Quigui

I lost a needle I liked in my pincushion so I decided to get a strong magnet and see if I could pull it back out.

I pulled out 68.

I very rarely sew.

AND YET.

(Source)

The actor, 86, will be most remembered on this website for the "Chuck Norris Facts" memes of hyper-exaggerated competence.

Boyfriend: So does being an ant person

Me: Again, baby, they’re not ants

Boyfriend: YES THEY ARE. They communicate via pheromones— LIKE ANTS.

Me: So back to the soulmate thing….

Boyfriend: You could trick them into following orders and thinking they’re dead by spraying them with a spritz bottle. I think they need a queen.

Me: So back to the soulmate thing…. Seems hellish!

Boyfriend: Not really. If being around the other person is what triggers the changes, if you want to go back to normal… all you need to do is leave.

Me, writing: (You found your soulmate. It’s changing you in scary ways. All you need to do is leave… how difficult would it be to leave? What pressures exist to stay?)

Boyfriend: So these ant-people—

which meant i went and read about snail brains.

here's the bad news, at least by human standards:

snails do not have anything like a centralized brain. their nervous system is made up of small clusters of neurons (ganglia) that mostly handle very local tasks. they don't have a cortex, they don't build big integrated models of the world, and they almost certainly don't experience things like appreciation, anticipation, or savoring.

pudding is not looking at the sky and thinking it's beautiful.

snail eyes are basically light sensors - they can tell bright from dark, but not form images. snail "taste" is done through chemoreceptors on their tentacles and around their mouth. those receptors don't produce flavor the way ours do; they just detect chemical compounds and sort them into "approach," "ignore," or "avoid."

so there's no evidence that snails enjoy food, or wind, or views, the way mammals do.

and that does sound kind of sad. but then i thought that maybe we are asking the wrong question.

snails do have valence. they detect aversive things (like salt or dryness) and withdraw from them. they detect non-aversive or beneficial conditions (like moisture) and stay extended. when pudding is stretched out like this, it means his nervous system is basically saying "this is safe; nothing is wrong."

if we define pleasure not as our human experience of dopamine and reward chemicals but instead as "the absence of aversion" - a state where the organism is open to its environment instead of defending itself - then this does count as something positive, even if it's extremely nothing like human enjoyment.

pudding isn't appreciating the wind. but his body is registering humidity, safety, and the ability to keep functioning, and that matters to him in the only way his nervous system can make things matter. he does not think "this is great, this is awesome, i love the weather", because he doesn't think in the way we do at all, but the neurological action in his ganglion tell his body that he is safe, that the moisture is an acceptable level, that it's not too dry or windy, and that there's nothing imminently threatening.

i think a lot of the sadness comes from assuming that a good life has to look like ours: full of enjoyment, meaning, and aesthetic experience. but a snail isn't missing those things. its world just isn't built to include them.

snails don't have a sense of flavor. they don't even have tastebuds. this seems like a gimme, right? but again that might be asking the wrong question about what "taste" is. biologically speaking, it's chemoreception. we taste sweet because it indicates high value, high calorie sugar molecules. we taste salty for salt, umami for proteins. so in what way does pudding's chemoreceptors differ from ours instrumentally? we can say "by our human perspective, pudding can't experience "preference" or "savoring" or "anticipation of delicious food"", but from pudding's perspective we have radically overengineered ourselves for the task at hand. pudding can tell what's salty, what's high value, what has the chemicals he needs. the functional outcome is that he can discriminate food souces based on their composition. is that not taste?