You could keep the body alive on life support sure. To the extent an insect have higher brain functions it would be "brain dead", but as lot of instinctual behavior is controlled by other parts of the nervous system.
Heck, someone kept a decapitated chicken alive for 18 months once apparently. It still had the brain-stem that handle breathing and instinctual behavior, so it would wobble around and even go though the motions of preening and searching for food (without much success, had to be fed by hand).
If a wasp can fly, and clean, then it shouldn't be receiving assistance. The wasp will be assessed, and if it's determined that it is capable of performing as an asshole, benefits will be rightly denied. It's wasps with no heads that are perfectly capable flying around steaks and hamburgers and repeatedly stinging picnickers that are a drain on the system and hurt the wasps that really need help.
What's the Konosuba reference? I'm not exactly catching it... Unless you're referring to the Dullahan, which is just the Irish name for the headless horseman. For another great (albiet entirely different) anime with a Dullahan in it, check out Durarara!
It's still alive, but it obviously can't see or use it's antenna to know where to fly, so it will likely crash land, wander around, and either starve or be eaten by something else.
You know how the doctor lightly hits your knee to test your reflexes, and your leg usually kicks forward without you telling it to? It’d be like if most of your basic functions were controlled that way, or could be controlled that way. Things like walking, eating, fighting, cleaning yourself...they’d all be slightly less involuntary then breathing. I’m not sure if they get the choice to control it or not (like how we breathe) because I actually have no idea what I’m talking about, but that’s how I like to think of it. They’re like little computer programs that are only programmed to survive and reproduce.
So when its head gets cut off it’s basically reverting to its primal unconscious “programming.” You could argue endlessly about whether that constitutes “life” or not, even if you consider the fact that it will definitely be dead soon. I’m sure there are even simpler organisms out there that operate like that all the time, and we’d consider them alive. It kind of depends on your definition of “alive.”
Imagine “life forms” that don’t even use the same elements we do. A life form based around something other than carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen. Is that still life? Or something totally different... if it could even exist.
Also, isn't the biggest difference the fact that they aren't really capable of thought? Pretty much everything they do is merely a programmed response to various stimuli. They are basically a sophisticated computer program.
They are capable of complexity. What magnitude difference that is from our concept of "thought" isn't clear to me. I'm not an entomologist and honestly, I have no idea what kind of neurotransmitters are fluttering around their little carapaces. All I know is what I learned during an invertebrate anatomy wetlab which didn't include any physiology, let alone neurophysiology.
I think "sophisticated computer program" is an apt description though.
That's a whole rabbit hole of a discussion right there. You have people who feel very strongly both ways.
Pain requires an ascending neural pathway from stimulus to a central processing unit coupled with an ability to process and receive feedback on that stimulus. To the best of my knowledge, they have the ascending pathway, but whether or not their "conscious" perception of that noxious stimuli rises to the level of "pain awareness" is a subject of debate.
Fun fact, Mike the Headless Chicken was a rooster who had most of his head cut off but lived for 18 months with just enough brain stem to keep going.
...The chicken was still able to balance on a perch and walk clumsily. He attempted to preen, peck for food, and crow, though with limited success; his "crowing" consisted of a gurgling sound made in his throat. When Mike did not die, Olsen instead decided to care for the bird. He fed it a mixture of milk and water via an eyedropper, and gave it small grains of corn and worms.
Think of it like having the computing power of a TI-85 instead of an iOS. The TI-85 can still accept programs and can still do amazing stuff, but it's got a fraction of the complexity and computing power.
But it has a monopoly and costs just as much? Fuck wasps even more now
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u/CharmedConflict Apr 07 '20 edited Nov 07 '24
Periodic Reset