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Scientists now know that bees can process time, a first in insects

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Re: Scientists now know that bees can process time, a first in insects

#71

Post by euroderf »

Loughla wrote: post #10
sitkack wrote: post #4

We are learning so many wonderful things about Bees! They can count https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21222227 Bees play https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33369572 https://www.science.org/content/article/are-these-bumble-bee... All of this reinforces my belief that nearly everything is conscious and aware, we differ in a capabilities and resolution but we are all more similar than we are different. Spider Cogni…

Growing up on a farm taught me that animals are absolutely able to think and learn. Not in the same way as humans, but I'm fully convinced there are degrees of consciousness. Watching new calves play in spring meadows is one of the most purely joyful things you can ever see. They have best friends and will avoid playing with other calves until their friend comes to play with them.

> degrees of consciousness

Societal dogma aside, I think this probably applies to all critters, including within species, including us.

Re: Scientists now know that bees can process time, a first in insects

#72

Post by dhosek »

Loughla wrote: post #10
sitkack wrote: post #4

We are learning so many wonderful things about Bees! They can count https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21222227 Bees play https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33369572 https://www.science.org/content/article/are-these-bumble-bee... All of this reinforces my belief that nearly everything is conscious and aware, we differ in a capabilities and resolution but we are all more similar than we are different. Spider Cogni…

Growing up on a farm taught me that animals are absolutely able to think and learn. Not in the same way as humans, but I'm fully convinced there are degrees of consciousness. Watching new calves play in spring meadows is one of the most purely joyful things you can ever see. They have best friends and will avoid playing with other calves until their friend comes to play with them.

There’s a part of me that speculates that the kashrut laws are meant to rule out eating the most intelligent animals (pigs, cetaceans, cephalopods).

Re: Scientists now know that bees can process time, a first in insects

#73

Post by fullstop »

johnisgood wrote: post #67
fullstop wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have always been enamored with "social" insects like bees, wasps, and ants. I _loved_ SimAnt as a child. It also blows my mind that I utterly balk at eating insects but bee vomit is totally cool.

Oh my, I just looked for a screenshot of SimAnt. I remember this game, too! I have played it for some time, too. :)

You can play it in a browser: https://archive.org/details/msdos_SimAnt_-_The_Electronic_An...

Re: Scientists now know that bees can process time, a first in insects

#74

Post by fullstop »

ACCount37 wrote: post #61
fullstop wrote: post #25

When I think of insects, I see them as tiny microcontrollers. In my head bees have a little shift register to measure time. While ants have control over each limb, they mostly move by rotating two tripods one at a time. It's like they turn on an output for three legs, turn off the output, and then turn on the output for the other three legs. Ants can walk backward, though, so perhaps it is more like a half-bridge rec…

Working in embedded gave me a lot of respect for insects. They can fit so much raw function into a body that's smaller than most standalone ICs. Just imagine how cool would it be to have programmable bees.

That would make an interesting game.

Re: Scientists now know that bees can process time, a first in insects

#75

Post by fullstop »

mikkupikku wrote: post #64
fullstop wrote: post #25

When I think of insects, I see them as tiny microcontrollers. In my head bees have a little shift register to measure time. While ants have control over each limb, they mostly move by rotating two tripods one at a time. It's like they turn on an output for three legs, turn off the output, and then turn on the output for the other three legs. Ants can walk backward, though, so perhaps it is more like a half-bridge rec…

I don't know much about insects, but spiders at least seem to be much more than mere automatons. The way jumping spiders are aware of their environment makes them feel much closer to a dog than to a microcontroller.

They have more peripherals, sram, and flash space.

Re: Scientists now know that bees can process time, a first in insects

#76

Post by assemblyman »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #32
testfrequency wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I promise this isn’t a trap, it’s just my curiosity as a “flexitarian”. What (mostly) keeps me from eating animals is my mind wandering sometimes when making a protein choice about how they ended up there, wherever I am, not by choice. Are you vegan?

You can’t avoid the reality that’s your life depends on something else dying. Either plant insect or animal How and why you draw the line on what is acceptable to kill is mostly arbitrary I’d argue a mushroom or a bee are more “conscious” than most chickens

>>You can’t avoid the reality that’s your life depends on something else dying. Either plant insect or animal

There are more nuanced ways of thinking about this. A good example is Jainism's version of vegetarianism which requires paying attention to what one consumes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism

"Jains make considerable efforts not to injure plants in everyday life as far as possible. Jains accept such violence only in as much as it is indispensable for human survival, and there are special instructions for preventing unnecessary violence against plants."

Re: Scientists now know that bees can process time, a first in insects

#77

Post by thewebguyd »

Loughla wrote: post #10
sitkack wrote: post #4

We are learning so many wonderful things about Bees! They can count https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21222227 Bees play https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33369572 https://www.science.org/content/article/are-these-bumble-bee... All of this reinforces my belief that nearly everything is conscious and aware, we differ in a capabilities and resolution but we are all more similar than we are different. Spider Cogni…

Growing up on a farm taught me that animals are absolutely able to think and learn. Not in the same way as humans, but I'm fully convinced there are degrees of consciousness. Watching new calves play in spring meadows is one of the most purely joyful things you can ever see. They have best friends and will avoid playing with other calves until their friend comes to play with them.

Animals also grieve and mourn their dead, much like we do.

They are fellow sentient beings capable of experiencing pleasure, pain, fear, and forming social bonds. It's a lot of why I take issue with anthropocentrism, and think factory farming is an absolute tragedy. It's the industrialized denial of a meaningful life and one of the biggest examples of human cruelty.

Re: Scientists now know that bees can process time, a first in insects

#78

Post by filoeleven »

johnisgood wrote: post #11
baxtr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I want to curb your enthusiasm for bees, but… I recently read that honey bees in particular get the most attention from humans lately, so they are kept in high numbers. This has some adversarial effect on other pollinators, which hurts ecosystems more than it helps.

Why would what you said curb my enthusiasm for bees though? Can you provide me more specifics on this by the way? > This has some adversarial effect on other pollinators, which hurts ecosystems more than it helps. What are those adversarial effects, what other pollinators, and how does it hurt the ecosystem more than it helps? I do not mind bees having kept in higher numbers, and beekeepers can do it anywhere without…

European honeybees do not behave the same way as their native solitary counterparts. They gather honey by visiting every flower on a plant, then moving to the next plant. Native bees OTOH visit only one or two flowers per plant. So if imported honeybees outcompete natives (and studies show they do), it very much affects the viability of monoecious plants, which experience a drop in genetic diversity. I don't want to find out the long-term results of that experiment.

I don't think that's a reason to eradicate honeybees in the US or anything like that, but it does point to a misplaced focus on "just" solving colony collapse disorder while ignoring the plight of the native pollinators.

If you don't keep bees, or if you do but have a large enough property, you could put up a bee hotel. They can be bought or constructed pretty easily, and you'll get to see a wide variety of who's around your area!

https://bugguide.net/node/view/475348

Re: Scientists now know that bees can process time, a first in insects

#79

Post by thewebguyd »

ACCount37 wrote: post #61
fullstop wrote: post #25

When I think of insects, I see them as tiny microcontrollers. In my head bees have a little shift register to measure time. While ants have control over each limb, they mostly move by rotating two tripods one at a time. It's like they turn on an output for three legs, turn off the output, and then turn on the output for the other three legs. Ants can walk backward, though, so perhaps it is more like a half-bridge rec…

Working in embedded gave me a lot of respect for insects. They can fit so much raw function into a body that's smaller than most standalone ICs. Just imagine how cool would it be to have programmable bees.

Black Mirror did an episode on programmable bees. S3E6

Re: Scientists now know that bees can process time, a first in insects

#80

Post by johnisgood »

fullstop wrote: post #73
johnisgood wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my, I just looked for a screenshot of SimAnt. I remember this game, too! I have played it for some time, too. :)

You can play it in a browser: https://archive.org/details/msdos_SimAnt_-_The_Electronic_An...

Oh cool! I am doing the tutorial and it told me to click on "MAP" which I did, and then nothing happened. :( Any ideas?
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