How does yeast survive without any food or water without dying for years in a pantry, then you just add water and sugar and it comes to life and creates air. Is it unetical to cook them alive? Do they feel pain? If people are mad about lobsters being cooked alive why do we still cook yeast alive?
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Pain is a way for a more complex organism to realize discomfort in one part of the body and translating that to the rest of the organism to elicit a reaction
Yeast is incredible simple. It has sensors to determine beneficial reproductive environments, and that’s about it. For most mushroom fungus, all it needs is to fruit, disseminate spores, and die. There’s no energy or benefit to feeling pain.
For yeast it’s even less complex. They are single celled organisms incable of discomfort, let alone pain. That’s just way too complex for them. Just like an egg couldn’t feel pain.
Long answer: First off, pain is just elevated levels of discomfort. Put more basically: a specific biological process to react (avoid) stimuli that is harmful. “Pain” is only known to exist in organisms that have some sort of ability to react to ( get away from) that stimulus. That’s way an itch requires a scratch, but a burning hot surface requires you to recoil. Plants and fungi will “,feel” a stimulus, and respond in a way that makes sense for their survivability. A tree responding by sealing the stump of a cut branch for instance.
Obviously we can’t account for every response to every stimulus in every irganism, but we have a pretty good idea that something that has developed motor response is going to have a stronger ability to sense discomfort. For example, there’s no biological benefit to a tree feeling pain due a wild fire, because it cannot move away. It’s damaging, yes, but it does not have “burn” temperature response like animals do because there has been no evolutionary benefit to developing such a thing, vs an animal can flee a fitey and survive to reproduce.
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