Yeah, and such things can even go on in more complex creatures. I once saw a program about lions in which the lions killed a gazelle. While the lions were tearing away the rear end, the gazelle was still eating grass.
Which leads to another question : Do all vertebrates feel pain the way we do ? More, less ?
I recall an example used on this subject; a pair of male rhesus monkeys fought; the winner had one of his testicles bitten off. The next day, he was having sex. Did he feel the kind of pain we would ?
What is “pain”? How does it differ from a reaction to a harmful stimulus?
Maybe it seems like a stupid question, but I think it needs to be addressed in a debate about whether or not certain animals feel pain.
Heck, that wouldn’t stop most guys I know from having sex. 
Sure, but the apparently coordinated gait must emerge due to some kind of intercommunication/feedback between the local controllers, otherwise, why should it emerge at all?
Coordination requires some kind of communication; not necessarily top down from a central controller; networked intercommunication and sensor feedback might suffice, but then the individual elements cannot be said to be working in entire isolation.
Interaction with the environment and senses. Internal communication isn’t necessary for two sets of reflexes to mesh.
There are even examples in humans, such as people with surgically split brains who still coordinate their actions. Or the cojoined twin girls I read about a while ago, who are basically 2 heads on 1 body; each head controls only half the body, yet they can still walk and even play musical instruments. Yes, they’re human, but those are reflexes and not intelligence at work.
Lesson : Reflexes can have no connection to one another, yet act in concert. We tend to think otherwise, because that’s not usually how we design things.
I don’t see that it makes a whole lot of difference, conceptually; communication is communication, whether it takes place across your own nervous system, or utilises external methods - it’s all just physics in the end - and I think we would be limiting ourselves, philosophically, if we were to insist that the totality of processes that constitute a sense of awareness must be exclusively inbuilt.
In Fact, I’m going to argue this one: no, by definition, they cannot (except by pure coincidence) act in concert if they have no connection to each other.
Do you mean no inbuilt connection to one another?
Yes.
Fair enough.
Conceptually, I don’t have a problem with the notion of awareness arising in an organised system that utilises non-inbuilt communication paths as part of its operation. I would not be so bold as to suggest any such system exists on our planet, but I don’t regard it as an impossibility.
There is some discussion of this topic in Temple Grandin’s book “Animals In Translation”. The most relevent point is that insects will attempt to walk on a damaged leg, and so we can assume that they lack pain.
That doesn’t seem like a particularly sound piece of reasoning to me; is it not the case that some vertebrates will still try to use a damaged body part?
Yeah, they do, and some of the arguments I’ve seen that they don’t experience pain are because they still act “normally” in mortal peril.
You can’t accept that as proof of ‘non-pain’ any more than you can accept apparent struggling and distress as proof of ‘pain.’
Anybody who says they know for sure one way or the other is bullshitting.