
Bee-brained - howard941
https://aeon.co/essays/inside-the-mind-of-a-bee-is-a-hive-of-sensory-activity
======
fiblye
Really 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.

~~~
maxwell
Lots of animals have opposable thumbs: [https://animalsake.com/list-of-
animals-with-opposable-thumbs](https://animalsake.com/list-of-animals-with-
opposable-thumbs)

The only thing that makes the _Homo_ genus unique is control of fire.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
And our genetic code. And schools and fire departments and lasers.

~~~
eplanit
Exactly. And libraries, moon/Mars/deep space exploration....

It amuses me when there's an article that recognizes a similarity between
humans and other species, many jump onto the "see, they're _just_ like us"
meme.

What I'd be intrigued by is if there is any other species (is there _any_?)
that has, century over century, via pure self- and collective-determination,
advanced their state of being, achieved new capabilities, live in ways
completely different than their ancestors, etc. I'm not including genetic
adaptation or evolution to suit an environment -- I mean self-driven
advancement. Seems we're quite unique, in that regard.

~~~
sdegutis
Right, that's called rationality. All other creatures are irrational, they act
only on pure instinct, even if that instinct is sophisticated, such as the
primates seen sharpening sticks for hunting, or the birds that drop hard
shells into traffic so that cars crack it open and they get to eat what's
inside, or the ways bees self-organize. Sophisticated, but still just
instinct. We're the only rational creatures.

~~~
theli0nheart
You’re joking, right?

~~~
sdegutis
No, but I think the confusion could be in the definition of rational. We're
the only creatures who have the ability to reason abstractly, which is why
we're able to do many things even the most intelligent other creatures can't.

~~~
maxwell
From the article:

> These bees retrieved their spatial memories entirely out of context, at a
> time when there was no possibility of foraging and so no immediate need for
> communication. The function is unclear. They might have ‘just thought’ about
> these locations spontaneously during the night. Or perhaps the communication
> is a strategy for consolidating their spatial memory. Scientists have since
> found that a bee’s memories of the previous day are strengthened when they
> are exposed to elements of these memories while in deep sleep. Perhaps bees
> not only think and ‘talk’, but dream?

> The key implication of Lindauer’s discovery is that bees are capable of
> ‘offline thinking’ about spatial locations, and of linking these locations
> to a time of day, in the absence of an external trigger. That’s not what
> should happen if bees’ memories are merely prompted by environmental
> stimuli, combined with internal triggers such as hunger. Bees, then, appear
> to have at least one of the principal hallmarks of consciousness:
> representations of time and space.

That sounds like evidence that bees may be capable of "reason[ing]
abstractly".

What can humans accomplish using solely "intelligence" that other animals
can't?

All of the unique behaviors I see in humans involve use of fire-derived
technology.

~~~
sdegutis
Isn't that enough? We can control fire. We can create technology from this one
unique capability, which no other creature can. Others have the physical
capability to control fire but they cannot actually do it.

~~~
starbeast
>"Intentional Fire-Spreading by “Firehawk” Raptors in Northern Australia"

>"We document Indigenous Ecological Knowledge and non-Indigenous observations
of intentional fire-spreading by the fire-foraging raptors Black Kite (Milvus
migrans), Whistling Kite (Haliastur sphenurus), and Brown Falcon (Falco
berigora) in tropical Australian savannas. Observers report both solo and
cooperative attempts, often successful, to spread wildfires intentionally via
single-occasion or repeated transport of burning sticks in talons or beaks.
This behavior, often represented in sacred ceremonies, is widely known to
local people in the Northern Territory, where we carried out ethno-
ornithological research from 2011 to 2017; it was also reported to us from
Western Australia and Queensland. Though Aboriginal rangers and others who
deal with bushfires take into account the risks posed by raptors that cause
controlled burns to jump across firebreaks, official skepticism about the
reality of avian fire-spreading hampers effective planning for landscape
management and restoration. Via ethno-ornithological workshops and controlled
field experiments with land managers, our collaborative research aims to
situate fire-spreading as an important factor in fire management and fire
ecology. In a broader sense, better understanding of avian fire-spreading,
both in Australia and, potentially, elsewhere, can contribute to theories
about the evolution of tropical savannas and the origins of human fire use."

[http://www.bioone.org/doi/10.2993/0278-0771-37.4.700](http://www.bioone.org/doi/10.2993/0278-0771-37.4.700)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
When they make a steam engine, then I'll admit to rational thought processes.
Until then it could even be instinct.

~~~
starbeast
How many steam engines have you made?

------
gambler
Bees are one of the reasons I think the current metrics for "smartness" of AI
are misguided and that we are very, very far away from AGI. Bees are capable
of learning, planning, communication, prediction and at least some form of
abstract reasoning. And it can operate sensibly in contexts very different
from its normal environment. All of that with just 960,000 neurons. No
artificial neural networks show anything close to this level of flexibility.

Does it really matter whether a bee is better at any of those tasks than
"average" or "best" humans?

Clearly, once flexibility is achieved, other capabilities can be improved upon
iteratively, because that's exactly what happened in nature. And yet I don't
see any researchers looking at how many _different_ tasks their specific AI
can accomplish, instead of how well it can accomplish a particular one.

~~~
TrainedMonkey
This is a simplistic view of what is going on. That complexity is not produced
by 1e6 neurons alone. Rather it is a combination of a neural net embedded in a
biochemical harness. The harness interacts not only with individual bee's
systems, but also with environment and other bees (via pheromones, etc.)

I do agree with you that we still have much to learn in neural network design
(or more generally distributed algorithms). For example distributed systems
are notoriously bad at state machines (or sequencing in general). One of the
ways biological systems handle sequencing is via multiple signaling layers
with different time constants (e.g. pheromones vs neurons). On the other hand
deep learning systems I am familiar with just throw more parameters at the
problem, obviously this scales poorly with the sequence length.

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pavel_lishin
I'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.

~~~
rladd
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.

~~~
pavel_lishin
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.

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Koshkin
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. 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.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _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.

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bananatron
"...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."

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monocasa
> Yet, for the most part, Descartes did not think very highly of the inner
> life of nonhuman animals. ‘[T]he reason why animals do not speak as we do is
> not that they lack the organs but that they have no thoughts,’ Descartes
> wrote in a letter in 1646.

That's borderline whitewashing his thoughts and actions on the matter. He did
stuff like nail his wife's dog to a board and vivisect it to prove that it
couldn't "truly" feel pain.

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awinter-py
this article could be evidence that they're zimboes

(because the author is convinced they have a real inner life)

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perpetualcrayon
un-bee-lievable

