“The Case for Insect Consciousness” by Vasco Grilo🔸

This is a crosspost for The Case for Insect Consciousness by Bob Fischer, which was originally published on Asterisk in January 2025.

[Subtitle.] The evidence that insects feel pain is mounting, however we approach the issue.

For years, I was on the fence about the possibility of insects feeling pain — sometimes, I defended the hypothesis;[1] more often, I argued against it.[2]

Then, in 2021, I started working on the puzzle of how to compare pain intensity across species. If a human and a pig are suffering as much as each one can, are they suffering the same amount? Or is the human's pain worse? When my colleagues and I looked at several species, investigating both the probability of pain and its relative intensity,[3] we found something unexpected: on both scores, insects aren’t that different from many other animals.

Around the same time, I started working with an [...]

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Outline:

(02:20) Uncomfortable studies

(04:12) Mere nociception?

(09:14) Don't move the goalposts

(10:33) Studying sentience

(18:38) Abiding doubt, and some replies

(22:42) The path to consideration

The original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
April 24th, 2025

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2RdYDcwrnvdCn2SbK/the-case-for-insect-consciousness

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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