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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>"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."
Furthermore, this kind of stuff always makes me wonder if/when other genus will eventually evolve into "intelligent" beings (with "intelligent" being loosely defined).
The Homo genus evolved around ~2-3 million years ago; homo sapiens came about ~250K years ago. What's not to say that 2 to 3 million years from now, there'll be some other intelligent species from other genus branches? It always tickles my brain to think about this.
I've had the same thought. Unfortunately at the rate we wipe out other species I don't know that they'll get the chance! But when debating conservation efforts for various species it does seem like there is the possibility that on one hand we could be allowing the extinction of a species on the cusp of "intelligence".
It's not that they don't recognize it, it's that the knowingly don't want to believe it, authorized by religions to kill animals for food and mistreat them in general.
> It's a stretch to say that religion 'authorizes' us to mistreat/eat animals.
"Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creature that crawls upon the earth."
Of course people would do it anyway, especially when they had no other choice (nowadays we could live without exploiting animals, it would even be cheaper and more ecologic - but before we knew chemistry and biology we had at least some excuses).
But at least Bible-based religions clearly legitimize abuse of animals, and treating animals as mindless things that don't have feelings nor rights. Even now in my country ecologists/vegans are one of the groups considered enemies of "natural order" by influential religious media (Rydzyk media-empire in Poland for one example).
It's not an accident that animals don't have souls according to Catholicism.
Islam is Bible-based as well (to some point). And their halal butchering practices aren't particularly humane by modern standards, even if at some point in the past they were.
The key thing humans got is replacing the genetic evolution by memetic evolution, aka culture, powered by structured communication aka speech. This allowed for organizations above the Dunbar number, and very quick evolution of behaviors without constantly killing and re-spawning physical bodies.
Some advanced animals, like wolves, have something resembling a passing of cultural knowledge: they teach their young how to hunt particular prey, and this may differs seriously between packs and types of prey. But they lack speech, so they can't pass more complex ideas.
Cetaceans are said to have consciousness not unlike humans'; maybe they have speech and an advanced culture; we don't know. But they lack means of manipulation and live mostly floating above abyss, so they don't have a material culture and technology.
Quite possibly it's not an exceptional intellectual capability that singled out humans among comparably intelligent animals, but the (proto-)speech ability. The advances in intelligence then followed, being evolutionary beneficial.
> Cetaceans are said to have consciousness not unlike humans'; maybe they have speech and an advanced culture; we don't know. But they lack means of manipulation and live mostly floating above abyss, so they don't have a material culture and technology.
You refuted your own argument. Sounds like it's more about the "material culture and technology", which started with control of fire.
No living species other than Homo sapiens harnesses fire.
Yes, fire was a key thing in the development of technology, and then (a few hundred thousand years later) domination of the biosphere.
What I mean that animals which did not develop technology may have other kinds of advanced culture, such as that we would recognize as culture, e.g. in social organization and explanation of the world ("philosophy"), and/or art — it they have a capability for structured communication and thus capable to pass more and more complex knowledge across generations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In my experience social insects have much more individuality than most people believe. I kept ants for a while and it was shocking to me how each of them has it's own, unique patterns of behavior. Some like to wander far outside, some prefer to stay close to the entrance. Some are more aggressive, some less. They react to danger and feeding differently, some are easily crazed out, some stay calm. It's hard to see this because they all look very similar and there's a lot of them, but with time you learn to recognize some, and then it becomes obvious that they totally have their own personalities.
Is it possible that you can't tell them apart, and that you just assume that all the ants that "craze out" are the ants you previously saw crazing out?
no, some of them are recognizable, have a specific discoloration, or a leg or an antenna missing or something like that's unique about them. My colony was small, a few hundreds ants, and I knew how to tell apart maybe about a dozen of them, enough to notice that not all of them behave identically.
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.
> 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.
"...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."
> 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.
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.