbols, it's clearly a very different
| "existence" than the one we have. I agree that it doesn't
| really look anything like our experience of existence.
|
| But I think it's much harder to pin down the part that we
| think they don't have, in a way that won't be begging the
| question, or exclude some humans and some animals that we
| normally think of as conscious and feeling pain.
|
| >This non-linguistic part is what I am arguing that LLMs
| do not possess (discounting magic), ergo have no sense of
| self
|
| That's an interesting argument, but I think the devil is
| in the details, and whatever this non-linguistic part is,
| it will be very hard to define without risking begging
| the question, or without defining it as some sort of
| intangible property that cannot very well be proven to
| exist.
|
| In a strict sense, I think we can create in principle
| (and up to your definition of what language means) large
| multimodel transformer model that uses nothing
| recognizable as language, but nervertheless have vision
| inputs, a robotic frame, and are able to mimic some
| simple animal behaviors. We can surely train robots to
| pass whatever tests we use to demonstrate self-awareness,
| we can probably even indirectly get this behavior to
| emerge without explicitly 'training on the test set', but
| I think that wouldn't be convincing, it'd be a cheap
| trick.
|
| If we want to define the something else that isn't
| language, that we want to use to determine which beings
| have a sense of self, it needs to be robust enough that I
| can't create a simulacra that has the property, but that
| we strongly wouldn't expect to have a sense of self. (And
| robust enough that not having that thing really implies
| no sense of self)
|
| >I do not posit however that this neural function of self
| could not be replicated. Actually, since it is apparently
| possessed by insects, I would suggest that it may
| actually be very, very simple, some kind of neural REPL
| perhaps.
|
| I would worry that not only can it be replicated, but
| that it could be taken to the absurd by minmaxing the
| dumbest digital neural network that notionally has the
| non-language REPL property we want, until the property
| starts to look absurd.
|
| I'm thinking for instance of Integrated Information
| Theory (IIT), a really clever idea to define
| consciousness mathematically. It's a really fascinating
| proposition, but unfortunately very quickly reaches
| absurd conclusions, like some repetitions of simple
| digital circuits being vastly 'more conscious' than we
| are.
|
| I think whatever the non-language part is that we want to
| use to recognize a sense of self, it may run into the
| same problems as IIT. We simply can't put our fingers on
| whatever it is that we think makes us special, and any
| single thing we try to isolate can be replicated in a
| simpler model and taken to the absurd.
|
| >Im pretty sure we could achieve it though if we worked
| on it a bit... but should we?
|
| I'm sure we could outdo Nature in cruelty. My hope is
| that we care more about suffering than she does.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I also had a microscope and loved to watch things under the
| microscope. It took patience: I would get something under the
| microscope and I would watch it interminably. I saw many
| interesting things, like everybody sees a diatom slowly making
| its way across the slide, and so on.
|
| One day I was watching a paramecium and I saw something that was
| not described in the books I got in school in college, even.
| These books always simplify things so the world will be more like
| they want it to be: When they're talking about the behavior of
| animals, they always start out with, "The paramecium is extremely
| simple; it has a simple behavior. It turns as its slipper shape
| moves through the water until it hits something, at which time it
| recoils, turns through an angle, and then starts out again."
|
| It isn't really right. First of all, as everybody knows, the
| paramecia, from time to time, conjugate with each other they
| meet and exchange nuclei. How do they decide when it's time to do
| that? (Never mind; that's not my observation.)
|
| I watched these paramecia hit something, recoil, turn through an
| angle, and go again. The idea that it's mechanical, like a
| computer program it doesn't look that way. They go different
| distances, they recoil different distances, they turn through
| angles that are different in various cases; they don't always
| turn to the right; they're very irregular. It looks random,
| because you don't know what they're hitting; you don't know all
| the chemicals they're smelling, or what.
|
| One of the things I wanted to watch was what happens to the
| paramecium when the water that it's in dries up. It was claimed
| that the paramecium can dry up into a sort of hardened seed. I
| had a drop of water on the slide under my microscope, and in the
| drop of water was a paramecium and some "grass" at the scale of
| the paramecium, it looked like a network of jackstraws.
|
| As the drop of water evaporated, over a time of fifteen or twenty
| minutes, the paramecium got into a tighter and tighter situation:
| there was more and more of this backandforth until it could
| hardly move. It was stuck between these "sticks," almost jammed.
|
| Then I saw something I had never seen or heard of: the paramecium
| lost its shape. It could flex itself, like an amoeba. It began to
| push itself against one of the sticks, and began dividing into
| two prongs until the division was about halfway up the
| paramecium, at which time it decided that wasn't a very good
| idea, and backed away.
|
| So my impression of these animals is that their behavior is much
| too simplified in the books. It is not so utterly mechanical or
| one-dimensional as they say. They should describe the behavior of
| these simple animals correctly. Until we see how many dimensions
| of behavior even a onecelled animal has, we won't be able to
| fully understand the behavior of more complicated animals.
|
| --From Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynmann
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I'm a GPT4 enjoyer, and I agree it might be our first knock on
| the door of true intelligence. But then I look at the sad state
| of AI in games and other systems we build and I'm not sure our
| computers have reached the intelligence level of a microbe yet.
| In some ways that microbe is smarter than GPT4 I think.
| lukeasrodgers wrote:
| The article seems to mostly equate emotional states with
| consciousness but doesn't make the case for that equivalence.
| Paramecia also exhibit negative stimuli avoidance behavior but I
| don't think that can plausibly be cited as evidence that they
| experience pain. I am generally persuaded by Antonino Damasio's
| arguments that consciousness is roughly a system "on top of"
| emotion, the latter essentially being a shorthand for a variety
| of behaviors related to the body's efforts to maintain
| homeostasis. (I'm simplifying and probably getting details of his
| argument wrong, it's been more than a decade since I read his
| stuff.) I am sympathetic to the idea that "lower" animals may
| have something like mental states or conscious experience, I just
| don't find the arguments in TFA convincing.
| aradox66 wrote:
| Personally, I'd much more need to be convinced that complex
| behavior and emotional states aren't evidence of consciousness.
| I feel the burden of proof goes in the other direction.
| [deleted]
| mycologos wrote:
| If you're the kind of person who is suspicious of small sample
| sizes, several of the bee studies cited in the article as
| evidence [1, 2, 3] draw conclusions from small groups of 10-20
| bees.
|
| I think this is a good question, and I get why it's hard to do
| animal research at more statistically significant scales, but for
| me the current evidence is uncomfortably close to "behavioral
| psych, but for bees", right down to the fun pop-sci conclusions
| ("bees like to play!"), which again, cute! but overstated as
| something that "science tells us".
|
| (This is all separate from the larger question of the
| relationship between response to external stimuli and emotional
| states, which just seems hard to answer.)
|
| [1] https://europepmc.org/article/med/27708101
|
| [2]
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000334722...
|
| [3] https://europepmc.org/article/med/27708101
| taneq wrote:
| You've got to be careful when rationalising sentient-seeming
| behaviour in non-humans as 'actually non-sentient'. Pull too
| hard on that thread and you'll realise that most humans aren't
| especially sentient most of the time either, with all the
| attendant uncomfortable implications.
| tux3 wrote:
| Can you say more? I'd like to hear about examples you've
| experienced.
| fasterik wrote:
| It seems like you're confusing sentience with intelligence or
| some other related concept. Sentience is the mental state of
| subjectively experiencing sensations. The only time humans
| aren't sentient is during some stages of sleep, being knocked
| unconscious, general anesthesia, brain damage, etc.
| TOGoS wrote:
| I'm not sure that there's a sharp distinction. From my
| experience inside my own head, the times that I spend 'on
| autopilot' in hindsight seem a bit robotic. Pleasure and
| pain may have been experienced, but were somehow less
| meaningful than on other occasions when I am better
| attending to my feelings or just in a more stimulating
| environment (e.g. when it's raining and there's fresh
| breeze blowing in through the window).
|
| What we think of as 'sentience' is surely a combination of
| things happening in our brains that all animals have to
| different degrees, rather than an on/off switch that's only
| present in certain animals and at certain times. It's just
| that most people's conscious experience is boring enough
| (unconscious -> wake up -> go to work -> go home -> go to
| sleep; I can do algebra but my cat can't, etc) that a
| simplified 'conscious or not' model is generally accepted.
| fasterik wrote:
| Yes, I think the general consensus is that consciousness
| is a spectrum. But even when something is a spectrum, it
| can still make sense to define a binary in terms of a
| threshold, like how we define bits in terms of high and
| low voltages.
|
| Obviously even when you're on autopilot you're above a
| certain threshold of sentience because you're still
| having conscious experiences. You would react if you were
| to see something dangerous or feel something painful. I
| still think it makes sense in this context to say that
| humans are sentient most of the time.
|
| I think it's reasonable to assume that intelligence is
| orthogonal to consciousness. I can imagine an AI that is
| very intelligent but has no subjective experience.
| Similarly, I can imagine a creature that has a very rich
| range of subjective experiences, but is unable to
| understand and change the world around it. Obviously
| these are just thought experiments and we don't have good
| theories of what consciousness and intelligence really
| are, but I think it's consistent with our current
| understanding of biology and neuroscience.
| User23 wrote:
| Bees are sentient in at least two senses of the word
| (depending on the reading of "conscious"):
| sentient Having sense perception; conscious.
| Experiencing sensation or feeling. Having a faculty, or
| faculties, of sensation and perception.
|
| The property humans have is reason. And yes it's observably
| not always exercised.
| JimDabell wrote:
| A lot of people say "sentient" when they mean "sapient".
| almostnormal wrote:
| > [...] several of the bee studies cited in the article as
| evidence [1, 2, 3] draw conclusions from small groups of 10-20
| bees.
|
| Seems fair. We don't judge human intelligence based on a large
| group of people either.
| imjonse wrote:
| One may be tempted to use these findings as a justification for
| (indirectly) killing sentient mammals. Add studies showing that
| even plants and fungi have senses and try to avoid harm, and you
| might as well consider that there should be no ethical
| considerations around various diets. Since everything living can
| feel pain for a generous definition of the term and since you
| kill plants and indirectly insects even on a plant based diet,
| there is little difference. Unsurprisingly this is a very common
| argument against veganism.
|
| But if you truly care about the feelings of insects or plants you
| should switch to a plant based diet as you'll probably indirectly
| kill at least an order of magnitude fewer plants and insects, the
| majority of which are consumed by practices related to industrial
| farming (large scale deforestation, waterway pollution,
| feedstock).
| TOGoS wrote:
| > Since everything living can feel pain for a generous
| definition of the term and since you kill plants and indirectly
| insects even on a plant based diet, there is little difference
|
| There certainly is if you take quantity into account. To quote
| the page linked to by unfairly-downvoted sibling comment:
|
| > Regardless, each pound of animal flesh requires between four
| and thirteen pounds of plant matter to produce, depending upon
| species and conditions. Given that amount of plant death, a
| belief in the sentience of plants makes a strong pro-vegan
| argument.
| myshpa wrote:
| Exactly. Those are very common fallacies / excuses.
|
| > Add studies showing that even plants and fungi have senses
| and try to avoid harm
|
| https://yourveganfallacyis.com/en/plants-are-alive
|
| > since you kill plants and indirectly insects even on a plant
| based diet
|
| https://yourveganfallacyis.com/en/vegans-kill-animals-too
|
| "Crop fields do indeed disrupt the habitats of wild animals,
| and wild animals are also killed when harvesting plants.
| However, this point makes the case for a plant-based diet and
| not against it, since many more plants are required to produce
| a measure of animal flesh for food (often as high as 12:1) than
| are required to produce an equal measure of plants for food
| (which is obviously 1:1). Because of this, a plant-based diet
| causes less suffering and death than one that includes
| animals."
| Etrnl_President wrote:
| This only applies to locally grown plants, especially
| permaculturally farmed ones. Modern farming and shipping kills
| tons of insects and animals.
| myshpa wrote:
| People often think that lowering meat consumption (something we
| absolutely have to do) means eating bugs.
|
| I'd worry exactly about how this shift might inadvertently
| overlook the ethical considerations, especially given the sheer
| volume of conscious beings involved.
| Aperocky wrote:
| > something we absolutely have to do
|
| That seems to be a personal thing.
| myshpa wrote:
| > That seems to be a personal thing.
|
| Not really. Animal agriculture is the leading driver of
| deforestation, biodiversity loss and droughts, and its other
| effects on the environment include significant greenhouse gas
| emissions, water pollution, and soil degradation.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
|
| The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100
| to 1,000 times higher than natural background extinction
| rates, and is increasing.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01448-4
|
| Humans are driving one million species to extinction
|
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/brv.12974
|
| More losers than winners: investigating Anthropocene
| defaunation through the diversity of population trends
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/13/almost-7.
| ..
|
| Animal populations experience average decline of almost 70%
| since 1970, report reveals
|
| https://www.jpost.com/environment-and-climate-
| change/article...
|
| Mass extinction of Earth's wildlife is closer than we think -
| study
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1400253
|
| Accelerated modern human-induced species losses: Entering the
| sixth mass extinction
|
| https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/natur.
| ..
|
| UN Report: Nature's Dangerous Decline 'Unprecedented';
| Species Extinction Rates 'Accelerating'
|
| https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/21/14449
|
| How Compatible Are Western European Dietary Patterns to
| Climate Targets?
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/07/insect-d.
| ..
|
| Insect decline a threat to fruit crops and food security,
| scientists warn MPs
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-023-00795-w
|
| Vegans, vegetarians, fish-eaters and meat-eaters in the UK
| show discrepant environmental impacts
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320356605_Agricultu.
| ..
|
| Agriculture production as a major driver of the Earth system
| exceeding planetary boundaries
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/
|
| Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat
| consumption
|
| https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/917471
|
| Feeding 10 billion people by 2050 within planetary limits may
| be achievable
|
| A global shift towards healthy and more plant-based diets,
| halving food loss and waste, and improving farming practices
| and technologies are required to feed 10 billion people
| sustainably by 2050, a new study finds.
| seszett wrote:
| > _People often think that lowering meat consumption (something
| we absolutely have to do) means eating bugs._
|
| I have not heard this but I can believe that's what people
| think, however it seems a bit weird to me, do these people
| think insect meat is not meat, like some people consider fish
| to be somehow vegetarian?
| throwanem wrote:
| I think in this case it's more to do with proportionally
| lower caloric input requirements for a given output mass of
| meat, although I admit I'm unclear on the details.
|
| I wouldn't look too closely for a consistent ethical basis in
| vegetarianism and veganism, both of which require drawing an
| arbitrarily defined line between living things it's okay to
| kill and eat and living things that it isn't, and then
| treating that as axiomatic. I respect the motivation, but not
| the result - we all draw our own lines, but it takes an
| unreasonable amount of brass in a person to try to argue
| their line should be good enough for everyone.
| hinkley wrote:
| Pigs and chickens are built to consume insects, but we feed
| them hardly any.
| eulgro wrote:
| Why would lowering meat consumption require eating bugs?
| Scarblac wrote:
| It wouldn't, but insects are a promising source of animal
| protein with less environmental impact than other forms of
| livestock. There are many plant and fungus based sources as
| well, of course, and in general there is an obesity epidemic
| and we can easily reduce the amount of protein we eat without
| having to replace it with anything.
|
| Right wing propaganda then turns that into "they want to
| force you to eat bugs".
| imjonse wrote:
| The body's protein requirements are usually overestimated
| based on hearsay and this results in too much importance
| being given to animal based food. Unless you're a growing
| child, pregnant, bodybuilder or have a medical condition
| you probably have plenty of protein without consuming meat,
| and very likely in the other cases too with a balanced
| diet. One should pay attention to
| sugars/fats/micronutrients a lot more.
|
| The silly 'But where do you get your protein?' was repeated
| so much that it inevitably lead to 'they will give us
| bugs'.
| myshpa wrote:
| True ... and we're already getting 63% of protein (and
| 82% of calories) from plants.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| Anecdote from Texas:
|
| I have admired the various dragonflies across north Texas. A wide
| range as you might say. From urban to rural lakes, I spot them,
| the most magnificent flight system I've seen.
|
| And they eat mosquitoes.
|
| At my residence a juvenile dragonfly accidentally made it
| indoors. I spent a good 30 minutes off and on guiding it back
| outside. It wouldn't survive here in captivity I'm not qualified.
|
| Here's the interesting part:
|
| There is a beautiful adult green dragonfly on this property that
| when I walk thru the pathway where it lives, it engages and
| either leads the way, shows off, or in general does things that
| unless you really believe in the nature and nurture overlaps,
| well, I'm just glad to participate.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| After watching small creatures for awhile (insects/fish/birds),
| one will become rather aware there is a lot more going on than
| first assumed.
|
| Bee hives in particular have collective temperaments, and being
| around a group everyday for awhile changes how they perceive your
| presence. For example, those who carelessly crush too many
| workers, will have their body odor associated with a threat.
| Accordingly, one may find your proximity to the hives will not be
| tolerated for the season. There were studies
| which tried to inject fake food-source location data into bee
| dances, and it showed even simple individual insects could
| distinguish nonsense.
|
| It is arrogant to apply our own emotional constructs onto these
| creatures, but one should certainly respect the fact they are
| alive and understand the world in their own way.
|
| Note, the bees can teach you a lot about resource management in
| complex distributed systems. In a way, the 1U rack standard could
| be seen as the IT hive cell structure.
|
| "Bee" good to each other, =)
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Indeed. I found this a fascinating read:
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-m...
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > In a way, the 1U rack standard could be seen as the IT hive
| cell structure.
|
| In more ways than one: https://xkcd.com/1439/
| imjonse wrote:
| "If death is instantaneous, such as when you slap the mosquito on
| your skin, there is little room for suffering."
|
| This assumes that mosquitos perceive time as we do. While all
| living things operate with the same molecular building blocks and
| physical laws, I don't know that perceiving time is as low level
| as that, so qualitatively what is an instant for us could be a
| long time for a much smaller organism.
| mbg721 wrote:
| This initially took me down a road of silly mysticism, like
| thinking about a fly with a gazillion images in its eyes, but
| even humans don't always perceive time exactly the same way.
| Who hasn't had a meeting that felt like it would never end, or
| said "five more minutes" to a toddler?
| m3047 wrote:
| The perception thing is tricky. How do you even know another
| human perceives things as you do? AI teaches us some truths
| through its failures and successes.
|
| It's a fallacy to think that we only think with our "mind".
| We think when we "try something out"; we think with our
| "gut"; we "take a walk"; we "sleep on it". We toss rocks,
| fiddle with rosaries, bow to mecca. All of these engage other
| parts of our body, even parts of our environment. (How do
| people make friends with a river or the wind? How do they
| perceive seasons? What is the epistomological basis of
| "Saturnine"? Why do we name some inanimate objects, in
| particular ships; and why feminine?) By my lights if you
| carry your smartphone all day, it's a part of you; I avoid
| making it a habit for this very reason.
|
| I've had serious astigmatism my whole life. I also managed to
| function uncorrected into my forties. My "vision" was
| extremely good, especially in a natural environment.
| Astigmatism means everything isn't in focus at one place at
| once, and there are interference patterns; so I'm hard wired
| to see certain patterns. So imagine that fly's eyes. The
| individual units don't focus to the best of my
| understandings. Think about them as individually
| manufactured, and maybe the quality control isn't what you
| think it is. Maybe it's expected that some focus near and
| some focus far; maybe some even suffer from e.g. astigmatic
| conditions. If AI can classify images from raw JPEG images,
| it's reasonable to suspect that it can integrate sensor data
| from multiple heterogenous units incorporating light sensors.
|
| So at some level it builds a model. The question has to be
| how much introspection the control unit can bring to bear on
| that model and does that help it interact with its
| environment in a more efficient or effective way.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Is there any basis to believe that mosquitos perceive time at
| all?
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