Pain in Crustaceans (opens in new tab)

It's not every day you get to transform your worldview, but for me, I think recent studies on honeybee consciousness, and better knowledge about crustacean experiences of pain probably register as big revisions to my operating assumptions I've only made quite recently. So I'm delighted there's an article on it, because I think I can't be the only one to have gained a better appreciation of this stuff between the 90s and now (the 90s being perhaps when my initial impressions formed that were eventually revised).

For the way this wiki article in particular is drafted, I would say it's (1) perfectly fair to deduce that behavioral and physiological data suggest crustaceans feel pain but (2) perhaps a bit too cautious and excessively philosophical in insisting that "suffering" can't be studied or measured, which the article can't resist stating several times. At worst it's maybe even be trying to slip in an anti-physicalist philosophical assumption about consciousness as if it were an uncontroversial baseline everyone accepts.

I appreciate and respect that there's notional distinction being drawn between pain and "suffering" but the same behavioral and physiological data can at least provisionally indicate suffering, too, not because they're necessarily the same but because they're importantly correlated.

And heck, they may even be integrally related to the point that the pain/suffering distinction, to the extent that it matters, is not a difference in what is proved by biology but a difference in what gets emphasized depending on the concepts you use to describe it.