Do Fruit Flies Have Emotions?

[emjay]

I think they probably do experience emotion because we don't know how much of the brain, of any brain, is involved in producing experienced states. For instance the mass and complexity of human neural networks could mainly be for storing and 'transforming' information rather than actually generating consciousness - the latter could be achieved by a much smaller part of it for all we know, and therefore available in smaller and simpler organisms. In any case emotion is thought to have evolved long before cognition in mammals and to be a much simpler system. All that aside, I've seen enough unexpected behaviour in animals and insects to be pretty sure that they all are conscious in some way, and since I don't see humans as anything special in the animal kingdom, I don't see why they shouldn't experience things.