Its not really "torture" since crickets have no memory and no pain receptors.
Hmmmm.....
'Torture':
- Anguish: extreme mental distress
- Unbearable physical pain
- Agony: intense feelings of suffering; acute mental or physical pain; "an agony of doubt"; "the torments of the damned"
- Torment: torment emotionally or mentally
- Distortion: the act of distorting something so it seems to mean something it was not intended to mean
- Subject to torture; "The sinners will be tormented in Hell, according to the Bible"
-The deliberate, systematic, or wanton infliction of physical or mental suffering by one or more persons in an attempt to force another person to yield information or to make a confession or for any other reason; "it required unnatural torturing to extract a confession"
Crickets and many other creatures with no pain receptors have other senses that will in some way indicate to them they are being frozen (or any other potential harm) and that this is a bad thing, so it could be classed as torture.
You could have a person with no working pain receptors (they do exist!
) but if you set them on fire or plunged a dagger into their heart, they would still know something was happening to them and would be in "extreme mental distress" or emotional torment. Thats not even a very good example, since humans have evolved to rely on pain receptors.
'Pain receptors' are just a specialized and effective kind of sensory receptor that we and countless other animals have evolved, we use them solely for detecting potentially damaging stimulus and sending signals to the brain that the brain then turns into pain. The fact that some animals do not have pain receptors does not mean that they cannot feel pain.
Think of the signal our pain receptors send to our brains as a radio wave with a certain wavelength. Our brains receive this radio wave, recognizes it and then generates a feeling of pain, all because of the certain wavelength.
Now think of a part of a crickets central nervous system that is detecting its legs are being crushed, it will send radio waves of the same wavelength as if it were being lightly brushed to the brain of the cricket. But because the legs are being
crushed, more sensory receptors are being stimulated(ones that would not be feeling anything unless the leg was being crushed, the ones inside the leg for example) and the crickets brain receives much more signals. The crickets brain processes this volume of signals as damaging because it knows that those extra receptors being stimulated must mean the leg is being damaged and creates a perception of 'pain' for the cricket to generate a response.
There is no way for us to tell if this feeling to stimulate a response is actually anything like pain (we're not crickets), but we have more evidence to suggest that it does feel like pain than against it. There is no such thing as pain, only the perception of pain, therefor the only evidence that pain even exists is our perception. There is no way of knowing how any other life form percepts things, so the only thing we can do is assume they percept similar or the same as we do.
Also, i don't see how memory comes into it at all. Memory is a function that a part of our brains fulfill, you do not need memory of pain to experience it. If the animal has a brain, then it is possible for it to experience pain or an equivalent. If the animal does not have a brain, then it cant.