 who give us an opportunity to try really hard to think outside of our own bodies, to think like a fly, to think about insects, experiences of pleasure and pain. Thanks both to Jonathan and Shannon for really wonderful talks. I turn it over to Margaret, who will launch our discussion. Thanks, Margaret. Yes, yes, let's do that. Thank you again. So I was wondering first if Shannon and Jonathan either had questions for each other or a response to having heard each other's talks? Well, I don't think there was any disagreement between us. And in fact, it sounds as though Shannon, I think really unusually, is an example of an insect researcher who cares very deeply about the welfare of experimental subjects that she's working with. I say unusually because I just don't think that's the norm internationally. In fact, I think what you were describing there where you tether the fly in the virtual reality arena but you release it at the end and you check that it's okay, that extra step would actually be very unusual. And so that's great. In a way, it seems like you're modelling the sort of good practice that this insect welfare research society exists to try and promote. And I think that I did like the measured approach that he took where we say, okay, well, we don't have full evidence of what is happening inside of the insect mind, but let's be as respectful as possible. I think this raises a very deep conversation that I think we could have for probably the rest of the conference on how do we then do that in the midst of our own human needs as well, right? We do need, I mean, I work in a country where, you know, vector-borne disease is very, very deadly, in fact. And the city I'm in right now in Bangalore, Dengue, is rampant. And so we can't just say, you know, let's not use any insecticide at all. Let's let people get sick because we don't have the other medicinal ways of combating Dengue, right? So I think this is an important conversation to have. I think it's a difficult conversation to have, but I think it's one to have. How do we balance these, ultimately, these different needs that we insects and other animals and even we can go as far as plants as well have on this planet to exist together with each other? Yeah. I think it's going to be very hard to produce disagreement between us. I'm absolutely not saying, you know, when the rationale is disease control, let's not kill any insects. That would be an example of a disproportionate action and I've always supported malaria nets, campaigns to try and attack malaria. There's lots of things we can do that are proportionate, I think. You know, it's no good pointing to some things and saying they would be disproportionate. Therefore, let's do nothing. That's a fallacious inference, so let's not do that. When some things are disproportionate, the next question should be, what can we do that is proportionate? Thank you. Other comments from the panelists about this discussion are about either of the two talks that we've just heard. Julie, your hand is... I have so many thoughts and I just don't know where to start. I just want to let you ask your questions. But I think, you know, if you don't mind me asking a question, if we're doing research on vertebrates, we have to go through animal permits in order to do that and we don't have it for invertebrates, clearly with cephalopods that we're making progress on that. But I'm just curious to, like, if you could start drafting some minimal best practices that we could start employing, where would you start? Jonathan, before you answer that question, would you talk a little bit about what standards are, for instance, in the UK and the United States when it comes to research on animals? Well, the protections are significantly stronger in the European Union and in the UK. One of the things I found really heartening is the extension right across the EU to cephalopod monosks, including octobuses but also cuttlefish, squid. So these animals, they're treated as honorary vertebrates and they receive some protection in science. And I think that should absolutely happen here as well. I want to see it here. There's no reason for it not to happen here. But I also want to go further than that. And, you know, we need to start recognizing that many other invertebrates, there's also a risk that we're hurting them when we do harmful procedures to them. And that certainly includes decapod crustaceans like crabs and lobsters. And as I say, I've come to strongly suspect that it includes insects as well. And then your question was, well, where to start? And where to start? Well, the website on my last slide, Insect Welfare Research Society, we've produced a code of practice that is absolutely just a draft starting point. It's saying there's a lot we don't know, but given the evidence we have, here are some suggestions. And there's a different type of permission that you have to think about, which I usually have to deal with, which is when you're going into a wild area, all of those beautiful pictures I have in the Himalayas, I had to have wildlife permits, add appropriate permissions. I of course had the permission from the local people, the indigenous people that lived in that area that I could work with them on their land. We were, in many cases, we weren't even touching the insects in those cases, but we would occasionally collect them for identification and purposes, and we had to have permits for that. So I think there's different levels, and that's very important to maintain the biodiversity and make sure that you're not taking too much for your own purposes. So I think those permits also could be strengthened in other ways as well, more from an ecological perspective, but there is both thinking about what you do in the lab but also thinking about what you do in nature as well. I have a question. I mean, this is purely curiosity. I would love to know what the panelists think. We've known for a very long time that perhaps some vertebrates that we rely on for food aren't necessarily being raised in the most humane conditions, and yet it persists, and it's persisted for a very, very long time, despite movies that are shown and films and billboards that are in Times Square and what have you. When I see photos of horseshoe crabs that are milked for their blood for vaccine purposes, it's disturbing to see it, but in some ways it's not unlike some of the videos that I've seen of chicken warehouses or slaughterhouses. What makes us think that we will have a different response from the general public towards caring for insects than what we've had for chickens or cows or... I mean, I hope we do. I'm agreeing with you, but I'm just curious, how do we get this compassion from people? It's a good point, because as you say, people have a lot of compassion for mammals, like dogs and cats, but often struggle to extend that to pigs or birds like chickens, for example, with really terrible consequences. Sometimes that's about not having really encountered these animals, not having read the research, just underestimating them, and there the answer is more events like this, more ways to get the information out there about how intelligent these animals are and how much they're capable of suffering. There might still be a problem, a sort of problem where even when people in their most reflective moments really agree, we've got to stop treating chickens and pigs like this. It doesn't always translate to consumer behavior in the supermarket, where one option is much cheaper than the other option. And there I think the answer has just got to be policy. I mean, that's... some place is much harder than in others, but you need action by companies and you need government encouraging that sort of action. And there's been some signs of this in the Netherlands, for example, where virtually all the supermarkets in the Netherlands have signed on to this commitment to avoid the fastest growing breeds of chicken, which have the lowest welfare, spend quite a lot of their lives in serious leg pain. So that's an example of how you can get industry buy-in, supported by government, supported by the public. But it's a lot of hard work, I think, to get to that point. And there needs to be viable alternatives, right? There needs to be viable alternatives for consumers to make choices that they can afford, right? If the humane option is out of your price range, I mean, then you don't really have much of a choice, right? And so we also have to work, as you said, with government and with industry and provide and also do more research. I think in some cases there aren't really financially viable alternatives to some of these inhumane techniques that provide the amount of food or revenue that is needed for a particular industry. So I think these things have to come together and work a little bit better on providing, you know, not just saying, don't do this, but saying we have an alternative that will give you an equivalent that is much more humane, that is much more respectful to the organism that you're using as food. Anna, I think you had a question. Yes. I was intrigued by these bumblebees playing. And how can you define playing? I was thinking, I mean, insects as other organisms will have to try out things. I mean, that was the way they also found out about pulling the strings. In that case, it ended up in a reward, but I mean, they would never have started doing that unless they had this sort of, not curiosity, and that could well be an instinct to sort of check out your environment, including, you know, pushing around these little nice balls. And big challenges in this area, and absolutely one of the big challenges is to distinguish play behaviour where we might want to say that it's not just exploratory behaviour, but rather involves taking some intrinsic delight in the action, you know, reward in the action, how to distinguish that from exploratory behaviour. And it is really hard. I mean, one of the things you can look at is whether the animal, having had plenty of time to learn that there is no reward, so plenty of time to habituate and just ignore it, nonetheless carries on. That seems to be pointing towards it getting some intrinsic reward from this behaviour. And that's what they did. They kept on playing with these balls, you know? I think curiosity itself is interesting, though, to and deserves, you know, a little attention. I know it from sort of like animal training that so much of our methods are like forcing our ideas on animals, and what we need, like, there's sort of a movement now to try to let them be more their curious selves and let us help them find the answers through their own natural curiosity. And so I think curiosity is sort of a motion or intellectual capacity that deserves its own recognition and then play is, you know, more than that. But I think just the fact that the bee goes around and is so curious to solve problems is intelligence in its own. Well, I mean, I've got to say I'm very interested to hear what Michael thinks about this. Michael, you've had a very illustrious career doing this kind of insect lab research without having to go through ethical review, for example. You know, anyone doing molecular biology using Drosophila, for example, is affecting the lives of tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of flies. And so it also sort of, you know, the questions you were raising, you know, how do you think about numbers in the case of insects? Especially since, you know, you presented plenty of evidence that insects feel pain. I mean, some of the original learning and memory studies in Drosophila were using electric shocks to train animals to prefer one odor over another where there was no preference before. So it's very clear that they react, that they learn and they react to not just stimuli. What I find difficult is knowing, you know, we do have sort of gradations in the way we treat vertebrate research animals, and what kinds of gradations might you be thinking about with these different insects that are so abundantly used for research, particularly molecular biology, where, you know, the numbers are really enormous, especially when you add up all the labs that are doing work. Yeah, it gets very difficult, yeah. And in our actual recommendations on the website, it's hard to go beyond, you know, in order to try and get consensus support, it's hard to go beyond things that are about just recommending humane ways of treating them. But if you're thinking about this in terms of the imperative to reduce, refine, replace, as they say, what we're focusing on there is really refinement. These questions about should this be something we're trying to reduce, I think, is a big and very difficult question, because a lot of the research inherently relies, as you say, on using very large numbers of animals. Yeah, I don't have an answer to that, but it's a really tricky dilemma, I think. I had a question for Shannon, at least to begin with. You were talking about insects observing their world and then responding to what they see. And I wanted to ask if you thought part of that was because insects are small, and one of the consequences of being small is that you often don't have a lot of control over your environment, so you kind of have to respond to what's there. So to what extent do you think that part of this might be a consequence of scaling? And if insects were the size of us, do you think they'd still be observing and adapting? Well, that's a good question. It's a really hard question. Why'd you give me the hard question? I knew you could handle it. You're correct, and I think your opening talk was so beautifully said that they are at the whims of many things that we don't... You mentioned friction and adhesion. They have completely different levels to an insect that's small, right? And they're also, you know, they're subject to the wind when they're flying. We can fly a plane in pretty heavy winds, but they get drift, they experience drift, right? And they have to quickly correct for that. They're suddenly blown off course, and now they have to figure out, where am I and what do I need to do to get back to where they are, I do think you're right. I do think because they're subject to the world's forces to a large extent, perhaps much larger than certainly we or any larger animal would be, but that's part of it. They also just have incredibly fast processing of information. They do have tiny brains. They do have fewer levels of neurons that need to go through to get to their motor centers or their wings. So they are quite fast, and they do often use, you know, as I showed in the talk, sometimes very simplistic algorithms, but very powerful ones that allow them to parse their space with relatively little processing. And that's an advantage for them because, you know, they don't, in many cases, have as long of a lifespan as we do. They don't have as long of a wait to eat food, so they have to find things very quickly. So I do think life, they live life in the fast lane in many ways, and that's very important to keep in mind that the time scales for us and the time scales for an insect are generally quite different. So I do think all of those things play a role together. Can I ask a question, Shannon? I mean, I totally agree with the point about time scale. Do you think that the bees in the experiments I was describing predict, you know? They anticipate, they can anticipate, for example, that this will give a sweeter reward than this, this will be hotter than that. And so I'm wondering how strong a claim you want to make here. I don't think they're living entirely in the present moment. I think they have some escape from immediacy. They can do a bit of prediction and anticipation. What they don't have is what we have, just worrying about the future years ahead and the future of the entire planet and so on. Do you agree with that, or do you really think they don't predict at all? I'm glad you brought that up because there is an important distinction between what I'm saying, which is being able to parse the world in front of you versus making decisions about it. And absolutely insects, as you beautifully showed in your talk and Lars's work as well as shown, and even we have shown in our lab, we can teach our hoverflies to like blue flowers very quickly. They may not like a blue flower from birth. They don't like the blue color, but you give it a little sugar and you present it to them a couple of times and they'll like blue. And they'll make predictions the next time that the blue flower is likely to have that sugar and they'll go to it. So absolutely, they do make predictions. They do have expectations about their environment. I think the difference is that they are much more able to deal with perturbations in their environment versus us. I mentioned that thing about we screwed up the coding and they were going in the wrong direction for a month and we didn't even notice. Another thing that we have found that they're able to do is also to respond to very, very slow worlds. One thing I didn't bring up in my talk is that there's something called the flicker fusion frequency. And this is what allows us to see a movie. A movie is actually just a bunch of pictures put together and if they're put at least 24 frames a second, we see a movie, okay? If you wanted to play a movie for a fly, you'd have to have 200 frames a second because they have incredibly fast motion sensors and also very fast wing beats, so everything is fast for them. When we first started, we were worried about this because having a color monitor at such a high frame rate, we overclocked our gaming monitors up to about 180 frames a second. Any gamers out there would be impressed by this. But it still wasn't enough and we knew it was still under what they could detect, so it would flicker to them, right? Just like if you have a movie that's too slow, like 20 frames a second, it will strobe for your eyes. We put the monitors down to 20 hertz, where it was even strobing for us and they were just doing their job. They were just flying around. They were seeming to deal with it and I think that that's the difference not that they don't use some expectation cues, but they are just incredibly fast at dealing with the scene in front of them, processing the information that they can and then adapting to it, which I think was really the point of my talk. But I think you're absolutely right. They do learn about their world. They learn about what's good, what's bad. Oh, I went to that blue flower. It was really tasty. I'll go to this other blue flower. They do definitely make decisions based on past experience, for sure. We would expect it to be selected for, right, in terms of long-term evolutionary history. We should expect there should be selection for you to be able to make preferences and for you to adapt quickly, because I think that's basically what leads there to be different colors in bodies of insects and sexual preferences and sexual selection. Even bacteria have simple forms of learning, right? They can change the way their receptors respond to chemical stimuli and they can be more sensitive to it the next time, which is a single cellular form of learning. I mean, learning and memory is essential for most life. I guess it's an important idea for me that I think insects and some other invertebrates like octopuses are in a very different category from bacteria in that, you know, in addition to having all of that basic stuff you were describing, there's also this central brain that is representing the world around it. And for me, it's when you get that, the possibility that there's real experience there, including feelings of pleasure and pain, comes in. So I don't defend policy to protect the welfare of bacteria. You know, if it's the dog or the bacteria that is infected, it chews the dog every time. But when it comes to the case of insects, I think it's really a bit different. And I think they really are much more like vertebrates in the sense of having experiences of the world around them. Second it. Yeah, let me go to the question of insect welfare and pain. I think to me, it is logical to assume they feel pain. So at my institute, we are trying to answer that question using crickets, edible crickets. Crickets make enormous noise. The noise sounds the same to us. The team of scientists at my institute are trying to figure out using artificial intelligence and machine learning what the different noises, the noises to differentiate the noises they make under stressful conditions, under conditions when they want to mate, under conditions when there is a shortage of food feed. So I think pretty soon we'll have answers to that. I think, for example, for many years, scientists assumed that, for example, plants can't hear their death. But that's because the experiments were all wrong in the past. People were scientists who were playing music, classical music, violin, all the music that we like to hear didn't mean anything to the plants. But recently, scientists in Israel figured out a way actually plants can hear their death. They hear to, for example, bees, the sound of bees. When they do that, when they hear bees around buzzing, they make sweeter nectar to attract them. They knew that there are bees there. So the right tools now, the right also experiments, I think pretty soon we'll answer that question whether really insects feel pain. It would be great to coordinate on this. The large Chickas lab that I've been collaborating with has always been about bees forever until now because we've just got funding to get crickets in the lab. Because of the urgency here with cricket farming going so rapidly, we see an urgent need for more research on crickets. So let's keep in touch about what the most informative experiments would be for developing codes of best practice for cricket farming. We'll be happy. Do you not think it's a little... I'm going to be very tough here. Do you think it's a little bit arrogant for us as humans to think about the suffering of insects? Do they think about the suffering of themselves? Why is this arrogant? I'm wondering if, for example, insects often eat other insects, right? Do they consider the welfare of... I think in general other animals are not really moral agents. Do you think of orcas, for example, killer whales? Absolutely. The things they do to seals are just so unbelievably horrible. But they don't have a moral sense. They're not capable of stopping and pausing the question is what I'm doing right or wrong. I'm sure that's true for insects as well. But we do have that ability. Because we do have that ability, we can stop and reflect and try to minimize the suffering that we create in the world through our actions. And so we end up with obligations to care about the suffering of other animals that those animals don't themselves have because they can't. They're not moral creatures. But then you're also distinguishing between the way humans behave and the way insects behave. So when you think about ethical considerations you also have to make that distinction between the way we would treat each other as humans and the way we would treat insects. So it becomes very complicated. Our obligations are very, very different. Of course. It brings up another tricky point, I think, that your comment raises which is why do we have these impressions of how to behave? Is it because we have a history of living in groups and having to look out for each other in ways where reciprocity is understood, is essential for survival? And if that isn't true in an insect world then we do have a dilemma. This is an argument that Darwin makes in The Descent of Man that is very memorable to me that he says imagine a species of social insect like bees that have developed human level intelligence and its own form of morality. The moral norms would be completely different and they would not worry about equality and things like that. They would have these rigidly defined social roles and they would not care at all about sacrificing large numbers of workers for the good of the queen. The morality they would end up with would be very different and it just leads to this reflection that it could well be that a lot of our moral beliefs are quite contingent on our own evolutionary history in the way you described and the fact we did live in groups that were pretty egalitarian unlike social insect groups. But there's always the question of where does the capacity come from and what do we do with it now? You think of maths, for example, our capacity to have mathematical thought and history that did not involve building rockets or nuclear power plants, etc. We do a lot more with that ability now and so it is with morality that we've evolved this capacity to think about the feelings and the suffering of others. We can do more with that than we evolved originally to do with it. I wanted to follow up maybe on that question with there are insects that we call social insects tend to be bees, ants, wasps, termites. And then insects that we would call non-social or sub-social, those include things like flies, many beetles, butterflies. And in thinking about the mind and intelligence, are social insects more intelligent? These insects that tend to live in large groups that take different roles with a colony. Are we just talking about a subset of insects or all insects? Sharon, do you want to start the discussion on that one? We don't have to have a question about what do we mean by intelligence. I think we have to start with that question. What does it mean to be intelligent? And then going back from our perspective of what is intelligent, I thought it was pretty amazing that the flies could see cloud animals. I thought that was pretty cool. I couldn't see that. So I thought that was pretty intelligent. I'm not sure if I feel even comfortable answering this question because I think we always ultimately see the world through our own eyes and through our own perspective. And what is intelligent for a fly is going to be very different. They are pretty intelligent in their ability to, as I said, to switch their wings around very quickly so that we can't do as humans. But we don't need to do that in most cases. So that's a skill that is harder for us. So they have adapted over millions of years. In fact, almost a billion years, insects have been around on this planet to be better adapted to their particular environments. And then they are very good at adapting to new environments, which is why we have more insects, as you said, in Congress than anything else, right? I mean, they're good at this. So, I mean, what then would you call intelligence, right? I find this a very tough question. I know I didn't answer it, but I think it's not an easy one. I don't know, maybe my esteemed other speakers would like to come in here. I would certainly say don't write off solitary insects. And I know this is Lars's view as well, that intuitively you might think sociality is really important here and that honeybees and bumblebees might be much more, much better at learning and memory than other solitary bees. But Lars's view is that there's no evidence for this, that when you give the same sorts of tasks to solitary bees, how well do they remember the different flowers, et cetera? They are just as good. And octopuses are worth thinking about in this context as well, that octopuses are not social. So, all our assumptions from our own case about how sociality is linked to intelligence, which I think are true in our own case, they're definitely not true in the octopuses case. Octopuses are highly intelligent, yet solitary. And the same may be true for a lot of insects. Not unlike some of our colleagues, right? Highly intelligent and yet solitary. Yeah, yeah, philosophers also fall into that. I mean, I guess it's a lot of different, like you said, different types of intelligence. They are really good at intercepting their prey, they can do math in their head. They have really large mushroom bodies, so we know that they can remember their territories, and some of them have very complex territories, or migratory roots, and they're solitary. But maybe we just think of kind of social intelligence in terms of being able to interact with others with termites, just being so impressive, like you said. It relates to ourselves, and then we're back to kind of naval gazing, I suppose, and thinking of it in the context of humans. I would think that it's... I mean, it has to do with evolution and the needs you have in your life as an insect. If you are... If you have to go around and look for flowers of specific colors and smell and whatever, whether you're solitary or social, you still have a quite complex life. But if you are a lice, you know, or some science, and you're just sitting there in some nice warm fur with your, you know, proboscis penetrates, penetrating and sucking blood, that's all you do for your life. You don't need all this decision-making all the time. So maybe we are sort of looking at the wrong separator in a way. It's more the complexity of the insect's life than sociality or solitariness as such. Or to persistently live complicated lives. Yes, exactly. Solitary but very complicated. Just thinking about a line from Franz Deweyle, the primatologist, that we have to worry about the risk of anthropomorphism. And for example, I think, when we infer that because intelligence and sociality are very closely linked in our own case, they must always be closely linked. But at the same time, Deweyle says we need to think about the risk of anthropo-denial, he calls it, where we just assume that because something seems so central to our own experience, no other animal could possibly have it. Pain, for example. The fact that pain seems so intimate and personal and subjective and private, that doesn't mean that insects can't have it as well. That actually leads to an interesting question. Sorry to jump your cue, Margaret. But one viewer asks, why is the utilitarian standard of can it suffer the appropriate one to apply? Why not ask, does this form of life have its own distinct good to achieve? That approach gets you out of trying to say that all beings consider suffering the way that 19th century English philosophers do. I think a 19th, 20th century philosopher wrote that question. So why apply that standard? Oh, in a way that the question is alluding to other approaches in animal ethics, like Martha Nussbaum's approach, for example, in her book, Justice for Animals, Christine Cosgard's approach in her book, Fellow Creatures. They have in common an emphasis on what is good for the animal that is not entirely a matter of avoiding suffering and having pleasure. So there's a richer way of thinking about what is good for the animal that extends beyond that. I think it's easy to overstate the differences between these traditions, to be honest. I think they absolutely do agree on the importance of suffering. And then the question is whether there are other capacities as well that we should also consider. But there's no view on which suffering is irrelevant. We'll argue later. Margaret. We can do it now. We're here to disagree well. Well, actually one of the things that I'm thinking about is that it feels like when we say again they suffer, that kind of is a trump card in a way that feels maybe like it's not a trump card in my own life. I mean, all of us engage in activities that involve suffering, maybe mental suffering, maybe physical suffering, but it's really it's the only way to get the job done in a sense. You don't ask any of the athletes in the room. Like, is it fun to do those things they do? No. So I wonder, is there a more nuanced way to talk about yes, suffering might be relevant, but it might actually not be the defining feature of how to think about something as a moral being. It might not be the only thing that matters. I think that's absolutely right. And in our own case, we know that sometimes we have a goal in view that makes the suffering worth it. We're running a marathon, we're going to suffer, but we're going to feel great at the end, so people say. Not speaking from personal experience there. Equally, I mean, so with other animals, I don't think they're thinking about the far future in the way that we do. But nonetheless, there might be some things that are very important to them that involve suffering. Think of ants, for example, where they sacrifice themselves for the good of the group. There's an ethical debate there about if you were to prevent that, would you be helping the ant or would you be harming it by stopping it expressing some of its most interesting and sophisticated capabilities? I'm sure there'll be disagreement in those cases. But it doesn't translate into disagreement about whether we should give the animals that we farm good lives free of suffering. Because there, the goal is our goal. It's not the animal's goal. There's no question of the animal thinking this suffering is worth it. Because that steak will be so tasty at the end. I also think there's a... I like this question a lot because I've been reading a lot about and speaking to people about things like the rights of nature movements across the world, which are largely influenced by Indigenous peoples across the world's viewpoints of the personification of things like a river or a tree where suffering is not... You don't think about suffering in a river's sense, but you do think about it's right to be there and it's right to exist and it's right to be clean and to be respected. I think for me that always is a much easier way for me to also think about all organisms, right? No, because the fact is, yeah maybe I wouldn't put ethics on bacteria like I would on insects, but bacteria are also really important to have on this planet. So it becomes really difficult, I think, to parse what is more important. Is it more important to have an elephant, or is it more important to have a tree, or is it more important to have a honeybee? I mean, they're all important in different contexts. I think this idea of recognizing their right to exist and trying to respect that and minimize the negative influence you have on their ability to survive as much as possible. That is generally how the discussions I have with others in our network, for example, go forward in terms of making decisions on how do we work in an environment. That applies to people too. A people's right to exist, a person's right to survive and to live. Then you actually apply everything equally and that's easier from maybe my small, slightly larger than insect-sized brain to handle than thinking about profound suffering of things that I have trouble dealing with. That might be a point of disagreement, because suffering is pretty important from my point of view. When I think about ecosystems and things like this, I think they absolutely have value and they have value in virtue of the sentient life they contain and that if you had an ecosystem in imagination, imagine stripping out all the sentient life, so no more animals, no more insects, nothing, only non-sentient life there. I really think the value has gone from that ecosystem. So in that sense, I'm a sentientist. I think that the ultimate source of the moral value of these things is the fact that they contain sentient life. Let's go ahead, Anna. Just coming back to the IPBS again, the nature panel. One of their other recent reports was on valuation of nature and very relevant. The nature panel works a lot with indigenous people and they reflect that view that you mentioned, Shannon. And sort of the conclusion of that valuation report put in very few words is that we have to move from living from nature. In other words, using nature to live with nature. And there are several more options in between. But this is, I think it's very simply put, but still it reflects this moving from considering us as something above all other beings and all other creatures on this planet and try to find ways to coexist that will secure our welfare, but also go as far as we possibly can in securing the welfare of these other beings we share the planet with. I think the IPBS reports are really worth reading for those of you that are not familiar with them. They have a short summary for policy makers that are easy to read, lots of figures and interesting stuff. There are lots of questions here about the nature of mind and brain and so on. I'm just wondering if any of you want to talk about the value of using some terminology rather than other terminology. Somebody asked questions about can we actually describe the parts of insect collections of neurons in a way that sounds like the way we would describe a human brain, for example. Is there is there power in saying mind? I mean, it's a really loaded weighted word in philosophy, of course. So can any of you just talk about why you would choose to use the word brain or mind or how you would, in fact, talk about these capacities that insects have? What label would you give to it? I was trying to amalgamate a lot of your really interesting questions about this matter, by the way, audience. Thank you for them. They're really, really interesting and I'll make sure that the panelists get access to them. This is also a discipline specific question in a way because, of course, if you're a neuroscientist you have certain neurophysiological terminology a neuroanatomical terminology of what a brain is, what a central nervous system is what we would call it and there's no doubt that they have a central nervous system and we have a central nervous system, right? In fact, the way they smell at least now they use their antenna we have our nose so you'd think it's completely different but from a neural processing standpoint there's incredible convergence in how the odors are being processed through the brain. We have an olfactory bulb they have an antenna lobe because we have olfaction in our nose and they have an antenna but the processing actually even the way the neurons process that information is extremely convergent between humans and insects, right? So from that standpoint it's different. Now, Jonathan can talk about the mind because I'm the ecologist and the neuroscientist so, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think Lois Chicker's Mind of a Bee book is good on this the brain is very differently organized and so when you look at the basic plan of the brain it looks very different from a vertebrate brain but, you know, you can have two different pieces of hardware running very similar pieces of software and what we see in the insect case is that they're clearly doing computations they're clearly representing the world around them and I think virtually everyone in the insect world is willing to go that far and then you get a debate about well, at what point do you shift from talking about computation to talking about mind and as I say, I'm wary here of the risk of anthropo-denial I mean, what are we talking about in our own case when we talk about mind and mentality? We're talking about representation, computation and subjective experience and clearly the first few things are there in insects and there's no reason, no principled reason to withhold the third thing so that's why I'm like the Dalai Lama, like Buddhists for 2,000 years, I'm entirely happy with saying that insects have mind I feel like whether you said they had a mind or whether you said they had clusters of ganglia I still could come to the same agreement with you, you know, I don't feel like I want to call it a mind for me to feel like I want to protect it It diminishes the ethical significance of what you're talking about If you're unwilling, yeah if you just talk about these clusters of ganglia I don't think you do that for a cat or a dog and I think we've got to be treating invertebrates fairly we've got to be treating them with parity with the way we think about vertebrates including using some of the same language where it's appropriate I almost in some way I almost think focusing so much on the brain in mind for ourselves as humans has been very limiting and so in sort of like I have the philosophers here so I apologize I'm not in my lane so correct me but in thinking sort of about just kind of like Cartesian dualism where we focus so much on the thinking and have ignored a little bit more of kind of the down sensory perception that we're going through all the time like our nervous systems are taking on a lot of info we haven't studied our gut responses in the same way that we've studied our brain responses and so I think if we can start appreciating those different ways of sensing better from insects then we start realizing that like there's parts of that in us too Thank you Great I think Descartes has a very unfortunate place in this history here as being one of the key figures who introduced skepticism about the minds of animals to the western tradition and philosophy because of course if you're Descartes you think mind and brain are fundamentally different things the mind is immaterial and it interacts by some unknown mysterious means with the brain and you end up thinking well it's very very special and only humans have it I think there was a huge misstep big mistake and once you reject that dualist picture in which mind and brain fundamentally different and you start to think of mind as being something the brain does something the brain implements then you start to realize that where you have complex brains as you do in insects is at some level of mentality and I think that's the correct view that we're now coming back to in which as I say Indian traditions have had all along Julie just said you know I'm not in my lane here and I think one of the things to remind everyone in the audience about is that we bring together a group of people who don't normally talk to each other and they're trying to learn how to talk to each other and one of the things that academia does is silos us in ways that make us feel like I don't know the right word I'm here right now to talk about this thing and so I just won't talk about it at all and what I really admire about the folks who come to this conference is their willingness to sort of say what's the word for that thing you people talk about when you're talking about that thing and that's one of the things that I really want us to model for you know our students high school students and college students out there because you all are doing it every day in the classroom right trying to go from you know music theory to you know exercise physiology and your heads are exploding all the time and I think it's really wonderful for us to try to to practice that ourselves because we get really used to being able to be smart in our narrow field and not have to make ourselves vulnerable so thanks to all of you for being willing to be vulnerable in these ways and I invite Margaret to ask vulnerably ask a last question so this comes from the audience and I think it's a great way of kind of ending this leaving people something to think about how do we as the general public begin fostering relationships with insects as sentient beings especially in a time where society is largely driven by capitalism what steps can we take to make it seem more realistic for individual people to take on this task I think that what I would do first is send everyone out of this auditorium to just walk around the campus and watch insects I think so few of us so few students actually have this opportunity when they go to school to observe insect life and I think that when you start to get those eyes and listen to class yesterday whenever I go on insect walks with students or even adults they don't see anything for a long time they think there's like nothing around and then suddenly I'll point out something and they'll see that there's insects and then they'll suddenly see them everywhere because they are everywhere and I think that it awakens you up to the sense that you are in the world of insects this is not something that we're talking about that's very far away they're underneath us they're above us at every moment in time except maybe when we're in the deep winter where they're mostly underground waiting for the spring but right now they're everywhere and I think the first thing that I would say is do that go outside if you've never tried to look for insects now is the time to do that it's really essential because you will never be able to understand their world and appreciate on this planet unless you see them unless you let them see you and unless you understand that they're here maybe I shouldn't spray a pesticide here maybe I shouldn't cut this grass here because there's a bunch of bees feeding on it this is the awareness that I think we need to have in everybody man, woman, childs, anyone and I think it starts there Your enthusiasm is so wonderful I think if you have a lawn don't mow the lawn and let the grass grow let more insects come into your into your life you'll be surprised I think far too many neatly trimmed lawns around I wonder if you have an answer to that one No, I guess I would support what Shannon was just saying I think we need to get involved with the insects we need to practice to see them and maybe we need to switch our perception somehow around it's not that the insects are sort of invading our city it's that we placed our city in the middle of their habitat so of course they're here and I think starting to see them you have this selective consciousness I guess like the way of viewing things like you say once you start looking once I was challenged by a journalist in the middle of London to find insects and we were it was just pavement and big houses on all sides and it took actually five minutes and I found representatives for all the major orders of insects and I was amazed myself because I was like oh this is not gonna work but it did so there are everywhere but we need to practice to see them and I think through that practice comes the respect for them and the curiosity to learn more and I think then at least we are on the road to a better relationship with insects for the good of both them and us Julie and then second it I just want to make a little note of the kind of capitalism in there and I'll speak touch on it in my talk tomorrow but I think that's actually a really there's a key part here and I'm not the best at articulating it yet but basically in our society in our capitalistic society we still have the sort of keeping up with the Jones's attitude of that our worth is a little bit based on what we have and owning the right things and that is capitalism trying to get our money in their pockets and so if we can start redefining our own worth differently maybe it's by how many insects I didn't kill today we have the capacity and power to redefine our own values to consume less and to stop feeding into the system that's causing so much harm and so the way to sort of help insects and help the world on a whole is to stop consuming so much and thinking more locally and changing our value systems to reflect our values not the ones that capitalists have given us so I agree with everything that has been said but I want also to add to expand it that every time you put a delicious honey on your toast think of the bees every time it's nutrient dense food, vegetables, fruits think that is the level of the pollinators often laid by insects every time you enjoy a nice silk fabric it is a level of silkworms and I think also I would say to people that in a nice bright day you sit in your lawn if you don't have a lawn garden you go to your park sit, relax, watch insects and one of the most inspiring things is to see ants carrying several folds their weight trying to take that food or the cat leaves or dead other insects to their nest you'll never them quit, they struggle they roll it, they go the side, they got until they persist to take it to their goal so there is nothing more inspiring I find than that type of lever and so we learn from insects I think you watch them and you only love and empathize with them that's lovely, thank you thank you so much thanks to all of our panelists today, thanks especially to our three speakers today we have four to come tomorrow just a reminder of what's to come please don't leave anything in the arena tonight your personal belongings please take those with you the bug bites reception is happening on the second floor out the doors to the left for those of you who registered for it don't forget tonight is the moth story slam in Bjerling, $5 it doors at $7.30 we'll begin tomorrow morning the prelude begins at $9.15 the doors here will open at $8.30 the first lecture starts at $9.30 and in anticipation of that moth story slam just one more haiku for today from Issa how much are you enjoying yourself tiger moth and with that I leave you enjoy your evening