Bee-brained
aeon.co
Bee-brained
1–10 of 42 posts
Re: Bee-brained
#2un-bee-lievable
Re: Bee-brained
#3Really interesting article. It's seeming like the more we learn about other life, the more we realize not much separates humans but a couple of thumbs and some decent dexterity.
I wonder if someday we'll reach a point where we recognize consciousness in most animals and think it was ridiculous that earlier people didn't see such an obvious fact. Just like how "common knowledge" just a few decades/years ago was that babies and crustaceans couldn't feel pain, but it'd be bizarre for anyone to claim that today.
Re: Bee-brained
#4"...biologists now suggest that consciousness-like phenomena might not have evolved late in our history, as we previously thought. Rather, they could be evolutionarily ancient and have arisen in the Cambrian era, around 500 million years ago."
Re: Bee-brained
#5The bees are highly social, and it is possible that it is primarily this fact that “lifts” their mental power into the realm of consciousness. Being part of the socium has been proven to be critical for a human to be, well, human. What is interesting, though, is that while the social life is lifting the bee, it appears that it often moves the individual human mind in the opposite direction.
Re: Bee-brained
#6I'm probably not qualified to say this, but just about every example of consciousness in bees and flies that they described could just as easily be explained if they were automatons.
Re: Bee-brained
#7The bees are highly social, and it is possible that it is primarily this fact that “lifts” their mental power into the realm of consciousness. Being part of the socium has been proven to be critical for a human to be, well, human. What is interesting, though, is that while the social life is lifting the bee, it appears that it often moves the individual human mind in the opposite direction.
> The bees are highly social, and it is possible that it is primarily this fact that “lifts” their mental power into the realm of consciousness.
As far as I understand it, a theory of mind is a hard requirement for consciousness - you understand that other beings have minds, then you model them, then you turn that in on yourself, and the loop is closed and voila, you develop tools and culture and anxiety.
Re: Bee-brained
#8I'm probably not qualified to say this, but just about every example of consciousness in bees and flies that they described could just as easily be explained if they were automatons.
Actually, all examples of consciousness can be explained as if we're all automatons. There's nothing we do which isn't produced (so far as we know) by physical (and therefore mechanistic) functions of the brain and body.
"Consciousness" is something that we experience, but it's not required to explain anything at all that's observed.
Re: Bee-brained
#9I'm probably not qualified to say this, but just about every example of consciousness in bees and flies that they described could just as easily be explained if they were automatons.
Actually, all examples of consciousness can be explained as if we're all automatons. There's nothing we do which isn't produced (so far as we know) by physical (and therefore mechanistic) functions of the brain and body. "Consciousness" is something that we experience, but it's not required to explain anything at all that's observed.
Fair enough; it would have been more accurate for me to say that bees don't necessarily have a conscious experience based on what we see.
Re: Bee-brained
#10I'm probably not qualified to say this, but just about every example of consciousness in bees and flies that they described could just as easily be explained if they were automatons.
Quoting my previous comment:
"I think it also useful to semantically separate cognitive consciousness (i.e. Knowing and expressing the existence of your thought processes through arguably higher, more abstract thought processes - which might even go on recursively - knowing that I know that i am conscious, etc) from the externally unmeasurable 'conscious experience', (i.e qualia, the awareness of sensory or thoughts at the most essential level, 'seeing' what one sees, etc).
One could imagine a living being with one but not the other, for example qualia without cognitive consciousness (if I had to guess, I would imagine this experience to be similar to being drugged to the point of having no internal monologue, no complex thought process, but keeping your sensations and vision, etc, or being a barely-sentient animal in purely instictual mode of thought and action)
The opposite, cognitive consciousness without qualia - a.k.a the philosophical zombie - or a computer which can argue the existence of it's thoughts without feeling them is, I gather, a more controversial state of being.
What I find interesting is that in separating the two 'consciousness's, the former ends up taking almost all of the importance and the latter none - anything which can be externally measured ends up in the first category (which is a computable logic process), which leaves very little of utilitarian/evolutionary/algorithmic importance in the second. However, in much discourse about consciousness the latter takes a disproportionate role (i.e fear of losing your unmeasurable consciousness when teleporting, etc, though the cognitive consciousness, being by definition a logical and measurable process is theoretically preserved)"
In this case although the article, to get quick views, appeals to our love for the mystical attributes of the 'conscious exprience phenomenon', the paper actually studies the (in my opinion much more) interesting empirical characterisation of the level of cognitive consciousness in insect 'brains' - i.e., how elaborately their software models its own processes.