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RE: Do Fruit Flies Have Emotions?
May 15, 2015 at 11:12 am
(This post was last modified: May 15, 2015 at 11:12 am by JuliaL.)
As always, the answer to your question is, "It depends on your definition of emotion."
The definition used in a neuroanatomy course I took was (as far as I remember) any neurological response to stimulation. A quick search gave a similar, but more clear and specific:
Quote:4. Working definition: (Scherer, 2000) “Emotions are episodes of coordinated changes in several components (including physiological activation, motor expression and subjective feeling/experience) in response to external or internal events of major significance to the organism”
So yes, flies have emotions..... maybe, depending on whether you are insisting that the 'and' makes the definition require subjective experience and if you think subjective experience can be shown in others.
So how, exactly, does God know that She's NOT a brain in a vat? 
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RE: Do Fruit Flies Have Emotions?
May 15, 2015 at 11:37 am
(May 15, 2015 at 10:24 am)Chuck Wrote: Computer can, and has been, programmed to respond exactly like that. It's a simple program too. Does a computer so programmed experience emotion?
Right, but I think you're talking about a program deliberately designed to give such an appearance. Mimicking the behavior is one thing but reproducing the actual feeling that drives it is quite another. It's safe to say evolution didn't equip the fruit fly with emotional mimicry capabilities.
Using the computer analogy though, we all know a computer can be programmed to respond in quite complex ways for practical purposes. I wouldn't expect a programmed behavior to necessarily be immediately recognizable as such.
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RE: Do Fruit Flies Have Emotions?
May 15, 2015 at 1:37 pm
(May 15, 2015 at 11:12 am)JuliaL Wrote: As always, the answer to your question is, "It depends on your definition of emotion." ... So yes, flies have emotions..... maybe, depending on whether you are insisting that the 'and' makes the definition require subjective experience and if you think subjective experience can be shown in others.
It's risky to bring subjective experience in, when the operational definitions must leave it out. Call it a "gut" feeling that "something" attends the buzz of that brain. I started this as a sort of joke (flyswatting people!) but note that for an insect, the fruit fly has a sophisticated nervous system of 100K neurons, currently being assembled into an atlas as they can be identified individually in all flies of a given strain:
Wade in NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/science/14neuron.html
(May 15, 2015 at 8:55 am)TRJF Wrote: Possibly feeling a modicum of emotion = necessary for personhood.
Possibly feeling a modicum of emotion =/= sufficient for personhood.
...
And, um... yeah, I think the plot premise of The Fly is still absurd.
I guess by "personhood" I didn't mean human, but "sentient" enough to be recognized in law as possessing rights. The Fly is a pretty silly movie but it fit the theme.
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RE: Do Fruit Flies Have Emotions?
May 15, 2015 at 1:49 pm
I get it. Do we need rights for flies in order to have a consistent framework? 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>intelligent or cute non-mammals>boring mammals>birds>reptiles and amphibians>fish>insects, as modified by, near as I can tell, 1) familiarity, 2) rareness, and 3) utility to humans (that is, we artificially give rights to species of which only 100 specimens remain, and we artificially take rights from things we can ride or eat).
I guess what I mean is... we *roughly* already order things based on cognitive ability. Flies have very, very little cognitive ability, it seems; the fact that they might have more than we thought doesn't change that.
Hmm... why am I discussing this? It's friggin' flies. You know what fly babies are? MAGGOTS. Eww. Kill 'em all.
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RE: Do Fruit Flies Have Emotions?
May 15, 2015 at 2:01 pm
(May 15, 2015 at 9:35 am)Napoléon Wrote: (May 15, 2015 at 9:26 am)bennyboy Wrote: However, the question is whether the flies experience their behavioral priming negatively "Eeek. Do you feel something in the air, Johnny? Something just ain't right, I tell ya!" or is it just a complex reflex?
What difference would that make?
Because we don't normally refer to reflexes as emotions. A headless chicken can still run in circles, but that doesn't mean it should have legal status and protection as a person.
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RE: Do Fruit Flies Have Emotions?
May 15, 2015 at 2:08 pm
(May 15, 2015 at 2:01 pm)bennyboy Wrote: Because we don't normally refer to reflexes as emotions. A headless chicken can still run in circles, but that doesn't mean it should have legal status and protection as a person.
True, the term 'emotions' encompasses way too many things IMO. It isn't the best word to use in debates like this as the definition for it is often quite obscure.
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RE: Do Fruit Flies Have Emotions?
May 15, 2015 at 4:17 pm
For the purposes of morality, we're really more concerned with consciousness, the awareness that one exists and the desire (I guess that's an emotion) to perpetuate oneself. It's hard to imagine that any insect has that level of complexity. I wish I could be certain because we have a roach problem now and I REALLY want to kill the little fuckers without losing any sleep over it.
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RE: Do Fruit Flies Have Emotions?
May 15, 2015 at 5:19 pm
(May 15, 2015 at 4:17 pm)AFTT47 Wrote: For the purposes of morality, we're really more concerned with consciousness, the awareness that one exists and the desire (I guess that's an emotion) to perpetuate oneself. It's hard to imagine that any insect has that level of complexity. I wish I could be certain because we have a roach problem now and I REALLY want to kill the little fuckers without losing any sleep over it.
I dunno. A trapped bug will fly like freaking crazy trying to escape. Maybe we just don't appreciate the full drama of a bug's life because they're too small to really focus on? Certainly, bugs are capable of motivated behavior.
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RE: Do Fruit Flies Have Emotions?
May 15, 2015 at 5:30 pm
Motivated by conscious desires or not is the question.
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RE: Do Fruit Flies Have Emotions?
May 15, 2015 at 5:46 pm
(This post was last modified: May 15, 2015 at 5:48 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(May 15, 2015 at 11:37 am)AFTT47 Wrote: (May 15, 2015 at 10:24 am)Chuck Wrote: Computer can, and has been, programmed to respond exactly like that. It's a simple program too. Does a computer so programmed experience emotion?
Right, but I think you're talking about a program deliberately designed to give such an appearance. Mimicking the behavior is one thing but reproducing the actual feeling that drives it is quite another. It's safe to say evolution didn't equip the fruit fly with emotional mimicry capabilities.
Using the computer analogy though, we all know a computer can be programmed to respond in quite complex ways for practical purposes. I wouldn't expect a programmed behavior to necessarily be immediately recognizable as such. 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?
Whether the program is deliberated designed is besides the point. For sake of argument one could easily postulate a process where a set of code calculated to replicate itself through accumulating generations of more or less random error inserted into themselves code bits that taken together cause the machine running the code to produce the said behavior.
The codes that resulted from this process needn't in principle be different by even a single byte from a code designed to achieve the effect. So is the identical codes, one designed, one arrived at by chance, that both does exactly the same thing, capable of emotion?
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