Do Fruit Flies Have Emotions?

[Hatshepsut]

This just in from Caltech: When a shadow passes over a fruit fly at rest, it might take off or freeze as a defensive response. But researchers have found that is not just a robotic reflex. Fruit flies can be primed by a shadow pass, showing heightened sensitivity to a repeat of the same "frightening" stimulus for several minutes afterward. If they were eating at the time, they do not return to their meal immediately as one might expect of a startle reflex, but continue milling around for a while. Hence they are able to transfer context from moving shadow to food and make an association. This differs from classical conditioning because the flies can't be taught long-term aversion to food.

Does the result mean that fruit flies can experience fear? Anderson and his colleagues at Caltech don't advance a claim one way or the other, cautioning that even if the flies do have feelings, these probably don't resemble ours because of the enormous differences between our brains and theirs.

If it turns out that they do feel, though, then the question arises of whether they should be included within the circle of sentience as many propose that we do for great apes, and granted a status of personhood. With fly as person, you now must put your fly swatters away! The plot premise of The Fly (1986 film, David Cronenberg, Jeff Goldblum), where a scientist inventing a teleportation device accidentally turns himself into a fly-human hybrid, might not be so absurd.

Rejecting personhood for fruit flies could mean the former isn't contingent on ability to experience subjective feelings, including horrible ones like fear or severe pain. To inflict pain on an animal capable of feeling it then becomes licensed by moral standard provided it's not "sentient." In this view, ability to reason, at least in certain ways, is presumably the criterion for determining sentience. Empathy for others is one such form of reasoning power, where one is able to imagine herself in the position of a peer and so anticipate the peer's feelings and responses.

What think you? Lame, or trending?

Stoller-Conrad on fruit flies in Caltech News: http://www.caltech.edu/news/do-fruit-fli...ions-46769

[Napoléon]

I think I'm still going to be swatting flies, let's put it that way.

[TheRealJoeFish]

Possibly feeling a modicum of emotion = necessary for personhood.
Possibly feeling a modicum of emotion =/= sufficient for personhood.

I don't think we refuse to call fruit flies people for the sole reason that we are convinced they don't have any possible "emotional" response. We might be convinced of such, but if the flies pass that hurdle there's still... quite a bit they'd need to learn.

And, um... yeah, I think the plot premise of The Fly is still absurd.

[robvalue]

What we label as our emotions is really only an arbitrary grouping of certain brain patterns. So I should think certainly anything with a brain could have "emotions". What it "feels like" to experience them is anyone's guess. We show our emotions a lot more than animals, but that doesn't mean animals' or even insects' emotions should be ignored, in my opinion.

[vorlon13]

Seth Brundle: You have to leave now, and never come back here. Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects... don't have politics. They're very... brutal. No compassion, no compromise. We can't trust the insect. I'd like to become the first... insect politician. Y'see, I'd like to, but... I'm afraid, uh...

Ronnie: I don't know what you're trying to say.

Seth Brundle: I'm saying... I'm saying I - I'm an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over... and the insect is awake.

Ronnie: No. no, Seth...

Seth Brundle: I'm saying... I'll hurt you if you stay.

[bennyboy]

First of all, the existence of sentience or primitive feelings are not the criteria most people use for determining whether an animal should be protected. For the most parts, it's "Pets and people, keep 'em. Anything else: eat 'em, kill 'em, or make them work." As for personhood-- get real. A gorilla's not a person, so a fly is a few orders of magnitude from being called one.

Also, it depends what you mean by emotions. I'm sure that insects have some level of subjective experience, and some instinctive reponse to stimuli, and that these interact. Why not? 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?

[Napoléon]

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?

[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.

[AFTT47]

Intuitively, I don't think the necessary brain complexity is there. But then again, we really don't know how much complexity is required. I really hope they aren't because boy, would that ever complicate ethics.

[Anomalocaris]

Computer can, and has been, programmed to respond exactly like that. It's a simple program too. Does a computer so programmed experience emotion?