The only reason I care is because of the broader ecological effects. I don't care whether my gut microbes live or die either, if it wasn't for the health effects it would have on me.
The scene is very well done. His imagination of the insect anthropomorphized is absolutely fascinating...
Why wouldn't they?
Ants also have a complex range of psychological responses. (Not sure I'd call them "emotions" since we're obviously too distantly related to them to have a meaningful reference here, but whatever.)
Ants can response to their environment, but are they even "psychological responses" or just a piece of machinery responding in a pre-programmed way? When I played the Sims 20 years ago my characters would respond in certain pre-programmed ways. None of can truly know what it's like to be an ant, but given the tiny size of their brains compared to higher animals I think it's fair to say the machinery for any kind of emotion just isn't there.
Is a mouse responding in a pre-programmed way? I'd say you're just showing mammalian bias here.
> given the tiny size of their brains compared to higher animals I think it's fair to say the machinery for any kind of emotion just isn't there
First of all, a whale isn't necessarily smarter than a monkey just because it has a much bigger (physically) brain. Secondly, an individual ant really isn't, because genetically the ant colony is a single unit.
All life is to some level – including your and me – but that doesn't mean there aren't distinctions.
> a whale isn't necessarily smarter than a monkey just because it has a much bigger (physically) brain
I claimed that brain size is deterministic of intelligence, but it's not as if any brain of any size can do anything; there are real physical limits here. Ant brains are tiny, and ants are probably the smartest insects: others have even smaller brains.
Either way, I'm mostly interested in the emotional experience of insects and other animals, rather than intelligence. I think that's a more important factor in deciding whether inflicting harm is morally acceptable or not.
Mice, of course, are also not especially clever or have rich emotional lives in the same way that a dog or pig might have, but there does seem to be some of it, whereas I'm not seeing any in ants or other insects.
Is it because their primitive brains go haywire? Or is this just our mammalian prejudice speaking? Who knows.
Probably best not to anthropomorphize any animal, I think.