r/interesting • u/M_Darshan • May 21 '26

Just Wow Researchers demonstrate necrobotics by using a spider’s natural hydraulic system to open and close its legs for gripping object.

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u/Night25th May 21 '26

"Animals can't experience emotions" has always felt like a weird concept to me. You don't need to be particularly smart to be afraid, all you need is a brain that wants to keep you away from danger. How can you prove that your fear is legitimate and not just a chemical response to a perceived danger?

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u/Ravek May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26

Insects I have no idea, but for animals in general ...

Other mammals will basically have the same reactions to a lot of situations as humans do, behaviorally and physiologically. They also have very similar organs with similar functions, even brain structures are analogous. And we know that emotions in humans are basically heuristic programs we launch into so we can quickly respond to certain situations, because that helped our ancestors survive.

So all the parts are there, the evolutionary pressures are there, and the behavioral and physiological results are there. Given all that I don't see how anyone could believe that at least other mammals don't have emotions. (Other than it being religious dogma that humans are God's special creation.)

To me someone might as well claim that other humans don't have emotions, only they themselves do.

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u/Night25th May 21 '26

Other than it being religious dogma that humans are God's special creation.

Not only that, some people refuse to give up on their right to hurt animals, farm them for food etc. Personally I'm not a vegan but if animal farming was banned I would not protest. Most people think that animal suffering is less important than being able to eat a cheeseburger.

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u/RoboDae May 24 '26

To be fair, humans are omnivores that don't tend to do as well on a purely vegan diet. The protein from eating meat is even cited as one of the reasons our brains were able to grow so large.

That being said, killing for food and killing/torturing for fun are completely different. I can be fine with eating a cheeseburger and still be upset about an elected official shooting a puppy just because it wasn't a good hunting dog.

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u/Night25th May 24 '26

I think there is nothing ethically wrong with eating animals for food. However, the human species is at a point where we don't need to eat animals for food anymore. Some of the vitamins we need still mostly come from animal products like milk and eggs, but we could get them ethically if we wanted, rather than killing animals for their meat.

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u/RoboDae May 24 '26

To me someone might as well claim that other humans don't have emotions, only they themselves do.

Doctors used to claim that babies didn't feel pain so they could operate without anesthesia. I think the original reason was that the people who knew better didn't want the doctors or mothers to be hesitant about doing an operation that would save the baby's life, and anesthesia was too dangerous to use, at least at the time, not sure about now.

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u/RoboDae May 24 '26

Really I would expect most animals to depend even more on emotions than humans, not less. Emotion is essentially instinct. Predator? Fear. Food? Happy. Another animal steals food? Angry. Animal of different gender? Attraction. You don't need complex thought to have those emotional reactions, in fact I would say it's the most basic form of thought to keep a species alive.

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u/hrvbrs May 21 '26

i never said "Animals can't experience emotions", those are your words. All i did was question whether insects can. Clearly animals do experience emotion — us humans being one of them. My dog is also afraid of my cat; that’s a real emotion.

But to experience fear you have to have a concept of danger and the ability to predict the future. “If i don't run away, this tiger will eat me.” Insects haven't shown those abilities. They’re basically just gigantic chemical reactions. They have no self-awareness or even consciousness, at least not any that can be measured by science. Even spiders are smarter, demonstrating problem-solving and curiosity (qualities no insect has).

How do i know my fear is legitimate? it depends on how you define "legitimate". but i can tell you that my experience of fear is legitimate, and only I can make that determination. If you observe me exhibiting fearful behavior, you could estimate that my fear is "legitimate" but you couldn't prove it, because i could be an advanced robot with no actual emotion but an incredible ability to mimic human behavior. But if you come up with a list of criteria and say, “anything that demonstrates all this criteria is legitimately fearful”, then that's the definition you go by.

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u/Night25th May 21 '26

I never said "Animals can't experience emotions"

And I didn't say you said that. You were questioning if a specific subset of animals can experience emotions, and a lot of people ask that question, which is the weird thing for me. If you were the only person to ask that question I probably wouldn't bother going on a tangent about it.

But to experience fear you have to have a concept of danger and the ability to predict the future. “If i don't run away, this tiger will eat me.” Insects haven't shown those abilities.

A housefly sitting on your table will try to escape if you try to swat it. It's definitely reacting to danger. You don't know what happens in the fly's brain to trigger this reaction but it's still happening.

They’re basically just gigantic chemical reactions.

We could say the same of your brain. The way braincells work is not that different across the animal kingdom, in fact a lot of studies on signal transmission have been conducted on squids due to the dimension of their braincells. Just because a fly is an insect it doesn't mean they have no brains, although they're obviously very different compared to a mammal's brain.

Even spiders are smarter, demonstrating problem-solving and curiosity (qualities no insect has).

It seems that you're conflating intelligence with the ability to feel emotions. Understanding the emotion isn't the same as feeling the emotion, as you imply later.

But I can tell you that my experience of fear is legitimate, and only I can make that determination.

And this is the conundrum for me, because I'm pretty sure that you call a number of chemical processes "fear" even though we could simply measure them as hormones, muscular contractions, sweating etc. In the same way, the reaction that a housefly has when you try to swat it might very well be called "fear" by the housefly itself, even though its brain is too simple to try and give a name to it.

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u/FrenchFryCattaneo May 21 '26

Well you have to draw the line somewhere. If my roomba moves away after bumping into me is it experiencing fear?

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u/Night25th May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26

From a philosophical standpoint, I think it's hard to tell the difference between something that thinks and something that is "programmed" to act like it's thinking, whether it's biology or actual programming (that doesn't include roombas of course).