Pain in Crustaceans(en.wikipedia.org)
en.wikipedia.org
Pain in Crustaceans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_crustaceans
2 comments
I read Dr. Seeley's Honeybee Democracy in 2021, and then again early 2023 (after using ChatGPT). It was my favorite non-fiction read 2021 (Steinbeck's East of Eden for fiction).
The last chapters touch on how simple rulesets can create incredible complexity in the overall supraorganism — it had me thinking of the robots and generative AI that will likely power their micro- & collective- thoughts.
A beautiful book overall, with and without computer comparisons:
[•] <https://www.amazon.com/Honeybee-Democracy-Thomas-D-Seeley/dp...>
The last chapters touch on how simple rulesets can create incredible complexity in the overall supraorganism — it had me thinking of the robots and generative AI that will likely power their micro- & collective- thoughts.
A beautiful book overall, with and without computer comparisons:
[•] <https://www.amazon.com/Honeybee-Democracy-Thomas-D-Seeley/dp...>
For the way this wiki article in particular is drafted, I would say it's (1) perfectly fair to deduce that behavioral and physiological data suggest crustaceans feel pain but (2) perhaps a bit too cautious and excessively philosophical in insisting that "suffering" can't be studied or measured, which the article can't resist stating several times. At worst it's maybe even be trying to slip in an anti-physicalist philosophical assumption about consciousness as if it were an uncontroversial baseline everyone accepts.
I appreciate and respect that there's notional distinction being drawn between pain and "suffering" but the same behavioral and physiological data can at least provisionally indicate suffering, too, not because they're necessarily the same but because they're importantly correlated.
And heck, they may even be integrally related to the point that the pain/suffering distinction, to the extent that it matters, is not a difference in what is proved by biology but a difference in what gets emphasized depending on the concepts you use to describe it.