Can you summarize the properties you look for when making these kinds of estimates of whether an insect is conscious/sentient/etc.? Or do you make these judgments based on more implicit/instinctive inspection?
I mostly do it by thinking about what I would accept as evidence of pain in more complex animals and see if it is present in insects. Complex pain behavior and evolutionary and functional homology relating to pain are things to look for.
There is a quite a bit of research on complex pain behavior in crabs by Robert Elwood. I’d link his site but it doesn’t seem to be up right now. You should be able to find the articles, though. Crabs have 100,000 neurons which is around what many insects have.
Here is a pdf of a paper that find that a bunch of common human mind altering drugs affecting crawfish and fruit flies.
It is quite implicit/instinctive. The problem is that without having solved the problem of consciousness, there is also uncertainty about what you’re even looking for. Nociception seems to be a necessary criterion, but it’s not sufficient. In addition, I suspect that consciousness’ adaptive role has to do with the weighting of different “possible” behaviors, so there has to be some learning behavior or variety in behavioral subroutines.
I actually give some credence to extreme views like Dennett’s (and also Eliezer’s if I’m informed correctly), which state that sentience implies self-awareness, but my confidence for that is not higher than 20%. I read a couple of papers on invertebrate sentience and I adjusted the expert estimates downwards somewhat because I have a strong intuition that many biologists are too eager to attribute sentience to whatever they are studying (also, it is a bit confusing because opinions are all over the place). Brian Tomasik lists some interesting quotes and material here.
And regarding the number of neurons thing, there I’m basically just going by intuition, which is unfortunate so I should think about this some more.
Ice9, perhaps consider uncontrollable panic. Some of the most intense forms of sentience that humans undergo seem to be associated with a breakdown of meta-cognitive capacity. So let’s hope that what it’s like to be an asphyxiating fish, for example, doesn’t remotely resemble what it feels like to be a waterboarded human. I worry that our intuitive dimmer-switch model of consciousness, i.e. more intelligent = more sentient, may turn out to be mistaken.
Can you summarize the properties you look for when making these kinds of estimates of whether an insect is conscious/sentient/etc.? Or do you make these judgments based on more implicit/instinctive inspection?
I mostly do it by thinking about what I would accept as evidence of pain in more complex animals and see if it is present in insects. Complex pain behavior and evolutionary and functional homology relating to pain are things to look for.
There is a quite a bit of research on complex pain behavior in crabs by Robert Elwood. I’d link his site but it doesn’t seem to be up right now. You should be able to find the articles, though. Crabs have 100,000 neurons which is around what many insects have.
Here is a pdf of a paper that find that a bunch of common human mind altering drugs affecting crawfish and fruit flies.
Thanks.
It is quite implicit/instinctive. The problem is that without having solved the problem of consciousness, there is also uncertainty about what you’re even looking for. Nociception seems to be a necessary criterion, but it’s not sufficient. In addition, I suspect that consciousness’ adaptive role has to do with the weighting of different “possible” behaviors, so there has to be some learning behavior or variety in behavioral subroutines.
I actually give some credence to extreme views like Dennett’s (and also Eliezer’s if I’m informed correctly), which state that sentience implies self-awareness, but my confidence for that is not higher than 20%. I read a couple of papers on invertebrate sentience and I adjusted the expert estimates downwards somewhat because I have a strong intuition that many biologists are too eager to attribute sentience to whatever they are studying (also, it is a bit confusing because opinions are all over the place). Brian Tomasik lists some interesting quotes and material here.
And regarding the number of neurons thing, there I’m basically just going by intuition, which is unfortunate so I should think about this some more.
Ice9, perhaps consider uncontrollable panic. Some of the most intense forms of sentience that humans undergo seem to be associated with a breakdown of meta-cognitive capacity. So let’s hope that what it’s like to be an asphyxiating fish, for example, doesn’t remotely resemble what it feels like to be a waterboarded human. I worry that our intuitive dimmer-switch model of consciousness, i.e. more intelligent = more sentient, may turn out to be mistaken.
OK, thanks for clarifying.