Jul 29, 2025 09:36 PM
Do lobsters and crabs feel? We’ve had the answer for years
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...-for-years
EXCERPTS: . . . many cultures (and until recently, much of mainstream science) have long treated fish and invertebrates as lesser, unfeeling beings. Fish, in particular, have historically been excluded from discussions of sentience partly due to their distant evolutionary relationship to mammals, and the absence of facial expressions or vocalizations that humans more readily empathize with. It’s this empathy gap that keeps myths like “fish can’t feel pain” alive.
Research continues to dismantle such assumptions. Fish have been shown to experience pain in a manner consistent with sentient animals, including possessing nociceptors and exhibiting long-term behavioral changes after being injured. Cleaner wrasse have even passed the mirror self-recognition test, a marker of self-awareness once reserved for great apes, dolphins, and elephants.
Invertebrates also defy expectations. Octopuses exhibit play behavior and problem-solving that suggests a level of cognition far more complex than previously thought. Hermit crabs show motivational trade-offs when exposed to electric shock, leaving their shells when the shock is more intense or when better shells are available, evidence that they experience pain and can weigh risks. This topic has also been covered by fellow Psychology Today blogger Marc Bekoff, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
[...] Countries such as the United Kingdom have passed legislation recognizing the sentience of cephalopods and decapods, and others are following suit. New Zealand includes octopuses and other invertebrates under its Animal Welfare Act, granting them explicit legal protection. In Italy, some cities have enacted local bans on boiling crustaceans alive. In Austria and Germany, animal welfare laws emphasize minimizing suffering for all animals during slaughter and handling, including invertebrates.
[...] Despite overwhelming scientific evidence, in the United States, crustaceans and cephalopods remain unprotected under federal law with organizations like the Maine Lobster Festival and the City of Rockland still participating in the practice of boiling these sentient creatures alive (a practice PETA is suing for, as of July 2025).
Rather than continuing to protect cruel and outdated traditions, it’s time for the United States to catch up and act on the science.
It’s also time for divers and scientists to dig deeper, to share experiences and to do more research into animal minds—research that is not attempting to justify keeping animals in inhumane conditions or using them as mere resources but rather to shed light on their inner life... (MORE - missing detail)
COMMENT: But you still have eliminative materialists who assert that the phenomenal states of consciousness do no exist even in humans: "Other versions [of EM] entail the nonexistence of conscious mental states such as pain and visual perceptions."
AI reveals language links between Reddit groups for hate speech, psychiatric disorders
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1092431
INTRO: A new analysis suggests that posts in hate speech communities on the social media website Reddit share speech-pattern similarities with posts in Reddit communities for certain psychiatric disorders. Dr. Andrew William Alexander and Dr. Hongbin Wang of Texas A&M University, U.S., present these findings July 29th in the open-access journal PLOS Digital Health.
The ubiquity of social media has raised concerns about its role in spreading hate speech and misinformation, potentially contributing to prejudice, discrimination and real-world violence. Prior research has uncovered associations between certain personality traits and the act of posting online hate speech or misinformation.
However, whether any associations exist between psychological wellbeing and online hate speech or misinformation has been unclear. To help clarify, Alexander and Wang used artificial intelligence tools to analyze posts from 54 Reddit communities relevant to hate speech, misinformation, psychiatric disorders, or, for neutral comparison, none of those categories. Selected groups included r/ADHD, a community for discussing attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, r/NoNewNormal, dedicated to COVID-19 misinformation, and r/Incels, a community banned for hate speech.
The researchers used the large-language model GPT3 to convert thousands of posts from these communities into numerical representations capturing the posts’ underlying speech patterns. These representations, or “embeddings,” could then be analyzed through machine-learning techniques and a mathematical approach known as topological data analysis.
This analysis showed that speech patterns in hate speech communities were similar to speech patterns in communities for complex post-traumatic stress disorder, and borderline, narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders. Links between misinformation and psychiatric disorders were less clear, but with some connections to anxiety disorders.
Importantly, these findings do not at all suggest that people with psychiatric disorders are more prone to hate speech or misinformation. For one, there was no way of knowing if the analyzed posts were made by people actually diagnosed with disorders. More research is needed to understand the links and explore such possibilities as hate speech communities mimicking speech patterns seen in psychiatric disorders.
The authors suggest their findings could help inform new strategies to combat online hate speech and misinformation, such as treating them using elements of therapy developed for psychiatric disorders... (MORE - details, no ads)
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...-for-years
EXCERPTS: . . . many cultures (and until recently, much of mainstream science) have long treated fish and invertebrates as lesser, unfeeling beings. Fish, in particular, have historically been excluded from discussions of sentience partly due to their distant evolutionary relationship to mammals, and the absence of facial expressions or vocalizations that humans more readily empathize with. It’s this empathy gap that keeps myths like “fish can’t feel pain” alive.
Research continues to dismantle such assumptions. Fish have been shown to experience pain in a manner consistent with sentient animals, including possessing nociceptors and exhibiting long-term behavioral changes after being injured. Cleaner wrasse have even passed the mirror self-recognition test, a marker of self-awareness once reserved for great apes, dolphins, and elephants.
Invertebrates also defy expectations. Octopuses exhibit play behavior and problem-solving that suggests a level of cognition far more complex than previously thought. Hermit crabs show motivational trade-offs when exposed to electric shock, leaving their shells when the shock is more intense or when better shells are available, evidence that they experience pain and can weigh risks. This topic has also been covered by fellow Psychology Today blogger Marc Bekoff, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
[...] Countries such as the United Kingdom have passed legislation recognizing the sentience of cephalopods and decapods, and others are following suit. New Zealand includes octopuses and other invertebrates under its Animal Welfare Act, granting them explicit legal protection. In Italy, some cities have enacted local bans on boiling crustaceans alive. In Austria and Germany, animal welfare laws emphasize minimizing suffering for all animals during slaughter and handling, including invertebrates.
[...] Despite overwhelming scientific evidence, in the United States, crustaceans and cephalopods remain unprotected under federal law with organizations like the Maine Lobster Festival and the City of Rockland still participating in the practice of boiling these sentient creatures alive (a practice PETA is suing for, as of July 2025).
Rather than continuing to protect cruel and outdated traditions, it’s time for the United States to catch up and act on the science.
It’s also time for divers and scientists to dig deeper, to share experiences and to do more research into animal minds—research that is not attempting to justify keeping animals in inhumane conditions or using them as mere resources but rather to shed light on their inner life... (MORE - missing detail)
COMMENT: But you still have eliminative materialists who assert that the phenomenal states of consciousness do no exist even in humans: "Other versions [of EM] entail the nonexistence of conscious mental states such as pain and visual perceptions."
AI reveals language links between Reddit groups for hate speech, psychiatric disorders
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1092431
INTRO: A new analysis suggests that posts in hate speech communities on the social media website Reddit share speech-pattern similarities with posts in Reddit communities for certain psychiatric disorders. Dr. Andrew William Alexander and Dr. Hongbin Wang of Texas A&M University, U.S., present these findings July 29th in the open-access journal PLOS Digital Health.
The ubiquity of social media has raised concerns about its role in spreading hate speech and misinformation, potentially contributing to prejudice, discrimination and real-world violence. Prior research has uncovered associations between certain personality traits and the act of posting online hate speech or misinformation.
However, whether any associations exist between psychological wellbeing and online hate speech or misinformation has been unclear. To help clarify, Alexander and Wang used artificial intelligence tools to analyze posts from 54 Reddit communities relevant to hate speech, misinformation, psychiatric disorders, or, for neutral comparison, none of those categories. Selected groups included r/ADHD, a community for discussing attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, r/NoNewNormal, dedicated to COVID-19 misinformation, and r/Incels, a community banned for hate speech.
The researchers used the large-language model GPT3 to convert thousands of posts from these communities into numerical representations capturing the posts’ underlying speech patterns. These representations, or “embeddings,” could then be analyzed through machine-learning techniques and a mathematical approach known as topological data analysis.
This analysis showed that speech patterns in hate speech communities were similar to speech patterns in communities for complex post-traumatic stress disorder, and borderline, narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders. Links between misinformation and psychiatric disorders were less clear, but with some connections to anxiety disorders.
Importantly, these findings do not at all suggest that people with psychiatric disorders are more prone to hate speech or misinformation. For one, there was no way of knowing if the analyzed posts were made by people actually diagnosed with disorders. More research is needed to understand the links and explore such possibilities as hate speech communities mimicking speech patterns seen in psychiatric disorders.
The authors suggest their findings could help inform new strategies to combat online hate speech and misinformation, such as treating them using elements of therapy developed for psychiatric disorders... (MORE - details, no ads)