What about doing Welfare Footprint-like analysis (e.g. here), but including both positive and negative experiences, and investigating what kinds of behavioural tradeoffs they make between different (intensities of) experiences to weigh intensities?
check for functions (causal roles) that can be reasonably interpreted as generating appearances of stimuli as good/​desirable/​worth promoting or bad/​undesirable/​worth avoiding. These are enough for moral status in my view, but pain and pleasure could be more specific. Or, what does it mean for something to be painful or pleasurable in functionalist terms? Develop that, and check for it in nematodes.
It’s unlikely that any of this will be conclusive, but it can inform reasonable ranges of probabilities.
On the question of what they find painful or pleasurable, check what they tend to avoid and approach, respectively, especially through learned behaviour (and especially more general types of learning) or internal simulation of outcomes of actions, rather than in-built reflexive behaviour and very simple forms of learning like habituation.
EDIT: You can also validate with measures of brain activity and nociception. There are probably features common to (apparently) painful experiences in nematodes, and features common to pleasurable ones in nematodes, which could be identified and then checked for across experiences.
I really don’t think so. I cannot conceive of research that would clarify whether a nematode life is net positive or negative
What about doing Welfare Footprint-like analysis (e.g. here), but including both positive and negative experiences, and investigating what kinds of behavioural tradeoffs they make between different (intensities of) experiences to weigh intensities?
How are you going to decide whether a nematode experiences pain or pleasure, and if they do what is painful or pleasurable to a nematode?
I’d follow something like these:
https://​​rethinkpriorities.org/​​research-area/​​invertebrate-sentience-useful-empirical-resource/​​
https://​​www.frontiersin.org/​​journals/​​veterinary-science/​​articles/​​10.3389/​​fvets.2022.788289/​​full
check for functions (causal roles) that can be reasonably interpreted as generating appearances of stimuli as good/​desirable/​worth promoting or bad/​undesirable/​worth avoiding. These are enough for moral status in my view, but pain and pleasure could be more specific. Or, what does it mean for something to be painful or pleasurable in functionalist terms? Develop that, and check for it in nematodes.
It’s unlikely that any of this will be conclusive, but it can inform reasonable ranges of probabilities.
On the question of what they find painful or pleasurable, check what they tend to avoid and approach, respectively, especially through learned behaviour (and especially more general types of learning) or internal simulation of outcomes of actions, rather than in-built reflexive behaviour and very simple forms of learning like habituation.
EDIT: You can also validate with measures of brain activity and nociception. There are probably features common to (apparently) painful experiences in nematodes, and features common to pleasurable ones in nematodes, which could be identified and then checked for across experiences.