31–40 of 79 posts
I don't know why we believe animals are so different than us and then we get so surprised when they do things like us. We're like them!
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One could imagine that human’s would appear unconscious to a hyper intelligent alien species. Perhaps it’s all relative.
You're conflating consciousness with intelligence. The two are not the same. One is the experience of qualia, and the ability to hold preferences. The other is the behaviors associated with making predictions and intentionally manipulating the world to achieve tasks. We have a hyper-intelligent chess engines that cannot be argued to be conscious. We also have small mammalian minds, like Koalas, that are dumb as a bri…
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I think it's extremely hard to say, but I'd say it's hard to argue for sentience when the neural system is so small. This is a serious problem in philosophy. The concepts of "philosophical zombies" is a hard problem. The fact is that we could have perfectly "sentient behavior" from creatures/beings without any sensible consciousness involved. The sentience of humans is debatable, even though it is readily apparent th…
Is there something we know about the relationship between conciousness/sentience and the size of brain? A computer neural network can be arbitrarily large and there is no evidence it will ever become sentient. While we're related to insects and afaik share some functions. I can definitely picture the idea of their conciousness just being a more basic version of ours. But I'm curious if there is some evidence or reaso…
Is it a product of the prefrontal cortex? Arguably. Is it the product of the mammalian mind? Seems plausible. The product of a small-but-thresholded nervous system? I think many would agree here. Is it the product of any nervous system? Doubtful, but maybe. Is it the product of any electrical system? Who knows, it's possible. Is it an innate part of matter? I mean...
Are insects conscious? I'm skeptical. Are mussels and/or oysters conscious? I'm very skeptical. Are plants conscious? I'm extremely skeptical.
I don't know why we believe animals are so different than us and then we get so surprised when they do things like us. We're like them!
The next step is to take this into account in ethics, but I fear this is a leap that humanity in totality will not make easily.
From the original study: > We found that ball rolling (1) did not contribute to immediate survival strategies, (2) was intrinsically rewarding, (3) differed from functional behaviour in form, (4) was repeated but not stereotyped, and (5) was initiated under stress-free conditions. ... > We suggest that the behaviour observed here has actual hedonic value for bumble bees, which adds to the growing body of evidence of…
The researches adduce from those five findings that ball-rolling holds hedonic value for bumble bees. One of those findings was that ball-rolling is "intrinsically rewarding" to a bee. Isn't this what you call "begging the question"? It's hedonic because it is intrinsically rewarding. The article ends with the quote: "We are producing ever-increasing amounts of evidence backing up the need to do all we can to protect…
There used to be a bumble bee that, I was convinced, would come around to play with my dog, a Labrador. It was entertaining to watch. When the dog was outside the bumble bee would hover near his face to get his attention. Once he noticed the bee he would growl, jump, and bite at the bee but not in an aggressive manor. It was in his playful tone, the same as when I played with him and his toys. Every time he lunged at…
Are you sure it wasn't a male carpenter bee? That's pretty standard(annoying) behavior for them.
Paying it forward: An article by David Graeber I first saw here, where he argues the utilitarian evolutionary view (every action witnessed in animals is there to somehow increase changes of survival) is a relic of the industrial revolution. Instead, he says, playing is a key feature of life. https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-hav...
I thought that it has long since been understood that any trait which does not inhibit reproduction is ignored by natural selection, and therefore does not get "weeded out" by the process of evolution. This is why there can be long standing diversity within populations.
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They said that because there's no apparent reason for the behavior, it must be "intrinsically rewarding". Is that really a proven conclusion, or a working premise? It's listed on equal footing with the observation that bees don't engage in the behavior under stress (also a finding). The later can be observed, while the former seems to need access to the inner experience of the organism.
You sound interested enough that you might enjoy bits of the actual paper [1]. They didn’t exactly say the bees stopped playing under stress. Instead they said the behavior isn’t a stress response (they know this because they eliminated stress from the environment). Also, the evidence that it’s inherently rewarding is bolstered by the pattern of interaction with balls. It increases over time and then drops (typical o…
I see the "question begging" emerged from me misconstruing the quotes from the paper above. I think I was especially skeptical because I wanted to believe the conclusion.
"Play" as a concept, is a clear social construct. The behaviors we call "play" is very obviously an innate instinctual behavior for humans, and is entirely plausible the same for bees. I see little here to suggest that this implies sentience apart from simple anthropomorphism.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in the framework of the evolutionary dogma as I know it, this behavior wouldn't make sense. It comes at the expense of energy and time, yielding no benefit, and thus is a net detriment and should therefore be bred out of the species with the one exception being some sort of higher process like emotional gratification. At least I can't imagine any sort of logical pattern where this improve…
This concept belongs to behaviorism, which is one school of thought in biology. Its massive and unjustifiable dominance in the benighted 20th century notwithstanding, it is far from the only one. My experience has been that the results of ethological research into hymenopteran behavior, at least, yield far more predictive power than much of anything from the behaviorist school. It would not at all surprise me if this were one case in a much broader pattern.