>>5114217
Literally everything with a noticeably centralized brain is “self aware” no matter how conditioned they are to reflections. As in, it must know it exists to handle basic concepts like self grooming, property, territory, and more advanced navigation than bumping into things. At one point people became fond of this idea that animals are hilariously large compilations of if-then-else statements but its actually simpler, evolutionarily and biologically, for it to just know it exists and figure out how to serve its own needs.

The number of small little retards like fish and ants passing the mirror test is a huge hint that everything bigger that failed it was actually self aware and either uninterested in touching/removing the spot or wasnt used to mirrors and had a stronger fear instinct overriding consideration.

The real question is if they think about thinking or just know they exist

I wonder how many people are olfactory self-aware

>>5114242
Having been to a TCG store before: very few.

>>5114221
>it must know it exists to handle basic concepts like self grooming, property, territory
Couldn't those just be instinct and basically automated without the animal understanding why it's doing what?
>more advanced navigation than bumping into things
I'm not sure. I don't think you need self awareness to see a wall and avoid it. Computer programs can do that.

>>5114267
>it could be a giant conflagration of case statement logic so surely it is
it makes you feel more comfortable if it is but its easier to just make part of a brain bigger until rudimentary consciousness emerges than it is to hone mechanistic behavioral pathways, considering how evolution actually works. then the brain can hone pathways on its own instead of waiting for the genetic dice roll.

>>5114267
Understanding (or thinking you understand) your own behaviors is thinking about thought and even humans tend to be wrong about it
Simple self awareness is knowing you exist and are not someone else
Being self aware means knowing you are walking and where in space and time you are, but not necessarily why

>>5114269
>it makes you feel more comfortable if it is
I don't really care and I agree that a lot of animals are smarter than we give them credit for. I just don't think that self awareness is a hard requirement for shit like grooming and territory like you said. Those are relatively simple actions and ideas that could be automated through instinct. Not saying the necessarily are, but just arguing against the point that they can't be.
>but its easier to just make part of a brain bigger until rudimentary consciousness emerges than it is to hone mechanistic behavioral pathways, considering how evolution actually works
Yeah makes sense. A bunch of if-else statements will approach the complexity of basic counsciousness anyway but they'll completely fail in a new scenario that a conscious being would be able to improvise in.

>>5114271
>Simple self awareness is knowing you exist and are not someone else
>Being self aware means knowing you are walking and where in space and time you are, but not necessarily why
That's not wrong, but I don't think it's the definition people typically think of when they hear the term. By that definition a pathfinding algorithm is self aware.

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314 KB JPG

My cat not only recognizes herself in the giant mirror next to her cat tree, but she also likes to look at it from different angles and spies on me with it.

>>5114276
A pathfinding algorithm never knows where it is and that it is. You probe its state to determine how the algorithm has progressed up to that point.

A self aware animal is familiar with its own state as a fact. It contains the pathfinding algorithm, the observer, and the probing mechanism all at once.
It can also want, not just… progress. That’s a common trait, desiring.

It just doesn’t have to know or ask why it does something or wants something.

>>5114285
>A pathfinding algorithm never knows where it is and that it is. You probe its state to determine how the algorithm has progressed up to that point.
Well true. I guess I meant more so an NPC that's running the algorithm. The NPC knows its own XYZ coordinates and velocity. That would technically fit your definition of self awareness.
>It can also want, not just… progress. That’s a common trait, desiring.
True, but that's going beyond the definition you posted.

>>5114221
It's not really relevant. Everyone wants to pretend animals are dumb to justify mistreatment.
>>5114283
OP's test is also probably heard to measure because there's intelligence within species. Some cats are smart, some are retarded. Probably lots of other species where they happened to test dumb ones.

>>5114289
Sorry you don’t get it bruv. Being too literal is an incelmaxxed cope for gigaplebs that can’t nuancemog brainlets.
In other word, I didnt’t just expound, I clarified. The reference to desire wasn’t beyond the concept I put forth. It was beyond your limited interpretation of it.
–.
*sips wine*
*pets cat*

You now remember 6yo children in africa failed to recognize their own reflections

>>5114283
Kitty!

>>5114217
This fish species is more intelligent than any cat

>>5114217
Wrasses (Labridae) in general are intelligent fishes

>>5114217
Fish possess consciousness. This has been proven repeatedly.

>>5114221
fpbp

>>5114221
Fish are intelligent:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/these-fish-know-when-youre-watching-them/

>>5117671
Mammalfags and birdfags always be coping

>>5117671
Don't underestimate fish:

This shows that the individual steps in nest building are innate, but cichlids only become master nest builders through practice. Remarkably, fish that were given another chance at nest building after a whole year without access to snail shells still displayed the skills of practiced architects and did not have to start from scratch—they were able to remember what they had learned even after this long period.

The researchers also explored whether the fish could adapt to unexpected challenges to their nest-building program. They exposed the fish to 3D-printed, sinistral snail shells. These shells are extremely rare in nature and are a mirrored version of the natural shell of right chirality. Amazingly, after just a short time the fish learned to simply change direction, rotating the shell counterclockwise rather than clockwise into the sand as they do for dextral shells.

"For a long time, it was assumed that nest building consisted of purely innate behavioral patterns. But studies in birds and our own research show that cognitive abilities such as learning, remembering and adapting also play important roles," says Swantje Grätsch, project leader at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence and first author of the study.

https://phys.org/news/2026-04-underwater-architects-cichlids-reveals-hardwired.html

""Accordingly, we were able to show that during nest building in cichlids, brain regions homologous to the mammalian hippocampus are active, which is known to be responsible for precisely these abilities. We are only just beginning to understand how complex this goal-directed behavior and the underlying processes in the brain really are."

>>5117671
>>5118734
https://phys.org/news/2026-03-damselfish-lines-regional-accents.html

Courtship calls among two species of fish commonly found on Australian coral reefs have been described, and researchers say their "accents" can vary significantly between regions. Scientists led by the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) and the Center for Marine Science and Technology (CMST) at Curtin University combined audio and visual tools to study two closely related Damselfish species—Dascyllus aruanus and Dascyllus reticulatus—finding they each produce distinct courtship pulse sounds. Characterizing variation in fish sounds associated with reproduction improves scientists' ability to detect species remotely and, in some cases, measure spawning success.

Researchers found the sounds varied strongly between two reef locations featured in the study, indicating that factors such as local dialects and environmental conditions, may influence how sounds are produced by the small black and white fish. The findings are published in Scientific Reports.

Recording and attributing the pulse sounds of the damselfish for this study was a difficult task. Many fish sounds remain undocumented because it is hard to attribute the cacophony of sounds on biodiverse places like coral reefs to individual species, or to their particular behaviors.

>>5114221
Goddamnit, finally someone who gets it.

>>5119001
Try looking at these studies, fag:

>>5117671
>>5118734
>>5118812

>>5114217
Why do chuds get so mad at the thought that fish are intelligent?

>>5114217
Fish were here before mammals and they will be here after mammals

>>5119337
What if I drink all the world’s water? Then what, smart guy?

>>5119374
the humans would perish because they can't survive without water

>>5118812
Fish acoustics is crazy, theres ~36,000 species and so far ~1000 were confirmed to produce sound which are mostly unique to their respective species

>>5120153
Source for this claim?

>>5120178
>Looby, A., Erbe, C., Bravo, S. et al. Global inventory of species categorized by known underwater sonifery. Sci Data 10, 892 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02745-4

admittedly, I think I took the 36000 species count from a different article that counts extant species, regardless this is a good article that reviews articles that confidently identified sound production.

>>5114221
you don't have an aquarium, do you?

>>5114217
People seething itt are just mad the fish passed the test while cats didn't

false flagging toxohead up above ^

>>5114221
A big issue with this debate is that is entirely sight dependent. Even something like a dog, who has pretty good eyesight and can identify things by sight, doesn't treat it as its primary sense for a lot of things. If an object doesn't SMELL like its favorite ball, then it is not is favorite ball. It doesn't matter to the dog if it looks like the ball.
Similarly to humans, if something looks like your mom, you think its your mom even if its some alien body snatcher with a completely different scent.
It'd be like putting a mostly blind man in front a mirror and declaring he's not aware because he can't identify himself in the mirror. Well duh, because the blind man (or dog) doesn't use sight as the primary sense identifier.

>>5120599
not false flag. A cat would not be able to complete the same complex tasks that a cleaner wrasse can.

>>5114217
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/these-tiny-fish-check-themselves-out-in-a-mirror-before-deciding-whether-to-fight-180985061/

Bluestreak cleaner wrasse set up “cleaning stations” on the reefs, then wait for other fish to show up so they can eat the parasites. They also have good memories and can recognize more than 100 different “clients.”

Last year, researchers also showed that bluestreak cleaner wrasse could recognize themselves in photos after looking at their reflection in a mirror.

Scientists wanted to explore the bluestreak cleaner wrasse’s self-awareness on an even deeper level, so they set up a series of new experiments.

In the first phase, researchers placed a bluestreak cleaner wrasse inside a clear fish tank. Then, they held photos against the glass showing bluestreak cleaner wrasses of varying sizes—some that were 10 percent larger than the fish in the tank, and some that were 10 percent smaller. No matter which photo the scientists showed, the bluestreak cleaner wrasse inside the tank tried to attack it.

Next, the team repeated the same experiment but added a mirror to the tank. The fish checked out their own reflection before deciding whether to fight—and they would only battle photos of smaller intruders, not larger ones.

To scientists, this suggests that bluestreak cleaner wrasse are capable of understanding their own body size, as well as how their body size stacks up against a rival.

“This was unexpected because we had an image that this fish always shows aggression against rivals, regardless of size,” says study co-author Taiga Kobayashi.

There are no mirrors in the wild, so the findings also suggest that cleaner wrasse adapted and learned to use the mirror as a self-preservation tool. This discovery can “help clarify the similarities between human and non-human animal self-awareness and provide important clues to elucidate how self-awareness has evolved."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ujy9EmUzN4E

>>5120604
>If an object doesn't SMELL like its favorite ball, then it is not is favorite ball. It doesn't matter to the dog if it looks like the ball.
that could just mean that smell is that much of an important factor to it that it is what makes the ball its favourite ball, even if the dog knows that its technically the same object. it's like when you have a favourite piece of clothing but you change the color

>>5121160
much more impressive than any cat

>>5114221
you sound like the retard if you think fish can't be smarter than some mammals

>>5120819
>>5121160
> Some fish can resolve relative sizing up. That makes them better than cats.
How dumb are you, precisely? There's garden snakes that can do this. It is likely that every single mammalian carnivore does it. We all naturally fear/feel on edge around large animals precisely because our brain always runs a "is this large enough to be a threat" routine in the background, it's the basic process of determining if something is dangerous or not.
You are literally trying to pretend cats don't know fear. That's how retarded your position is.

>>5122466
The wrasse can use a mirror to compare relative sizes despite never encountering a mirror in its native habitat. A cat sees its reflection in a mirror and attacks it because it's stupid enough to think it's another cat despite being exposed to mirrors for centuries via domestication.

>>5122468
A fearless cleaner wrasse almost nothing ever hurts is not going to have the self preserving primal stress reaction of a solitary mesopredator (predator and also prey) aka cat.

Plenty of cats get used to mirrors and admire themselves in them. So do dogs. And cows.

The mirror test is flawed. Get the fuck over it. The science itself is flawed. Ancient cavemen had a better understanding of animal awareness than materialist sceptics.
>bbbut science and logic!
Dont believe your lying eyes believe the leaps of logic, cherry picked data points and poor experimental design of some abject failure that couldn’t hack it in the hard sciences sure

>>5122475
Cleaner wrasse do occasionally get eaten by predators which is why they have to be discerning about who their clients are and commit relevant details to memory. Their self-preservation strategy just happens to select for higher intelligence than a cat's.

>>5122468
And how do you know the cat isn't running a relative size up calculation on its image in a mirror? Why is a kitten having a reaction to something that will never happen in the wild, to which he has never been selected for, dumber for it than a fish *not* reacting to it and just running the exact same set of behavior it would always run no matter what?

>>5122551
>And how do you know the cat isn't running a relative size up calculation on its image in a mirror?

Because there's no evidence that's the case. Even the Ancient Egyptians had mirrors. How long do cats need before they figure out what a mirror is?

>>5122555
>>5122539
You must be the anticatschizo that other retard accuses everyone of being

There are plenty of cats that get used to mirrors and use them. They default to freaking out because another cat would hurt them before they had a chance to figure out if it was a reflection or not.

The mirror test is NOT a valid measure of self awareness and never will be. Its sole purpose is providing the results that are convenient for atheist moralizers trying to invent an animal value hierarchy that fits their preconceptions.

>>5122555
>Because there's no evidence that's the case.
There is no evidence fishes are aware of the values that are taken in account in setting their behavior. If you can overmine proofs, I can undermine them.
>How long do cats need
Anecdotal : I have raised 7 cats in my life (I'm 42), I've never had one freak out on its image in the mirror. Jump scares, surely. But then again I've had jump scares walking into a room with a reflective surface I didn't expect, caught my reflection on the side, that doesn't mean I couldn't use a mirror to size up the difference in size between me and something else.
They do seem to lose interest in mirrors very quickly, and don't appear to care about their own reflected image as much as you'd expect from such a vain animal.
This is a very very dumb line of argument. You've reduced self-awareness to the product of cognitive processing, even if cats were to fail a single identifiable task, it wouldn't suggest they are dumber than something that can resolve it. Cats could have a thousand overriding behaviors sets in that means they fail this simple test. Because they don't need to succeed it, or rather, because its more valuable to fail it and succeed at others. Domestic cats are pretty much the perfect example of the expected brain-to-mass ratio in a mammalian carnivore, with no deviation. They aren't dumb, they just aren't smart, by our skewed standards. I couldn't start estimating by what amount the brain of a cat dwarfs that of a fish, but I'm confident its a lot.
There's just so many assumptions hidden behind your argument it would take a 500 page essay to identify them all.

>>5122627
>There is no evidence fishes are aware of the values that are taken in account in setting their behavior.

Yes, there is. See:

>>5121160

>>5122690
No, this is evidence that the fish is capable of equating the image in the mirror to itself, not that he has awareness that this requires inferential steps. This could all be done reflexively by cognitive circuitry which never manifest in any other way to the fish than as what sets its behavior. Perhaps the fish doesn't even recognize itself, but a "sibling shape", and attacks purely as a reflexive defensive tactic (hyper-aggression does work, depending on the animals in question, statistically).
And still no evidence to suggest cats fail this test, or could not accomplish its equivalence.
AND further, no attempt to address the fact that if this is a test for self-awareness, then there's no reason to discount the dozens of other forms of cognitive self-awareness found in animal life. Any form of continuity or mereology established or pointed out by a cognitive process is a contributing factor to your self-awareness.

>>5114217
Anyone who pretends there is a cutoff for "sentience" is a midwit who wants to feel superior or abuse animals.

Spiders, rats, birds, and other small insects can all have friendly relationships with humans. If you dont agree you're a retard.

>>5122818
Behold! A redditor! Can you explain why 5 year old African humans can't pass the OP test?

The mirror test should have remained where it was designed: human children's mental developement progress

It is absolutely not a good measure of self awareness in animals. The cleaner wrasse's unique lifestyle where grooming has a special importance makes it "pass". Yes it is self aware and so are all fish. You realy need to do mental acrobatics to strip animals of conciousness.

>>5122910
>Behold! A redditor!
You do realize I agree fishes are self-aware, right? That, if you wish to adopt the definition set by OP (and it isn't "wrong", its just one among many, and "self-aware" is an essentially hazy term), then insects, fishes, birds and all mammals are self-aware, and possibly lower down.
I doubt spiders can be "friendly", but not that they are somewhat aware.
>>5122910
>Can you explain why 5 year old African humans can't pass the OP test?
Hypothesis : they do not have, on average, the attention span required to properly interpret generic linguistic instructions. I would like to test if they fail to use the mirror when given non-specific instructions by their parents, and specific instructions (so, a scenario like the fish, where they have to solve the issue by personal inference, and one where the parent explicitly asks the kids to identify himself in a mirror, and then compare to results from non-related instructors and observers.)
>>5122920
>You realy need to do mental acrobatics to strip animals of conciousness.
Not really? I mean, with all we know now, not recognizing that most animals on our scale have to be self-aware is pretty grotesque. But some living beings have a world made up of 2~3 things. A fly's behavior is mostly set by a cluster of 12 neurons set with binary values (smells good/feels the right temperature/humidity = go toward).

Mammalcels SEETHING in this thread

>>5123140
>A fly's behavior is mostly set by a cluster of 12 neurons set with binary values (smells good/feels the right temperature/humidity = go toward).
Household insects also have different flight or flight tendencies. (learned the hard way trying to film closely in a tropical country)

>>5123200
>Household insects also have different flight or flight tendencies.
Yes, that insects can have their behavior set by a very small number of neurons (as in, less than a 100) doesn't mean they'll all produce the same behavior at all times. Neurons set and updates their signal firing value at all time, so even a completely programmatic being could show some degree of adaptability in its actions.
Given the relative simplicity of some beings and that computionalist models were pretty much the first that seemed to reach the level of "hard scienc-ism" required for a field to be thought of seriously, it isn't at all that surprising that we thought the cut off for consciousness was higher than "insects".

>>5122930
lmao stupid cat doesn't even recognize its own reflection

>>5123200
>>5123212
https://www.baka.com.au/environment/conservation/scientists-in-a-buzz-over-discovery-that-bees-can-understand-numbers-20260421-p5zptz.html

>>5114390
>Everyone wants to pretend animals are dumb to justify mistreatment.
Ah, yes. Puppies don’t really chase their tails - it’s just a myth we made up so we have an excuse to kick puppies.

>>5123866
Tail chasing is just fun. Not a sign of missing self awareness.

If you had a tail, you’d grab it for fun too.

>>5123830
wow, even bees are more intelligent than cats...

>>5119015
because then they can't stuff their gullets with fish

>>5114221
The mirror test is one of the most flawed tests ever conceived.
Why the fuck would most animals care about what they look like in a mirror?

>>5123871
This.
Humans do a LOT more weird shit with themselves to pass time when they are bored.

>>5124383
we can eat smart fish any day of the week but delusional libtards trying to make fish more expensive with pointlessly extensive welfare laws and subsequently ceding the rest of the seafood market to china (no animal protection laws whatsoever) is a real threat. we don’t value life based on the assumed intelligence of subhuman creatures. liberals however do as its one of the ways atheists desperately attempt to be moral without admitting that without god, morality is just feelings and darwinian theories.

we must deny fish intelligence for what awaits fish if the west elevates them and the market immediately shifts (this already happened to pork) is far worse than what goes on in seattle

>>5114221
>everything bigger that failed it was actually self aware and either uninterested in touching/removing the spot
Theres a video floating around of people with a cat face app for their phones and when they showed it to their cat sittimg next to them and the cat saw the live feed of themself next to their "person" with a cat face on the screen they tripped the fuck out on their person sitting next to them.
100% proof they recognize themselves in the mirror image on the phone and even understand something is fucked up about their owner.

>>5125595
I feel those are a little too disingenuous on whats happening sometimes, especially since its always women on social media
We need to do a scientifically controlled recreation of those events to confirm

>>5125595
>the cat saw the live feed of themself next to their "person" with a cat face on the screen they tripped the fuck out on their person sitting next to them.
What does this prove? Typical retarded cat behavior.

>>5125595
no they don't lol

>>5125876
Anon didn't explain it well but the point is that the cats in those videos will turn to investigate their owner in real life rather than focusing on what's on the phone, i.e. they're able to recognize that what's on the phone screen is not reality but only a reflection of it. Of course you'd need a proper study to actually research this and not random tiktok videos that could easily be staged.

>>5114217
I’ve always thought fish were underrated. Just because they look googly doesn’t mean they feel or think googly. They think and feel a lot more than taken for.

>>5114217
>https://youtu.be/Drbl5udwk9
Anton's videos are good

>>5114285
>A self aware animal is familiar with its own state as a fact. It contains the pathfinding algorithm, the observer, and the probing mechanism all at once.
This could all be accomplished on the data. The "observer" could simply be a delayed structured simulation allowing to query other functions. "Desiring", or the ability to set its own goal, isn't functionally mysterious.
The scientific question here is, is the form of self-awareness we are familiar with intrinsic to complex living organism, if so in what way, is it emergent, if so what are its conditions, or is it itself an adaptive feature, and if so what are its mechanism.
imho, it is emergent, but so early that it might as well be intrinsic. Worms could just be mobile mouths, stomachs, and anuses, they don't seem to have or need anything more to be, makes sense Nature had to figure out how to scale the engine before anything else. To effectively use anything we add more to the machine, it needs to be able to monitor itself, which it can only do by comparing all the data it processes against itself (because it literally has nothing else at hand). Anything that has an Umwelt, that is to say, that interact not only from the data but from the represented sum (or possibly only some of) its data is aware.

>>5127599
what about ants and bees?

>>5128603
So, the difference I see are in ways a system processes data, between a more mechanistic model and one where some form of global representation of the processes are made available and help guide the being's actions in a world where inputs cannot be entirely predicted.
Its not impossible that self-awareness is a very late emergent property that very few animals, perhaps none outside of humans have, we know even our brains function at least as a sum of innumerable mechanistic processes, but our first-hand experience teaches us it doesn't end entirely there. The brain does something similar with visual data as those 3d recording cameras in order to give us depth perception, it seems in fact those cameras are much more efficient than brains in the way they do this. Those cameras could be programed with a log of when they turn on and how long they stay off, could have an OS that gather a whole bunch of data on its functioning, but we have no reason to believe its aware of the world in the same way even an ant is.
If its just a question of scale, well, you could model humans as p-zombies directed by a branching tree of hyper-astronomical size. But we know that's not all there is (and even by the argument that the plus-value is an illusion, well, its still there, there's still more to it.). Its inconsistent to know we have this and refuse it to less complex animals.
An animal that is not aware of its own individuality inside a world makes sense only to me if we posit it is an incomplete, early prototype, which is what I've been represented worms as, just the most "bare bone" living engine capable of motion. They sense one thing or two and move toward it and eat. I could see that being done entirely "blind". But maybe not. Ants and bees are aware and self-aware, 100%.

>>5128750
Awareness probably grows with the number of senses you have, on the other hand self-awareness comes from a myriad of functions and and mostly implied by an animal's general behavior. We have a "feeling" of identity which comes from various source, there's cognitive functions that establish continuity between our memories when we lose consciousness, and we naturally assume the permanence of objects which behave a certain way when we move around our environment. When you see an animal evaluate an appropriate landing spot before a leap, it shows self-awareness in a limited form.

>>5128766
what about cephalopods?

>>5129439
Nothing seems to suggest that they are "incomplete" animals, the only sense they are missing from the mammals we usually consider "higher level" is hearing, and they've got ways to mimic that.
I've read they are social animals, I assume that's expressed in more ways than just staying in a pod, if so that's very likely awareness and self-awareness right there.
The fundamental differences in our environment could also mean that our respective forms of consciousness are not translatable 1 to 1. Being aquatic means what's available to an animal, at any point of its evolution, is different from being a landborn animal (just like being at different scales means different options are available...). Language to certain whales means being able to communicate with every other whale around the planet, from the start. Buoyancy and the lack of support means a whole bunch of logical problems we have to face are not available for them to have to resolve, and therefore they don't need to develop much of a relation to those aspects of the world. I think there's a moral dimension touched here, in that at some point, we have to assume awareness and self-awareness despite not having any concrete proof of it, purely because of how impolite being wrong about it is.
Their reproduction cycles being so draconian is one of the things I find screwed up about Nature. They clearly aren't on the same "level" as mayflies, but in a way, I hope they aren't so conscious as to experience suffering, because that's brutal.

State a useful definition of awareness and self-awareness before you write a wall of cringe

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>>5125876

>>5129528
Assuming you are speaking to me, that would be dumb because whatever paradigm produced that definition is already known to be unable to represent awareness. There's still phenomenological work to be done before any attempt at a useful definition can be produced. That's essentially what this whole thread is about, how dumb and arbitrary and missing the bigger picture all those moronic mirror tests are.

>>5128750
What about the high IQ of jumping spiders?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRQMOF5c2Z8

>>5114217
In our new study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, we searched for behavioural signs of pain in house crickets, one of the most widely farmed insects. After applying heat to an antenna, we found that crickets didn’t just reflexively flinch and recover. They nursed the harm, returning again and again to groom the affected site, much as we rub a burned hand.

rench philosopher René Descartes considered animals unfeeling biological machines, and for centuries the circle of moral concern barely extended beyond our own species.

But the boundaries have steadily crept outward. Recognition that mammals experience pain came first, followed by birds. Fish too, once assumed to lack the necessary brain structures, are now widely accepted as capable of pain-like states.

The leap into invertebrates has been greater and more contentious. Their nervous systems bear little resemblance to our own, so arguments from brain anatomy alone don’t carry us far. Instead, we look to behaviour. Does the animal respond to harm in ways that go beyond reflex, ways that are flexible, persistent, and sensitive to context?

Over the past decade, testable indicators for pain in non-humans have been developed and are increasingly accepted. These include learning from unpleasant events, trading off harms against rewards, and actively protecting the site of injury. Evidence meeting these criteria helped crabs and lobsters gain legal recognition as sentient under United Kingdom law in 2022.

Among insects, the evidence has been accumulating fast. Yet most of this evidence comes from bees. Bumblebees weigh the risk of harm against the richness of a food reward, and groom the site of an injury. Honeybees learn to associate particular smells with harmful stimuli and avoid them.

Far less attention has been paid to Orthoptera. That gap matters, because the house cricket is the world’s most widely farmed insect, with more than 370 billion reared annually.

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>>5114217
Meanwhile, ANTS

>>5130939
I don’t care if crickets "feel pain" (have a damage avoidance and fluid flow stimulation algorithm) or if a cow can be trained to use a brush. Your religion is retarded. Being vegan for ethical reasons is morally impermissible. Being a vegan for religious reasons is okay because then you get to go to hell for not obeying genesis.

The absolute most crickets can do is be on the absolute edge of the "going out of your way to torture this for no reason shows somewhat poor character" category.

There is no such thing as a “carnist”. It’s actually called normal. Humans are carnivores. This is a fact. The human body does not function or develop properly without regular uptake of animal products. The best it can do without them is just not die… immediately. Without the whole world built and maintained by stronger, smarter meat eaters to support you, you would be a cretin, instead of just a dysfunctional little "brahmin" suffering from the neurosis of an animal reared in captivity by animals reared in captivity.

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>>5114217
Maybe we all are just a dead skin in a huge bowl of wrassels

>>5120819
Now try asking a fish to climb a tree... Exactly, that's what I thought
Epic victory for me

>>5114221
I think for a lot of animals, it is just a case of not really caring about eyesight in the same way that humans do.
Like if you're a species that relies mostly on smell, then the mirror test is pretty limited in utility because flipping it around - how many humans could identify their own smell?

>>5131193
there are lots of fish that can climb

>>5130972
Why would someone simply quoting a study suggesting something as dumb as "animals actually feel pain, they don't just act it out" send you on this diatribe?
The argument that animal feels pain is a moral one, beyond that of their consumption, it relates to truth about the world. The only neurotic here is (you), with your extreme onlineness preventing you from being able to approach the object of discussion properly.

>>5132775
>The argument that animal feels pain is a moral one
No, it isn’t. Basing morals on pain and suffering is a pseudointellectual white guy thing. Your primitive neanderthal hedonist-pagan roots haven’t been properly killed off.

>>5132776
>No, it isn’t.
Yes it is. It relates to truth, and truth is a moral value. You do not have to base morals on pain or its perception to acknowledge that it is a value that enters in the equation. This is very obvious, a murderer that sedate his victims is not guiltless, but it isn't as guilty as one that goes out of his way to maximize pain.
>Your primitive neanderthal hedonist-pagan roots
More memery. You obviously cannot provide much more, so don't bother replying, cunt.

>>5132782
See, more pagan greek garbage. This doesn’t work until you go all the way down to mystical harmony with the natural order nonsense. That’s why you threw in a false equivalence (murder and torture of humans) for emotional appeal.

You either obey G-d or is there is no morality beyond self benefit and kin selection.

The pain of a mere beast has no relevance to either. Save idolaters who worship rabbi yeshua “dont wash your hands before eating” bar pantera and stretch the fuck out of some scamming apostles offhand comment about tending oxen. And idolaters who worship literal demons (eastern religions). If you wanna be with those smellies, get the fuck away from me.

>>5132785
Alright, I'll bite, if anything because it might provide some insight into the specific kind of brainworm infecting you.
>See, more pagan greek garbage.
You have obviously missed the line of progression between Aristotle and Christian thought. Every single Christian thinker would agree that truth is a moral value.
>>5132785
>This doesn’t work until you go all the way down to mystical harmony with the natural order nonsense.
The Renaissance's Treatment of Arcadia in Catholic Pastoralism for 500, Jerry
>You either obey G-d or is there is no morality beyond self benefit and kin selection.
I either accept your forced dichotomy, or I don't.
>The pain of a mere beast has no relevance to either.
Complete and absolute vanity.
Beasts are better Christians than you are.

>>5114217
I understand the self-awareness thing, but are you telling me animals are startled there's an upside down animal inside the pond when they go to schlorp their water every day