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Insects and other animals have consciousness
- jowdones 2y agoSo bees play, hence they are conscious. But a lot of animals play and they are oblivious to themselves (not self conscious).
- uoaei 2y agoTo be conscious and to be self-conscious (sentient) are different things.
- m3kw9 2y agoBees are conscious because we assume they are playing and can’t imagine any other reasons on why they did what they did.
- steve_taylor 2y ago“We don’t know, therefore consciousness” sounds an awful lot like “We don’t know, therefore God”.
- jhbadger 2y agoAnd play isn't "useless". It's not surprising that a lot of play (cats and dogs pouncing on toys, puppies and kittens wrestling with each other) is obvious practice for things they do when they aren't playing.
- justinclift 2y agoGood point. There must be some as-yet-undiscovered football league for bees, for when they're not just playing around. ;)
- yungporko 2y agomost maybe, but definitely not all play is practice for anything. a crow sliding down a roof on its back in the snow over and over again for fun isn't practice for anything it ever needs to do, and neither is instigating a fight between 2 cats just to watch, probably.
- newzisforsukas 2y agoMaybe bees get akathisia from spherical objects.
- Arn_Thor 2y agoThey explain this in the article. These scientists talk about a basic level of consciousness that does not include a notion of self. This would put the bees in the same category with animals that experience for example pleasure and pain but have no notion of self. You may disagree with calling that consciousness, but it is at least consistent
- smegsicle 2y ago> The declaration focuses on the most basic kind of consciousness, known as phenomenal consciousness. Roughly put, if a creature has phenomenal consciousness, then it is “like something” to be that creature a 1995 thought experiment suggested that an etch-a-sketch could also be conscious
- uoaei 2y agoWould two cities debating about whether humans are conscious be able to understand that we humans ask the same questions about our cells?
- nick7376182 2y agoSorry, the cells that were going to answer that are on vacation visiting in another human.
- uoaei 2y agoAre analogies always constrained to be so literal? Do we complain about how many legs the 'wasp' has when talking about wasps and orchids?
- nick7376182 2y agoApologies, that was meant to be humour rather than criticism.
- vivzkestrel 2y agooh boy now i don't know how to feel about all the mosquitoes i have been swatting this entire winter season
- krapp 2y agoMosquitos kill over a million people every year. Show them no mercy.
- m3kw9 2y agoHey don’t generalize the entire population
- praptak 2y agoAlso it's not mosquitos' fault that deadly pathogens hop on the ride.
- surfingdino 2y agoAiding and abetting, that's what it is. Those mosquitos know what they are doing.
- m3kw9 2y agoMust be quilt by association
- amelius 2y ago"A society can be judged by the way it treats its mosquitos" -- paraphrased from Fyodor Dostoevsky
- vouaobrasil 2y agoWe kill more than a million non-human animals every year, even excluding mosquitos and what we eat. Like bycatch from fishing. We should not be shown any mercy.
- 2y ago
- dang 2y agoRelated. Others? Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40097045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40097045 - April 2024 (14 comments) 'Irresponsible' to ignore consciousness across animal world scientists argue - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40092985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40092985 - April 2024 (270 comments)
- bnralt 2y agoMost of the discussions around "consciousness" would be greatly improved if people avoided that vague and ill-defined term.
- dstroot 2y agoThe article defines “phenomenal consciousness “ as feeling pain, pleasure or hunger, but not necessarily a sense of self.
- cess11 2y agoSounds like they're including plants.
- causal 2y agoBut even those terms a human can only understandable from a human standpoint. I'm guessing that pleasure for a bee is nothing at all like pleasure for me, but I cannot avoid projecting my own experience when I think about the bee's experience.
- haswell 2y agoWe descended from apes. Before we made the jump, apes presumably still felt pain and pleasure. They just didn’t have the same degree of sophistication when making sense of these sensations. Our understanding of shared traits among various animal types makes it possible to extrapolate reasonably that what these animals experience is not dissimilar to what we experience in terms of raw sensations.
- jenadine 2y agoThis seems obvious to me and I don't understand how one can think otherwise.
- uoaei 2y agoObjectification, that's how.
- konart 2y agoSun moves around Earth. This seems obvious to me and I don't understand how one can think otherwise. /s
- diego_sandoval 2y agoSun does move around the earth though. Doesn't it?
- fsckboy 2y agoThe entire sun moves around a point that is outside the sun. this point is on a more or less (Saturn) straight line to Jupiter.
- stavros 2y agoIt doesn't (always). It depends on where the other planets are, and can range from near the center of the sun to outside its surface.
- himinlomax 2y agoIt depends on the frame of reference, so you can correctly say that the sun goes around the earth. You're instead thinking of heliocentrism vs geocentrism, which is about the planets as a whole revolving around the sun. This is a common misguided gotcha question that is hilariously so confidently gotten wrong, just like what is heavier, a kilogram of lead or a kilogram of feathers? The former is heavier and I can prove it with one word.
- m3kw9 2y agoWhy would you automatically think a bee spinning a ball “ It was, apparently, just for fun.”?
- bayindirh 2y agoBecause it serves no purpose other than “fun” and “passing idle time”.
- m3kw9 2y agoThat’s what we think because we cannot imagine or know another reason. But we can’t be sure. I know it’s possible because that’s what humans do for fun.
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- jhbadger 2y agoOr we haven't bothered to investigate why they are doing it? Poets used to think birds sang because they were happy (we now know they are mostly saying "Back off; this territory is mine" and "I'm looking for a mate; would you do it with me?")
- bayindirh 2y agoWell, that’s the result of the research. It’s a whole paper. And, it’s not written by poets. Plus, birds doesn’t always chirp to tell you to back off or to mate. There’s a myriad of reasons.
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- arp242 2y agoMost insects have hundreds of thousands of neurons. Even simple mammals have dozens of millions. Dogs have billions. Humans, elephants, dolphins have 1 to 2 dozen billion. While differences between e.g. humans and dogs is pretty large, it's still roughly of the same order. This is something you can meaningfully compare with similar(-ish) frame of references. I don't think you can compare "consciousness" as experienced by humans, elephants, apes, and dogs with "consciousness" as experienced by a bee with ~800,000 neurons, for any meaning of "consciousness". Even extrapolating rolling around a little ball to "play" is a huge stretch; many insects can exhibit all sorts of absurd behaviour because their programming misfires.
- Arn_Thor 2y agoIt may be a stretch but since we don’t know the exact criteria for the kind of consciousness the article and scientists refer to, it seems rash to dismiss it out of hand. And quite the leap to call it “absurd behavior”
- arp242 2y agoThe criteria they used is phenomenal consciousness, but it doesn't matter what criteria you use because with these gigantic differences in brain sizes it's just not meaningful to compare experiences of any kind. Moths are not flying around your lamp because they think it's good craic to do so. They do it because their brains and programming are simple and with slightly wrong inputs they will display absurd behaviour. This is just a well-known example but tons more have been observed.
- acyou 2y agoPlay isn't idle play, we do it all for a reason, like all other animals. Kittens play to practice hunting. Puppies play to practice fighting. It's an evolved behavior where animals that practice do better than animals that don't. It's pretty clear by inspection that with these wooden balls bees are exhibiting some sort of evolved behavioral response to their environmental stimulus. Might be related to sex, collecting food, protection from predators or some other activity that's critical for bee survival and replication. My theory, which is as good as any other until investigated, is that bumblebees compete with other bumblebees for habitat, food and sexual/mating opportunities, and have naturally evolved to detect, fly into, grab and push around and maybe even fight with spherical, bumblebee-sized objects. For an animal behavioral scientist, it seems like this should be the first conclusion, no?
- lencastre 2y agoImagine fighting every headless manequim in Zara for practice. I will never look at that shop the same whey again.
- h0l0cube 2y agoIf you watch birds for long enough you see them doing silly things that seemingly have no evolutionary benefit. For example, I once saw a magpie, upside down on the floor with its legs in the air. My first thought is that it was hurt, but then soon enough another bird came and started play fighting with it and it just was taunting with its legs at the other bird, and then eventually flipping right side up and zooming off with the other in pursuit. Perhaps ground fighting is a useful skill, or perhaps birds also experience 'fun' from novel experiences. To flip it around, it's been posited ever since Darwin that a human predilections to take on a life drawing or woodworking course is driven by sexual selection. But without any external means to distinguish a conscious and unconscious agent, whether animals experience qualia is in a philosophical sense as unknowable as whether other humans experience qualia. Everyone except one's self could be 'philosophical zombies'[0]. This lack of verifiability is part of what is termed the 'hard problem of consciousness'[1]. If we ever build an AI agent that is conscious, we wouldn't know. Common sense would dictate, that because I, as a human, am conscious, any other human is most certainly conscious too. But if play behaviour isn't enough to hold this certainty, where should the bar be set? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
- icambron 2y agoThis seems confused to me. I don't see how bees playing, octopuses reacting to harmful stimuli, and cuttlefish remembering things is evidence of consciousness, and the article seems to confuse those things with bees having fun, octopuses feeling pain, and cuttlefish having reflective inner lives. But those are different things! Those are what we would experience doing those things, but it doesn't follow at all the other beings will just because they perform these activities. A thought exercise is to imagine programming a little robot. It can play with balls because you program it to stimulate objects in its environment, and it has a heuristic called "interesting" that controls what it plays with. It can detect when it is damaged and avoid places where the damage happened (you can even call the variable where you store the quantity of damage "pain" if you want). It can remember places or objects by encoding characteristics about them and storing on the onboard flash drive. While none of that is at all easy, those are all things you could imagine programming without some great conceptual breakthrough. But you would probably not suspect your robot is conscious. That's not an argument that bees are not conscious, and as far I understand it, there's no conceivable way to really know, and we don't even really have a great definition of consciousness to begin with. We have only guesses, and usually those guesses are something like "well, it seems like something that must emerge from a sufficiently complex brain, and mammals and birds have big complex brains, so they probably do, and mollusks don't, so probably they don't", etc. A related thought exercise is to imagine an alien that is very smart but is not conscious, and doesn't understand us when we ask it about the experience of being itself.
- andoando 2y agoThis is called the philosophical zombie or p-zombie. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
- hypertele-Xii 2y agoYou've conveniently hand-waved away all the actual substance of your robot comparison. Just "stimulate objects in its environment" is an unsolved problem containing such gems as, sensing the environment, identifying objects in it, manipulating physical objects, etc. But sure, if I imagine myself as God, I could program that. >_>
- amelius 2y agoIn other news, Earth is not at the center of the universe.
- pas 2y agoEarth is definitely at the center of the universe, just as any other point of its observable universe.
- vouaobrasil 2y agoIt's sad that we are discussing the consciousness of animals as if it were a little puzzle using technology that requires mining and infrastructure that has killed billions of animals.
- hilbert42 2y agoWhilst I've never had definite proof I don't think I've ever doubted this. Similarly—again sans proof—I've always assumed that that consciousness in other creatures would manifest itself in significantly different ways than it does in humans. I've owned dogs and even as a kid I refused to believe that they were just automatons acting without being conscious and aware of their actions. One of my dogs in particular could read my actions and emotions probably better than I could myself and it's hard to conceive let alone believe that he wasn't self-aware. Unless we've absolute proof to the contrary, it just makes sense to assume most if not all creatures have some degree of sentience. That said, there has to be a scaling factor here. There just isn't sufficient neurons in say an ant's brain to register the complex emotions of a human and it seems sensible to me that we need to keep this perspective when dealing with all living creatures. Anthropomorphizing and likening the consciousnesses of an ant to that of humans is, in my opinion, fraught with problems. For example, if we believed that ants perceived the world in the same way as we humans do and or that they were self-aware to the same degree as us then we could be in big trouble, as such an understanding would likely stop us taking action when they became pests (when, say, fire ants are imported into countries where they aren't native). We do not fully understand consciousnesses in ourselves nor are we able to put a measure on it, so attempting to extrapolate our degree of sentience to other organisms not only doesn't make sense but it also could be dangerous to our own wellbeing, thus we should be very cautious until we have a much better understanding of what consciousness actually is. Let me say categorically that is no excuse for being cruel and or to disregard the 'feelings' of creatures irrespective of their 'brain power'. We do however have to ensure that well meaning people who have strong anthropomorphic feelings are not able to set unrealistic rules in respect of living creatures that could be detrimental to our own wellbeing. As I see it, honing an appropriate and proportionate response is our biggest challenge.
- anothernewdude 2y agoUnconvincing. The observation and conclusion linked by vibe and feel. That might be enough for someone picking out their birthstone but it's not enough for me.
- yungporko 2y agonow i hate wasps even more than i already did.
- nineteen999 2y agoThis is great news for Animal Liberation groups, society and the world as a whole. It finally provides the justification needed to outlaw the consumption of animals for good forever. We'll start with humans of course, but we can then outlaw lions eating gazelles, sharks eating humans, and birds eating insects. Just imagine how wonderful everything will be when we finally are able to snip into the circle of life and turn it into a flat line.
- pleb_nz 2y agoLet’s not forget the other kingdoms. We’ll have to be pretty convincing with convince the fungi to stop eating everything they can get their tentacles on
- toymin 2y agoyes those are obviously the same, after all lions are known for running industrial-scale farms where they force millions of gazelles to procreate and then keep them in tiny cages for the entirety of their short lives so that other lions can conveniently buy prepackaged gazelle meat in a supermarket not even having to ever associate the pack of meat with a once living gazelle
- tgv 2y agoIMO, the parent comment points out that having consciousness is not a sufficient basis for ethics, and certainly not for law.
- DangitBobby 2y agoI disagree, it seems to deride a certain flavor of ethics. Almost an "appeal to nature" regarding whether humans should treat animals a bit nicer knowing they experience things.
- nineteen999 2y agoHonestly I don't have much faith that as a species we can treat our animals much more humanely, considering how we treat each other. My apologies if you took offense personally, it wasn't intended.
- nathias 2y agothis seems as a good clue that consciousness is implemented as gamma neural oscillations
- poochkoishi728 2y agoDogs and cats seem much closer to what we experience as consciousness than they are further away. And pigs and cows are likely as conscious as dogs and cats. I'd imagine insects also have a subjective experience with some similarity to other animals, based on how they writhe in pain and seem to hate it just as much as we'd hate it.
- RickJWagner 2y ago"The behavior had no obvious connection to mating or survival, nor was it rewarded by the scientists. It was, apparently, just for fun." They lost me there. People do lots of things that aren't for survival, don't have to do with mating, and aren't fun.
- ChaitanyaSai 2y agoIt helps to have both a computational understanding, and a computational perspective of what minds do to understand why consciousness is needed. Consciousness is a consensus mechanism. I've co-authored a book where we talk about what's the most computationally robust and biologically plausible model of consciousness. It is only now, two years after the book, that I realized that the best phrasing for what consciousness is must be one that takes into account the Truly Hard Problem of Consciousnss: Who is feeling it? With every other phrasing or definition the "I" is implicit and taken for granted. So the question becomes "Why does this have to feel like anything?" The answer, it turns out, is that both experience and the experiencer are constructed together in a virtuous loop. You are a constellation of experiences. Consciousness is the consensus mechanism by which a chorus emerges in this constellation. And why is one needed? Because the decentralized entity that is you must act as one at all times, and especially when rare risks or outstanding opportunities present themselves. When we take the "I" for granted, we simply do not realize the staggeringly immense computational challenge it is to stitch this subjective self together. What sets apart this explanation is not just this broad-strokes perspective, but the biologically plausible mechanism by which top-down expectations (your past experiences) match up with bottom-up sensory data (ambiguous and potentially overwhelming reality) More here: https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-mechanism-2b399c9ec4b5 https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-me... More here:
- hu3 2y agoCan I simulate consciousness with an infinite loop asking an AI what to do next? while true: Prompt: our body state + sensory input + "what to do next" If we can run this loop 60 times per second with such large input, I guess we could simulate a conscious human.
- falsaberN1 2y agoI'm still not going to feel bad when squashing mosquitos. Spiders are friends though. And bugs like moths just get evicted if they are a nuisance. I feel bad about killing those. But screw mosquitos. Well I guess I could let the males live, but I have no way to know.
- rythmshifter 2y agomales are much bigger and dont bite.
- taxesTaxi 2y agoThat is because you would be acting in legitimate self-defense squashing the mosquito - the only time violence is acceptable. All other violent acts are in karmic vain.
- Intralexical 2y agoDefence of your friends? Or of strangers? Otherwise we can just be picked off one by one.
- pas 2y agobut is it justified self-defense to respond to a tiny bite with lethal kinetic force?
- falsaberN1 2y agoYes, because there's no option to negotiate, placate or convince the mosquito to leave. The bites can cause allergic reactions, and even just a nasty itchy bite lasts a quarter of their lifetime. I get nasty reactions when they bite my hands that last for longer than the mosquito lives as an adult! And it can be even worse, in some areas of the world a mosquito bite can indirectly kill you. I think it's pretty much the only situation where it's justified. Unless we can invent a better solution at least.
- PopePompus 2y agoI think claiming that bees rolling little wooden balls are playing is like claiming that moths endlessly flying around a porch light at night are dancing. When a creature with a brain far simpler than a mammal's encounters stimuli that were not present during most of its evolutionary history, it isn't terribly surprising that it behaves in a way that does not enhance survival or demonstrate fitness.
- gunapologist99 2y agoGood point. It could simply be learning how to enhance its survivability by interacting with its environment, testing to see if it was a new type of egg for a creature that eats bees, or something else that takes more than three seconds to think of. This is what passes for science these days: a test designed to prove the hypothesis true, and analysis without enough skepticism. Simply saying "more data needed" doesn't make for new grants or exciting headlines.
- emsign 2y agoRolling little balls for no reason cannot be compared to insects trying to orient themselves upright. Insects have no inner ear like mammals to figure out what's up and what's down, they use light. Light is up, because in a natural environment in which they have developed up is where the sun is. So the moths are doing something useful, they want to fly straight, but get tricked by the artificial sun, which happens not to be up, but hovering in mid air. The bees however are doing something that has no apparent purpose, they're not trying to eat the balls, they don't attack them. An analogy would be the bees think the little balls are the surface of the earth and they are desperately trying to stand on it.
- dkekenflxlf 2y agogood explanation! ++1 same with donkeys vs horses
- h0l0cube 2y agoHumans are just evolutionarily driven machines that respond to stimuli also, but how is it that we are conscious? What is the bar at which you say consciousness has emerged, and why is that limited to mammals?
- tamaharbor 2y agoDo plants next.
- wsintra2022 2y agoI read a really interesting book, Jung in the 21st century. Off the top of my head I remember a part about a consciousness field that runs throughout the universe. I also listened to a podcast just the other day in which two physicists discussed an idea that the higgs boson may be part of a field that could be related to consciousness and that neurons and electrons behave in a conscious manner. Anyway, recommend the Jung in 21st Century book.
- emsign 2y agoIt's called Panpsychism. (Unfortunaltely) it's not falsifiable. So it's a philosophical belief.
- noashavit 2y agoWhy is this surprising? I feel like some pompous scientists 800 years ago decided that inspects and other animals don’t have consciousness to establish human superiority and prove that god exists (as they were forced to back then). Living beings are conscious, that includes animals we eat for and inspects we kill.
- RecycledEle 2y agoWhat if fun/play is just a malfunction of the brain?
- grantcas 2y ago[dead]