Treatment of living things like machines begins...

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

I, cockroach: Do insects feel pain? Are they conscious? A science kit for at-home cyborg cockroaches provokes the hard questions

...Such sentience is quite unlikely in a bug, says Backyard Brains, and most people would likely agree. ‘It’s very important to avoid anthropomorphising the cockroach with thoughts such as: “If I do not want my own leg cut off, then the cockroach does not want its leg cut off”,’ reads the site. And yet — do we really know this? A good scientist assumes nothing, and the possibility of insect sentience is rather more scientifically complicated than one might expect. In fact, there’s good reason to think that cockroaches just might possess it...

 

[Szechuan]

The so-called 'danger' of anthropomorphising is a hangover of sorts, I think. It seems to be typically used as a defence against animal welfare transgressions that instinctively feel wrong. I can relate to the writer's misgivings and I go further myself, finding it difficult to deliberately kill tiny creatures that are encroaching on my environment. Though I still do so, it is not without a twinge of conscience.

But putting aside any debate over ideas like sentimentality, anthropomorphising et al, I think there is a simpler way to look at these situations. A cockroach (or any such creature) has inherent 'interests'. There is something that is 'in the interest' of the cockroach (to steal a concept from qualia discussions) - it is a living creature and will go about its cockroachy business as nature determines for it: business such as eating, breeding, evading predation etc. It is not remotely 'in the interest' of the cockroach to be abused in this manner.

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

Like you I think there's something disturbing about treating living things as toys in this way, a step below pets or research subjects.

I am sure accusations of hypocrisy will come into play, and as someone who still eats meat and like you kills pests I may be deserving of them. But I suspect most people at least recognize that these living things are worthy of some compassion. There's just something creepy about this kind of invasive manipulation for the sake of making what is basically a living toy that, IMO, kicks things up a notch.

If there's nothing to consciousness but meat-based machinery, then so be it. (Though personally I think there's good reason to doubt this.) But let's not slide into easy acceptance of the kind of world where we begin to chip away at the boundary between life and machinery...

“Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

But putting aside any debate over ideas like sentimentality, anthropomorphising et al, I think there is a simpler way to look at these situations. A cockroach (or any such creature) has inherent 'interests'. There is something that is 'in the interest' of the cockroach (to steal a concept from qualia discussions) - it is a living creature and will go about its cockroachy business as nature determines for it: business such as eating, breeding, evading predation etc. It is not remotely 'in the interest' of the cockroach to be abused in this manner.

In a nice bit of synchronicity, here's a quote from neurobiologist Martin Heisenberg:

...has focused on humans and ‘conscious free will’. Yet when it comes to understanding how we initiate behaviour, we can learn a lot by looking at animals. Although we do not credit animals with anything like the consciousness in humans, researchers have found that animal behaviour is not as involuntary as it may appear. The idea that animals act only in response to external stimuli has long been abandoned, and it is well established that they initiate behaviour on the basis of their internal states, as we do.
(Nature, vol. 459, 2009, p.164)

More here.

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

Posted this earlier in another thread:

HUMAN RESOURCES: Social Engineering In The 20th Century

Human Resources explores the rise of mechanistic philosphy and the exploitation of human beings under modern hierarhical systems.

Topics Include; behaviorism, scientific management, work-place democracy, schooling, frustration-aggression hypothesis and human experimentation.

Featuring interviews with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Rebecca Lemov, Christopher Simpson, George Ritzer, Morris Berman, John Taylor Gatto, Alfie Kohn and others.

Youtube link:

 

[David Bailey]

I, cockroach: Do insects feel pain? Are they conscious? A science kit for at-home cyborg cockroaches provokes the hard questions

I saw a report about that, and it disturbed me too. Hopefully it is little more than a daft one day wonder.
The concept of anthropomorphising is an odd one. It sounds so scientific, but if you probe the person about just which piece of science justifies their view, they go a bit vague.

Science seems to be gradually accruing a strange set of beliefs - i.e. things that are asserted with essentially no evidence - to supplement its factual base! One is the belief that it understands consciousness enough to know which creatures feel what!

David

 

[BotchCat]

I saw a report about that, and it disturbed me too. Hopefully it is little more than a daft one day wonder.
The concept of anthropomorphising is an odd one. It sounds so scientific, but if you probe the person about just which piece of science justifies their view, they go a bit vague.

Science seems to be gradually accruing a strange set of beliefs - i.e. things that are asserted with essentially no evidence - to supplement its factual base! One is the belief that it understands consciousness enough to know which creatures feel what!

David

Materialist science is running roughshod over our society. They need to be taken down a few pegs.