Do Fruit Flies Have Emotions?

[AFTT47]

I disagree that a computer program purposely designed by intelligent beings for sole purpose of mimicking emotional behavior is likely to be seen in nature. No survival advantage.

Of course, I don't know that the fly's behavior is indicative of feeling and I tend to think it probably isn't. I just wouldn't bet on it.

The whole consciousness thing is just such a mystery.

[bennyboy]

How do you know the fly had any actual feelings when it behaved this way?

But if behavior is indication of feeling, what about the behavior of the computer?

Yeah, that's the question, isn't it? But it doesn't have to be applied to just computers or flies. How do you know that another person has any actual feelings?

In the end, I think we look at behavior and make a leap of faith-- something acts as though it has feelings, and it's an organic DNA-based lifeform like me, so I believe it probably has some kind of feelings.

With computers, I'm really not so sure. If I could transfer my entire brain function to a quantum computer, would it "live"?

[Minimalist]

[Darkstar]

This thread kind of reminded em of this study:

Mimosa pudica is known as the Sensitive plant or a touch-me-not. Dr Monica Gagliano from the University of Western Australia and her colleagues designed their experiments as if Mimosa was indeed an animal.


They trained Mimosa‘s short- and long-term memories under both high and low-light environments by repeatedly dropping water on them using a custom-designed apparatus.

The scientists show how Mimosa plants stopped closing their leaves when they learnt that the repeated disturbance had no real damaging consequence.

The plants were able to acquire the learnt behavior in a matter of seconds and as in animals, learning was faster in less favorable environment.

Most remarkably, these plants were able to remember what had been learned for several weeks, even after environmental conditions had changed.

http://www.sci-news.com/biology/science-...01695.html

Now surely we don't say that plants have consciousness just because of this.

On a side note, I think the term 'emotion' is being used too loosely here. Simply because something is a behavior, even a learned one, does not mean that it is indicative of emotion.

[Alex K]

[ignoramus]

All living things have evolved innate behaviours in order to survive their respective environments.
Or more accurately, those that didn't are extinct.
Isn't that the only way nature evolves blindly and without conscience?

As DH Lawrence said
"A bird will fall frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself."

It's in our DNA, it's in fruitflies DNA, it's in plants DNA.
Isn't this what nature is and has always been ...Nothing more, nothing less.

It is our intelligence with evolved social morals, which has us asking deeper philosophical questions like feeling, emotions, etc
Nature has no idea what we're talking about... She's blind and doesn't care.

[bennyboy]

Boom chicka bzzz bzzz.

[Hatshepsut]

I think allowing the indiscriminate killing of, say, orangutans would be inconsistent with our ideas about human rights.  But it's pretty clear that there's a sliding scale of how we treat organisms: roughly, it's something like primates>monkeys>intelligent or cute mammals....

That "charismatic megafauna" thing. I seem to remember a sliding scale that went Caucasoid > Mongoloid > Negroid....used to justify racism 90 years ago. Although orangutans are in trouble; there may only be a few thousand left & pity if 7 billion of us can't make room for them.

Meanwhile, I was expecting a mutant fly array to turn up soon...

[The Grand Nudger]

But if behavior is indication of feeling, what about the behavior of the compute

-Isn't that how we determine that anything -at all- has "feeling" (including our fellow man) - judging by it's behavior? Remove, diminish, or call into question -that- particular metric and all we are left with, in regards to feeling, is an assumption.  

I agree with a poster above, in that emotion may be used to loosely, but this doesn't remove the central question, because regardless of whether or not behavior is indicative of emotions like fear, it is most certainly indicative of a whole range of attributes we generally reserve for ourselves and "higher animals".   

(I'll still be poisoning the bastards left right and center, mind you....I kill plenty of things that would embarrass a fruit fly when it comes to behavioral or even -dare I say it- emotional response.)