Do bugs have emotions?

[Wesley_Clark]

@Chronos

Then again, there are also some who would say that human emotions are just programmed instinctive responses, too. Our programmed instinctive responses can be much more complicated than most other animals’, but they’re still programmed responses.

To that end, I would say that insects do have emotions; they’re just extremely simple emotions. Fear is already one of the simpler human emotions, and the insect version of fear is even simpler yet.

But do insects have subjective awareness? If they feel ‘fear’, is it unpleasant?

My understanding is that if you physically damage an insect they do not react the way that a self aware creature capable of suffering would react. Insects will attempt to walk on broken legs for example. A mammal wouldn’t do that.

[Chronos]

Questions about what other organisms (even other human organisms, when you get right down to it) feel are unanswerable. All that you can answer is how they act. And insects do act in a way to attempt to avoid damage to themselves.

There’s a whole continuum of complexity of animal reactions to stimuli. I don’t think it’s useful to set some threshold and say that reactions below some level of complexity somehow don’t count.

[RaftPeople]

@Wesley_Clark

But do insects have subjective awareness? If they feel ‘fear’, is it unpleasant?

Is subjective awareness a requirement for emotions?

Seems like the first thing to do to answer the op is to define the word emotion.

[Isamu]

@Jasmine

Agreed, insects react instinctively based on various stimuli that trigger fight, flight, reproduction, etc.

Could you imagine aliens saying the same about us?

[Darren_Garrison]

@panache45

When I was a kid I raised insects, especially praying mantises. When I watched them having sex (voyeur!), I was always amazed that the male just kept going, seemingly unconcerned that his mate had just bitten off his head.

That’s because most of the things insects do aren’t controled by the “brain”, which is only very roughly analogus to the vertebrate brain. (BTW, if you want to know way more than you want to know about mushroom bodies, click this.)
Myself, I suspect that there is far too little machine there to have a ghost in it.

[RaftPeople]

@Jasmine

Agreed, insects react instinctively based on various stimuli that trigger fight, flight, reproduction, etc.

Fly training experiment (implies reward (which could possibly imply pleasure)):

Heberlein and colleagues have shown that male Drosophila can be positively conditioned to an odor-laced location by presenting that odor during mating with a virgin female (Shohat-Ophir et al., 2012). This observation and the finding that the response to virgin females involves neuropeptide Y (NPY), which also controls ethanol-based reward learning, implies that mating does not simply involve a series of concatenated and serially dependent SR reflexes (sometimes referred to as “stigmergy” [Giuggioli et al., 2013]) but, rather, involves the induction of a rewarding internal state.

[clairobscur]

@Chronos

Then again, there are also some who would say that human emotions are just programmed instinctive responses, too.
Our programmed instinctive responses can be much more complicated than most other animals’, but they’re still programmed responses.

Even if they’re programmed, we are conscious of these reactions and we dislike or like them. That’s what make them emotions. Does the roach dislike it, when we remove the rock it was hiding under?

[Walken_After_Midnight]

I was pondering a similar question: does a spider get angry if one destroys its web (in particular the intricately-crafted webs)?

[jackdavinci]

I’m with Chronos and Raft on this one. This is a fantastic question, but a satisfying answer is probably still far off on the horizon because

1. emotions are not particularly well understood yet, or even particularly well studied

2. what emotions refer to isn’t even particularly well defined

3. subjective experience goes almost to the core of what is particularly difficult to study

What we can say, is that even life forms which often get dismissed or ignored as simple may have some kind of rich complex inner life (“Secret lives of Trees”) or collective behavior vague analogues (social insects)

Most likely they have some very simplified version of emotions, with much less variety but much greater relative intensity

[robardin]

@Kimstu

For fuck’s SAKE, people, this is General Questions at the Straight Dope. Silly clickbait links about how René Descartes, who never married, allegedly “dissected his wife’s dog” do not belong here.

If you want to read a more GQ-worthy account of Descartes’ views and practices with regard to vivisection, try this one.

Ack, I am ashamed

I knew Descartes had never married, how did I fall for that clickbait?

[ftg]

[Bart Simpson]
If they don’t, I’ve wasted a lot of my life.
[/Bart Simpson]

[Kimstu]

@robardin

Ack, I am ashamed

I knew Descartes had never married, how did I fall for that clickbait?

Happens to us all, shunta lost my temper, sorry! AFAICT from this French source, Descartes definitely did conduct some vivisection experiments on live animals as well as dissecting a lot of animal cadavers and fetuses and observing some human cadaver dissections, although I can’t find an online version of his unfinished work Traité de l’homme that presumably contains more of the details.

The vivisection experiment mentioned in your link, carried out on [warning: explicit description of cruelty to animals] a dog whose paws were nailed down, appears to be borrowed from accounts of the notorious 19th-century vivisector Francois Magendie:

Magendie would become the arch-villain of the antivivisection movement. Despite the broad recognition of his contributions to science by most peers, he was also amongst the most infamous of his time for the disdain he held for his experimental subjects. […] His public presentations became the most notorious, particularly one he performed in England when he dissected a dog’s facial nerves while the animal was nailed down by each paw, and was left overnight for further dissection the following day.

[Dana_Scully]

@Isamu

Could you imagine aliens saying the same about us?