Monday, February 17, 2025

Do Invertebrates Have Feelings


  • by Admin
  • Sep 04, 2024

Assessing the evidence is tricky. In recent years, we have discovered that some invertebrates — octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish, for example — are much more intelligent than we used to think. That’s also true to some extent of lobsters and crabs. But they are special cases. Many other invertebrates, like clams, show little sign of cognitive awareness.
As Mesa goes on to note, it is hard to tell without skilful research. Many invertebrates do not have “faces” and their brains are organized very differently from ours. And, bluntly put, some invertebrate behavior does not point in the direction of much sentience. As she observes, “Locusts continue to chew leaves as they’re being consumed by predators, and many insects don’t limp in response to injury.” Then there’s the praying mantis:


Animal Algorithms

Eric Cassell, author of Animal Algorithms (2021), and entomologist Deborah M. Gordon describe the behavior of insects like ants as algorithmic, like that of a computer — which means that they probably aren’t “feeling” anything.

Other researchers also remain skeptical about pain in insects — and crustaceans:
Of course, it may turn out that some of the smarter invertebrates have equivalent — though not similar — structures to ours. At any rate, most researchers will concede pain in otherwise clearly intelligent cephalopods (octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish), if not insects:

 

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