> 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 a form of sentience in these insects
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 insects that are a million miles from the mindless, unfeeling creatures they are traditionally believed to be."
It gives me the impression the findings are driven by the agenda to save the bees. Which makes me feel conflicted since I support the aim and have lay interests in philosophy of mind.
Begging the question is when you conclude one of your assumptions. “That it’s intrinsically rewarding” is a finding not an assumption.
The study was definitely influenced by the popular notion of saving the bees, but that’s not a problem! I’d rather read about bees having fun than any other insect! I hope others feel the same and a friendlier sentiment towards bees (because of the study, a little bit) helps the whole problem.
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 of play), and it is unrelated to mate/food finding.
It’s very difficult to know what animals are thinking. The scientists say multiple times in different ways that none of this is conclusive (the longest section regarding knowing the behavior isn’t function-related). That being said, it’s a well designed experiment in my opinion. I think they did a good job of setting it up so that we can conclude: “why else would they roll the balls?”
Okay -- thanks for being patient; appreciate the link to the paper and additional detail.
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.
> Isn't this what you call "begging the question"? It's hedonic because it is intrinsically rewarding.
I think what they mean is that it was not connected to an external reward (at least not one that the researchers could identify). For example, they did not train the bees to roll the ball in order to get sugar water or something.
I guess the question is how you would describe something like listening to music for a human. It would be 'intrinsically rewarding' and 'hedonic'. Why? because of our brain structures? Hard to say.
Sometimes things are not what they seem. We know that dolphins smiling are being aggressive for example.
> "Bumblebees play because we humans think that they play"
Or maybe they are just brain-wired to explore any strange object and instinctively clean any movable peeble, fruit, and object in the path of the entry of the colony. Cleaning the colony is a very common behavior reported in bees
"We observed the pleasure centers in the brain activated in a scanner" is not the same as "we think that the pleasure centers in the brain activate because the bumblebee seems happy". One is an objective claim, the other subjective (and looks like designed to sell animism 2.0 and happy feelings).
Subjective and tainted by the positive image that we had from bumblebees. Try to sell "happy spiders play football with fly heads" for example and everybody will conclude that spiders are the worst
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 the bee it would dart back and always stay just out of reach. Then the bee would zoom in closer and they would repeat this for a few minutes until one of them would get distracted. As far as I know they never made direct contact. RIP good boy
Yep. I hate all flying insects as they make me tense up like some fight or flight response... probably from being stung by hornets a billion times as a kid.
That said, I learned to tolerate the carpenter bees on my deck because they'd bonk all the wasps away.
At an old apartment there were some bumble bees that lived in my neighbour's fence (or at least that's what it seemed like) and every time I'd sit outside, they' come out and fly around all chill. Nothing aggressive ever, they'd just fly in front of me and sometimes I watched them and otherwise I'd just sit and work. I don't know what my point is anymore... bumble bees!
Hover flies compete with other makes for the privilege of hovering in the 'best' spot over a bush or wherever. They'll fly at whoever invades their space and then return to hovering and defend it.
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.
If you spend any time researching play at all, you'll find that's pretty much a universal view among scientists who study it. It's essential training and learning for survival. Love Graeber, RIP, but if that's something he claimed then he's unfortunately off on that one.
sorry, the universal rule is play isn't important, or the universal rule is play is important? Also, do you have some leads on sources? I'd be interested on reading up on this.
I think this[1] would be your definitive resources but if you can just search for "evolution of play" then you'll find a lot of stuff. Wikipedia has a hodgepodge of perspectives in section on the purpose of play [2] but you might be better off tracking down those citations.
I might be misunderstanding Graeber, but I thought his point was that by viewing play through the calculus of evolution and survival probabilities, scientists have not paid as much attention to the fact that play is fun.
How did animals come to play? Because it allows them to explore their environment and increases their evolutionary fitness. Why do animals continue to play? Because they enjoy it.
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.
“Debt: The First 5000 Years” is mind boggling and I hold it as high as Sapiens. In some ways it’s actually better when explaining what people actually did instead of our idealized views.
> This would be the reaction of most professional ethologists as well.
A behaviorist maybe, but an ethologist?
* an ethologist surely knows that gene mutations can be advantageous for the family/group as well as the individual
* an ethologist surely knows that a previous advantage for survival can persist as a vestige
* an ethologist can surely rinse and repeat to find all kinds of fascinating combinations in living organisms which-- while they may not disadvantage the organism-- cannot be explained in the present as construing any clear survival advantage
Those alone are enough to develop an incremental path out of the narrow rational view that Graeber ascribes to Ethology's history. I can't imagine Ethology didn't already get there.
Ethologists: what say you?
Edit: Related process in an unrelated field-- early 20th Century German comparitive musicology eventually became the perfectly reasonable and relativist field of Ethnomusicology. AFAICT Ethnomusicologists kept the instrument taxonomy and the ethnologies, and then got off the "gold standard" of high-Romantic German art music. :)
Note: Title is incorrect. They're actually talking in terms of charge density.
"As far as electricity generation goes, a bee swarm’s charge isn’t too impressive: It would take about 50 billion bees to power an LED light, Popular Science reports. But compared to the charges produced by common weather events, the bees’ charge density was six times greater than an electrified dust storm and eight times greater than a thunderstorm cloud."
Not very surprising. We, as a whole, do not recognize intelligence in other creatures because it makes it so much easier to do anything with or to them. Damn shame for a number of reasons
> …insects… are a million miles from the mindless, unfeeling creatures they are traditionally believed to be.
Is it truly a common belief that insects are mindless and unfeeling? I would imagine the vast majority of people, when polled, would guess that insects have some form of consciousness and feeling.
Of course, that doesn't stop people from squashing or swatting them when they get in the way. In fact, it hasn't fully stopped people from killing other people either.
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 that we experience qualia.
Unless you're willing to accept that a rock, or a series of silicon chips, or even a massive mechanical computing machine can have consciousness, the blurry edge of where neural systems go from being electric discharges to a vehicle for qualia is an extremely difficult question.
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 brick, but are very likely conscious.
I realized recently there’s no evidence that they don’t, but a wealth of evidence that they do.
I watch animals very closely now and I see more all the time that they are just like me in most ways. I suppose I used to watch them as a person who eats them, and my comfort with doing so depended on not seeing them as conscious creatures like me. Now that I don’t eat them, it’s as though there are more similarities than there are differences.
I suspect if animals could speak, we’d realize they’re remarkably similar to us. This probably sounds ridiculous to many people, and would have to me once too.
A key part of this is not that I’m elevating animals’ conscience to that of humans so much as lowering humans’. We tend to think we’re exceptional, but I think our exception is probably just intelligence. The rest, I don’t know, I suspect we’re all very much alike.
Some level of intelligence is a prerequisite for experience of qualia.
A rock for example is below that threshold. The question then becomes what exactly is the minim level of perception we are willing to accept. Individual cells respond to their environment indirectly, that’s enough to qualify IMO but I accept people would disagree.
Which just illiterates people don’t generally use philosophical definitions directly. What they mean by qualia isn’t subjective conscious experience, it’s something else which they can’t actually describe that just so happens to conform exactly to their preconceived notions.
The ideas is if you had some, theoretical, mechanical computer built of stone (something trivially producible), if we believe that any artificial intelligences can be sentient, then it would be trivial to extend this to create a sentient, but essentially just a complex stone object.
A single stone is different than a system consisting of large numbers of stones in some non random configuration.
It’s like the flaw in that “Chinese room” thought experiment. The person following instructions isn’t the room any more than the walls are. All that thought experiment demonstrates is a CPU has a more limited perspective than the computer it’s part of.
A specific rock inherently is whatever that rock is. That same rock can represent all finite messages at the same time in relation to it’s position along arbitrarily defined number lines. Nothing inherent to the rock changed as that meaning is external to it.
Consciousness is an actual thing. It's not an idea. The idea that somehow a collection of stone objects springs forth a consciousness when arranged in one pattern versus another... is certainly an odd concept.
Why would you assume consciousness is a thing rather than a property of a system?
Temperature for example isn’t a substance. I am not saying consciousness couldn’t be a thing, but it just seems to be an assumption without justification.
As to arrangements of stuff being important, arrangement of individual pieces can make the difference between a watch and a pile of pieces or a person and a dead body. Many emergent properties depend on the specific arrangements of components.
>Why would you assume consciousness is a thing rather than a property of a system?
If consciousness were simply the property of a system, then I'd assume it is effectively an illusion. I'm not sure, and I'm not saying this it would be de facto wrong, I'm just saying it's absurd for me to conceive of it this way, because if it is the case that it's a byproduct of a system, then there is effectively no self. It may be the case that that is true, bit it's useless to conceive of it.
Is math an illusion? Math is a property of systems, as is our and our calculators ability to do it. I would argue that makes it more real.
When you see an object in reality, you're really making a series of assumptions. What you see is reflected light, and you construct a highly innacurate but useful model of what that light logically implies. Something that is external can only be perceived epistemically, as a sufficiently good guess. There's no evidence we're not in a simulation, so it's a toss-up as to whether anything physical exists at all.
Contrast the concept of self awareness. 'I think, therefore I am' is not a guess. It is a certainty, regardless of the broader context, that somewhere, something is a host to my experiences and thoughts.
Tangent: You can extend that a little bit by reasoning that you exist, therefore the things you interact with must exist as something. That doesn't get you past the possibility of the matrix, but it does escape total nihilism.
As I said in my first post “What they mean by qualia isn’t subjective conscious experience, it’s something else which they can’t actually describe that just so happens to conform exactly to their preconceived notions.”
I am hypo intelligent, but my coworkers definitely appear unconscious. Incomplete, ill-posed statement fragments over chat or better yet, in needless "sync" meetings.
Insects display unbelievable forms intelligence to anyone that pays attention.
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 reasoning that actually conciousness emerges as some threshold gets crossed
I mean, we don't know. We literally don't know where or how consciousness exists. We just know that we have it, and we try to extrapolate backwards.
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.
This always used to be my thought as well. Consciousness and intelligence had a clear hierarchy in my mind. Slowly though I am not so sure anymore. Watching plants grow in their own time frame in the documentary "the private life of plants", reading about the communication networks of trees in "The Hidden Life of Trees" and having observed nature a lot; this hierarchy starts to fade.
There is a big connection between consciousness and morality. Killing a family of bears to safe a human child would be seen as a moral think to do. We explain this to ourselves by using levels of consciousness. It is okay to kill, enslave etc. a species with a lower level of consciousness for the benefit of one with a higher level. And humans have the highest levels of consciousness.
I believe this is an illusion or even a coping mechanisms for admitting that we find our own species more important.
Think of it this way; what if there existed an alien race, superior in intellect and consciousness. Would we be okay with it enslaved us? Would we kill one of our own if it meant saving one of them. I think not. I think the connection between consciousness and morality would disappear.
When connecting consciousness with morality, admitting consciousness to a life form becomes subjective and a costly dilemma.
I think that by just admitting that we prefer the survival of our own kind it would be easier to see rich world of many possible consciousness entities in this world. Be it humans, insects, trees or even interconnected systems of species.
If we take away the whole effect of the trolley problem and only talk about values, I would say that given the choice of 2 human life against the last 2 of a species of some insect, I would choose not to extinct that species.
I agree on the comparison of a higher consciousness than humans visiting earth. I would in most normal cases protect my own humans instead of a bear or alien.
But if a human where about to kill a defenceless alien without cause, I would save that alien.
Even if there is a chance it’s all a mirage, wouldn’t it be better to behave as if these and other creatures have an inner life?
Appealing to the philosophical zombie seems like an excuse to discard that our actions might cause real suffering from their perspective, on the unknowable chance they don’t mind.
I honestly view insects as largely robotic, performing a limited set of specific tasks over and over without requiring any learning. Some of those tasks are immensely complex! But they do them with the determination of an automaton and with, presumably, fixed programming dictating the behaviors (since they require no teaching whatsoever for hunting or nesting or breeding or child-rearing, unlike other more 'advanced' animals).
So no, I never considered insects to be "feeling" creatures. But research like this can certainly change my mind!
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 improves fitness other than because it is emotionally gratifying, which I would posit necessarily intersects with biology beyond the very simplistic instinctual-automaton model.
I mean, I'm no expert, but I think this position is more than a bit rigid. We know that evolutionary development probabilistically yields maximized efficiency, but we also know there is plenty of room for drift and it can be a bit random.
E.g. anti-fragile behaviors likely yield the best outcomes, even if they are less efficient, because the ultimate evolutionary failure is extinction (not death). Highly regular, efficient behavior are great for the individuals survival, but terrible for the species survival.
The play could also have benefits evolutionarily. While the behavior take energy, it teaches motor skills (which is more relevant to the younger bees who played more). I’m just using this (admittedly weak) example to show that play isn’t necessarily less than optimal behavior.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you. I can recall several instances having arguments in my head when someone totally oversteps the probabilistic nature of evolution - those people were my professors.
As to antifragile behaviors, I don't know that I agree completely. For instance there's a pretty considerable difference in strategies we observe with r (antifragile) and K (fragile) selection. But also hyper-specific species, for instance the famed Darwin's Hawkmoth: a moth previously unknown but predicted to exist by Darwin who posited that the pitcher flower with a narrow neck necessarily had some animal evolved to correspond to its adaptive strategies. That to me reads as the precise opposite of antifragility, an exclusive dependence would be fragile, and yet monophagy (very fragile)/oligophagy (fragile) is fairly common, and omnivorism (antifragile) is not. Though I suppose you could point to, in some instance, antifragile outcomes over the long run the sum risk for some of these organisms I intuit, outweigh the benefits of antifragile strategies.
There are some interesting and definitively antifragile, some of the niche partitioning strategies are really quite ingenious.
I would indicate the most antifragile creature is the human (literally real-time evolution), our wont towards ecosystem engineering may actually be our downfall. I've actually thought for some while a golden mean exists in antifragility, and too much investment in that direction leads to insensitivity to critical structural weaknesses through a couple of different pathways.
> biology beyond the very simplistic instinctual-automaton model
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.
I don't disagree with you. My entire point is that "play" isn't a thing. It's a behavior we can point to and categorize, but it shouldn't be defined by some post-hoc function. That's a teleological view applied to natural phenomena.
The behavioral pattern exists. It's obviously instinctual. It may exist for a variety of functions, both currently important to human evolution or as a vestige from a previous era. The my entire point is that "play" again, is a social construction placed on top of a observed behavioral pattern.
I agree. It’s like we forget that we’re literally one of millions, billions, or trillions (it seems the estimated count is an open question) of species on this planet. No other species could possibly share analogous behavior.
Lacking evidence otherwise, I would say that we have to assume the internal experience of most life with central nervous systems are remarkably similar to ours, because we are remarkably similar.
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.
78 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] thread> 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 a form of sentience in these insects
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 insects that are a million miles from the mindless, unfeeling creatures they are traditionally believed to be."
It gives me the impression the findings are driven by the agenda to save the bees. Which makes me feel conflicted since I support the aim and have lay interests in philosophy of mind.
The study was definitely influenced by the popular notion of saving the bees, but that’s not a problem! I’d rather read about bees having fun than any other insect! I hope others feel the same and a friendlier sentiment towards bees (because of the study, a little bit) helps the whole problem.
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.
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 of play), and it is unrelated to mate/food finding.
It’s very difficult to know what animals are thinking. The scientists say multiple times in different ways that none of this is conclusive (the longest section regarding knowing the behavior isn’t function-related). That being said, it’s a well designed experiment in my opinion. I think they did a good job of setting it up so that we can conclude: “why else would they roll the balls?”
1. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Samadi-Galpayage/public...
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.
I think what they mean is that it was not connected to an external reward (at least not one that the researchers could identify). For example, they did not train the bees to roll the ball in order to get sugar water or something.
> "Bumblebees play because we humans think that they play"
Or maybe they are just brain-wired to explore any strange object and instinctively clean any movable peeble, fruit, and object in the path of the entry of the colony. Cleaning the colony is a very common behavior reported in bees
"We observed the pleasure centers in the brain activated in a scanner" is not the same as "we think that the pleasure centers in the brain activate because the bumblebee seems happy". One is an objective claim, the other subjective (and looks like designed to sell animism 2.0 and happy feelings).
Subjective and tainted by the positive image that we had from bumblebees. Try to sell "happy spiders play football with fly heads" for example and everybody will conclude that spiders are the worst
That said, I learned to tolerate the carpenter bees on my deck because they'd bonk all the wasps away.
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 think this[1] would be your definitive resources but if you can just search for "evolution of play" then you'll find a lot of stuff. Wikipedia has a hodgepodge of perspectives in section on the purpose of play [2] but you might be better off tracking down those citations.
1. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-handbook-...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_(activity)#Development_an...
How did animals come to play? Because it allows them to explore their environment and increases their evolutionary fitness. Why do animals continue to play? Because they enjoy it.
“Debt: The First 5000 Years” is mind boggling and I hold it as high as Sapiens. In some ways it’s actually better when explaining what people actually did instead of our idealized views.
A behaviorist maybe, but an ethologist?
* an ethologist surely knows that gene mutations can be advantageous for the family/group as well as the individual
* an ethologist surely knows that a previous advantage for survival can persist as a vestige
* an ethologist can surely rinse and repeat to find all kinds of fascinating combinations in living organisms which-- while they may not disadvantage the organism-- cannot be explained in the present as construing any clear survival advantage
Those alone are enough to develop an incremental path out of the narrow rational view that Graeber ascribes to Ethology's history. I can't imagine Ethology didn't already get there.
Ethologists: what say you?
Edit: Related process in an unrelated field-- early 20th Century German comparitive musicology eventually became the perfectly reasonable and relativist field of Ethnomusicology. AFAICT Ethnomusicologists kept the instrument taxonomy and the ethnologies, and then got off the "gold standard" of high-Romantic German art music. :)
"Honeybee Swarms Can Produce as Much Electric Charge as a Storm Cloud" https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/honeybee-swarms-ca...
Note: Title is incorrect. They're actually talking in terms of charge density.
"As far as electricity generation goes, a bee swarm’s charge isn’t too impressive: It would take about 50 billion bees to power an LED light, Popular Science reports. But compared to the charges produced by common weather events, the bees’ charge density was six times greater than an electrified dust storm and eight times greater than a thunderstorm cloud."
Is it truly a common belief that insects are mindless and unfeeling? I would imagine the vast majority of people, when polled, would guess that insects have some form of consciousness and feeling.
Of course, that doesn't stop people from squashing or swatting them when they get in the way. In fact, it hasn't fully stopped people from killing other people either.
Not saying etymology is the best indication for what people think, but there is a connection there.
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 that we experience qualia.
Unless you're willing to accept that a rock, or a series of silicon chips, or even a massive mechanical computing machine can have consciousness, the blurry edge of where neural systems go from being electric discharges to a vehicle for qualia is an extremely difficult question.
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 brick, but are very likely conscious.
I watch animals very closely now and I see more all the time that they are just like me in most ways. I suppose I used to watch them as a person who eats them, and my comfort with doing so depended on not seeing them as conscious creatures like me. Now that I don’t eat them, it’s as though there are more similarities than there are differences.
I suspect if animals could speak, we’d realize they’re remarkably similar to us. This probably sounds ridiculous to many people, and would have to me once too.
A key part of this is not that I’m elevating animals’ conscience to that of humans so much as lowering humans’. We tend to think we’re exceptional, but I think our exception is probably just intelligence. The rest, I don’t know, I suspect we’re all very much alike.
That said, I agree with what you are saying. We tend to assume a bigger than likely distance between us and other animals.
Now I suppose neither of us are prepared to accept it.
A rock for example is below that threshold. The question then becomes what exactly is the minim level of perception we are willing to accept. Individual cells respond to their environment indirectly, that’s enough to qualify IMO but I accept people would disagree.
Which just illiterates people don’t generally use philosophical definitions directly. What they mean by qualia isn’t subjective conscious experience, it’s something else which they can’t actually describe that just so happens to conform exactly to their preconceived notions.
It’s like the flaw in that “Chinese room” thought experiment. The person following instructions isn’t the room any more than the walls are. All that thought experiment demonstrates is a CPU has a more limited perspective than the computer it’s part of.
A specific rock inherently is whatever that rock is. That same rock can represent all finite messages at the same time in relation to it’s position along arbitrarily defined number lines. Nothing inherent to the rock changed as that meaning is external to it.
Temperature for example isn’t a substance. I am not saying consciousness couldn’t be a thing, but it just seems to be an assumption without justification.
As to arrangements of stuff being important, arrangement of individual pieces can make the difference between a watch and a pile of pieces or a person and a dead body. Many emergent properties depend on the specific arrangements of components.
If consciousness were simply the property of a system, then I'd assume it is effectively an illusion. I'm not sure, and I'm not saying this it would be de facto wrong, I'm just saying it's absurd for me to conceive of it this way, because if it is the case that it's a byproduct of a system, then there is effectively no self. It may be the case that that is true, bit it's useless to conceive of it.
When you see an object in reality, you're really making a series of assumptions. What you see is reflected light, and you construct a highly innacurate but useful model of what that light logically implies. Something that is external can only be perceived epistemically, as a sufficiently good guess. There's no evidence we're not in a simulation, so it's a toss-up as to whether anything physical exists at all.
Contrast the concept of self awareness. 'I think, therefore I am' is not a guess. It is a certainty, regardless of the broader context, that somewhere, something is a host to my experiences and thoughts.
Tangent: You can extend that a little bit by reasoning that you exist, therefore the things you interact with must exist as something. That doesn't get you past the possibility of the matrix, but it does escape total nihilism.
How do you know that? It’s entirely possible that a rock has all sorts going on that we just can’t detect.
Which sounds facetious, but given that we can’t even detect consciousness in humans, it seems difficult to rule it out entirely.
Insects display unbelievable forms intelligence to anyone that pays attention.
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 reasoning that actually conciousness emerges as some threshold gets crossed
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.
There is a big connection between consciousness and morality. Killing a family of bears to safe a human child would be seen as a moral think to do. We explain this to ourselves by using levels of consciousness. It is okay to kill, enslave etc. a species with a lower level of consciousness for the benefit of one with a higher level. And humans have the highest levels of consciousness. I believe this is an illusion or even a coping mechanisms for admitting that we find our own species more important. Think of it this way; what if there existed an alien race, superior in intellect and consciousness. Would we be okay with it enslaved us? Would we kill one of our own if it meant saving one of them. I think not. I think the connection between consciousness and morality would disappear.
When connecting consciousness with morality, admitting consciousness to a life form becomes subjective and a costly dilemma. I think that by just admitting that we prefer the survival of our own kind it would be easier to see rich world of many possible consciousness entities in this world. Be it humans, insects, trees or even interconnected systems of species.
If we take away the whole effect of the trolley problem and only talk about values, I would say that given the choice of 2 human life against the last 2 of a species of some insect, I would choose not to extinct that species.
I agree on the comparison of a higher consciousness than humans visiting earth. I would in most normal cases protect my own humans instead of a bear or alien. But if a human where about to kill a defenceless alien without cause, I would save that alien.
Appealing to the philosophical zombie seems like an excuse to discard that our actions might cause real suffering from their perspective, on the unknowable chance they don’t mind.
So no, I never considered insects to be "feeling" creatures. But research like this can certainly change my mind!
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.
At least I can't imagine any sort of logical pattern where this improves fitness other than because it is emotionally gratifying, which I would posit necessarily intersects with biology beyond the very simplistic instinctual-automaton model.
E.g. anti-fragile behaviors likely yield the best outcomes, even if they are less efficient, because the ultimate evolutionary failure is extinction (not death). Highly regular, efficient behavior are great for the individuals survival, but terrible for the species survival.
As to antifragile behaviors, I don't know that I agree completely. For instance there's a pretty considerable difference in strategies we observe with r (antifragile) and K (fragile) selection. But also hyper-specific species, for instance the famed Darwin's Hawkmoth: a moth previously unknown but predicted to exist by Darwin who posited that the pitcher flower with a narrow neck necessarily had some animal evolved to correspond to its adaptive strategies. That to me reads as the precise opposite of antifragility, an exclusive dependence would be fragile, and yet monophagy (very fragile)/oligophagy (fragile) is fairly common, and omnivorism (antifragile) is not. Though I suppose you could point to, in some instance, antifragile outcomes over the long run the sum risk for some of these organisms I intuit, outweigh the benefits of antifragile strategies.
There are some interesting and definitively antifragile, some of the niche partitioning strategies are really quite ingenious.
I would indicate the most antifragile creature is the human (literally real-time evolution), our wont towards ecosystem engineering may actually be our downfall. I've actually thought for some while a golden mean exists in antifragility, and too much investment in that direction leads to insensitivity to critical structural weaknesses through a couple of different pathways.
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.
The behavioral pattern exists. It's obviously instinctual. It may exist for a variety of functions, both currently important to human evolution or as a vestige from a previous era. The my entire point is that "play" again, is a social construction placed on top of a observed behavioral pattern.
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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/07/29/bee-cognit...
I strongly recommend everybody interested in play to read Huizinga's Homo Ludens.
And if so, is it not reasonable to expect every species that benefits from honing and/or exploration to also 'play'?
I don't find it surprising.