Pain and pleasure are the greatest survival teachers, I’d expect them to be the basest feelings a living thing can have.
Saying some creatures don’t feel pain just because their physiology is different is like how we were taught that animals couldn’t think back in the 20th century.
“Survival of the fittest” is about a species, not an individual. For larger animals pain and pleasure are the greatest teachers, because we can learn from those. These species benefit from individuals learning survival skills. Insects have no use for it, they don’t learn to adapt, they survive through numbers, their behavior adapts through evolution.
They react to damage the same way plants do. If you want to call that pain, sure. It doesn’t make sense evolutionary that they would suffer from it though.
And we know it’s not inherent to life. Even some people are born without nociceptors because of genetic issues. Not-suffering is a big problem, kids get infections etc because they don’t learn to stop hurting themselves.
Nature is very cruel, but not so evil to evolve suffering in animals who don’t have the capacity to learn from it.
Pain and pleasure are the greatest survival teachers, I’d expect them to be the basest feelings a living thing can have.
Saying some creatures don’t feel pain just because their physiology is different is like how we were taught that animals couldn’t think back in the 20th century.
“Survival of the fittest” is about a species, not an individual. For larger animals pain and pleasure are the greatest teachers, because we can learn from those. These species benefit from individuals learning survival skills. Insects have no use for it, they don’t learn to adapt, they survive through numbers, their behavior adapts through evolution.
They react to damage the same way plants do. If you want to call that pain, sure. It doesn’t make sense evolutionary that they would suffer from it though.
And we know it’s not inherent to life. Even some people are born without nociceptors because of genetic issues. Not-suffering is a big problem, kids get infections etc because they don’t learn to stop hurting themselves.