Play 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?
h0l0cube 1 hours ago [-]
If 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?
"For example, I once saw a magpie, upside down on the floor with its legs in the air. "
That sounds like it is useful for training flying skills.
"Perhaps ground fighting is a useful skill"
If you are chased by birds of prey, I guess any advantage you have in flying is useful. When birds chase them through thick forests, they do have to fly upside down some of the time.
But very likely the bird does not think, "oh I need to train". No, they just have fun doing it. Like kids have fun wrestling. "Fun" is the motivator to do the right thing evolution wise. Our human problem with "fun" is just that we have other metrics for sucess, that are not that fun anymore.
h0l0cube 25 minutes ago [-]
> Our human problem with "fun" is just that we have other metrics for sucess, that are not that fun anymore.
Bowerbirds go to great pains to gild their nests. Humans go to great pains to maintain an aura of success, though the vast majority are just trying to survive with whatever they have at their disposal.
hnlmorg 1 hours ago [-]
Magpies and other crows are very intelligent birds. More intelligent than your average bird. There’s lots of videos online of these fascinating creatures doing clever and fun things. Eg https://youtu.be/1WupH8oyrAo?si=Ra_gI1CF0DPWjJwt
fsckboy 1 hours ago [-]
> Kittens play to practice hunting
just like humans have sex to procreate, right?
marci 32 minutes ago [-]
Or they play to practice procreation
h0l0cube 20 minutes ago [-]
As far as we know today, sex for pleasure's sake is one of the unique characteristics of hominid species. For bonobos specifically, it's a means of social cohesion.
lencastre 2 hours ago [-]
Imagine fighting every headless manequim in Zara for practice. I will never look at that shop the same whey again.
jenadine 3 hours ago [-]
This seems obvious to me and I don't understand how one can think otherwise.
bawolff 1 hours ago [-]
Because nobody really agrees on what it means to be concious, so depending on what that means to you, either its trivial that a lot of things are concious or its very unclear if even other people are concious.
yungporko 14 minutes ago [-]
there are certainly people that make me wonder
koenraad 2 hours ago [-]
I had the exact same initial thought. I don’t fully grasp the definition of the term consciousness but I guess for me it boils down to loving.
uoaei 2 hours ago [-]
Objectification, that's how.
sandspar 15 minutes ago [-]
Nobody alive has the slightest clue what consciousness really is, including you. Your sense that it's obvious to attribute this opaque phenomena to an opaque species is just voodoo.
anothernewdude 52 minutes ago [-]
The converse seems obvious to me. Perhaps 'seeming obvious' isn't enough to reach conclusions.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai 2 hours ago [-]
How is that obvious? I'm pretty sure that not even humans have consciousness before they have learned to speak.
fsckboy 59 minutes ago [-]
>not even humans have consciousness before they have learned to speak
some humans never learn to speak because they can't hear. I'm pretty sure they are conscious
jmprspret 2 hours ago [-]
So if humans are limited by the precondition of language, other creatures must be too?
N0b8ez 2 hours ago [-]
I guess in that case if it were true, it would be unnecessary to give such humans anesthesia. Is that what you mean?
TheDudeMan 2 hours ago [-]
Just because memories are not persisted? Or some other reason?
colordrops 2 hours ago [-]
It sounds like you and GP are talking about two different things when referring to "consciousness".
ekianjo 2 hours ago [-]
it was obvious that the Earth was flat until not too long ago in Human History.
8372049 2 hours ago [-]
No, the spherical shape of the Earth has been apparent and acknowledged for at least two thousand years. It's the heliocentric view that has been challenged until fairly recently.
ekianjo 1 hours ago [-]
thats patently false. it was known to the educated greeks but it was far from being widespread among the masses who were uneducated and did not know how to read. education was not a thing unless for the scribes which were a super small minority of the population.
so for most people it was far from obvious that the Earth was spherical
bawolff 1 hours ago [-]
"We all agree on the earth’s shape. For surely we always speak of the round ball of the Earth" - Pliny (Natural History, II.64). In year 77.
If the earth was commonly spoken of in day to day language as the round ball, than i would assume this meant that even commoners knew that it was round.
konart 2 hours ago [-]
Sun moves around Earth. This seems obvious to me and I don't understand how one can think otherwise. /s
diego_sandoval 2 hours ago [-]
Sun does move around the earth though. Doesn't it?
fsckboy 56 minutes ago [-]
The entire sun moves around a point that is outside the sun. this point is on a more or less (Saturn) straight line to Jupiter.
bnralt 2 hours ago [-]
Most of the discussions around "consciousness" would be greatly improved if people avoided that vague and ill-defined term.
dstroot 2 hours ago [-]
The article defines “phenomenal consciousness “ as feeling pain, pleasure or hunger, but not necessarily a sense of self.
bawolff 1 hours ago [-]
If all we are saying is that they respond to those stimuli, then i am pretty sure my laptop is concious (it beeps when it is hungry because the battery is about to run out. Segfaults look like a pain response to me, etc)
h0l0cube 52 minutes ago [-]
But does your laptop develop a deep aversion to segfaults? I'd imagine agency is a big part of consciousness. The philosophical implication of this is that if you take the agency from someone mentally (e.g., the Ministry of Love in 1984), this over time renders the person unconscious. Taking agency from someone just physically (e.g., locked in syndrome) still doesn't render a person unconscious however, so if your AI powered laptop actually had agency of thought, it could be screaming on the inside. Terrifying.
causal 2 hours ago [-]
But 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.
wolverine876 1 hours ago [-]
You may be interested:
What it's like to be a bee by Lars Chittka, professor of sensory and behavioral ecology, Queen Mary University - London
We 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.
sandspar 12 minutes ago [-]
Pedantic but I believe there was no jump, it was shades?
cess11 2 hours ago [-]
Sounds like they're including plants.
taneq 2 hours ago [-]
All this does is push the lack of definition into “feeling”. Is a nerve cell reacting to stimulus and transmitting an impulse to the brain “feeling”? If so then anything with a nervous system is conscious, but fairly often it’s argued that some secret sauce in the brain is required to “experience” a stimulus rather than simply detecting it and acting on that information.
exe34 1 hours ago [-]
I can never get these phenomenologists to accept a kalman filter as conscious, but somehow the only thing it tends to lack is being made in flesh.
Whilst 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.
icambron 2 hours ago [-]
This 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 1 hours ago [-]
This is called the philosophical zombie or p-zombie.
Most 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 2 hours ago [-]
It 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 2 hours ago [-]
The 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.
>Most insects have hundreds of thousands of neurons
really? don't snails have about a dozen (not saying sails are insects) neurons in their brains, and we've completely mapped them and we know what each one does?
andbberger 2 hours ago [-]
don't underestimate insect behavior they do a lot with what they have. nonetheless, one really hopes that their experience of the world is, uh, commensurately smaller than ours
vouaobrasil 1 hours ago [-]
It'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.
yungporko 5 minutes ago [-]
now i hate wasps even more than i already did.
amelius 2 hours ago [-]
In other news, Earth is not at the center of the universe.
anothernewdude 53 minutes ago [-]
Unconvincing. 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.
m3kw9 3 hours ago [-]
Why would you automatically think a bee spinning a ball “ It was, apparently, just for fun.”?
bayindirh 2 hours ago [-]
Because it serves no purpose other than “fun” and “passing idle time”.
jhbadger 2 hours ago [-]
Or 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 2 hours ago [-]
Well, 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.
m3kw9 2 hours ago [-]
That’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.
2 hours ago [-]
smegsicle 3 hours 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 3 hours ago [-]
Would two cities debating about whether humans are conscious be able to understand that we humans ask the same questions about our cells?
nick7376182 2 hours ago [-]
Sorry, the cells that were going to answer that are on vacation visiting in another human.
jowdones 3 hours ago [-]
So bees play, hence they are conscious. But a lot of animals play and they are oblivious to themselves (not self conscious).
Arn_Thor 2 hours ago [-]
They 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
jhbadger 2 hours ago [-]
And 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.
yungporko 6 minutes ago [-]
most 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.
justinclift 2 hours ago [-]
Good point. There must be some as-yet-undiscovered football league for bees, for when they're not just playing around. ;)
uoaei 3 hours ago [-]
To be conscious and to be self-conscious (sentient) are different things.
newzisforsukas 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe bees get akathisia from spherical objects.
m3kw9 2 hours ago [-]
Bees are conscious because we assume they are playing and can’t imagine any other reasons on why they did what they did.
steve_taylor 2 hours ago [-]
“We don’t know, therefore consciousness” sounds an awful lot like “We don’t know, therefore God”.
vivzkestrel 3 hours ago [-]
oh boy now i don't know how to feel about all the mosquitoes i have been swatting this entire winter season
krapp 3 hours ago [-]
Mosquitos kill over a million people every year. Show them no mercy.
vouaobrasil 1 hours ago [-]
We 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.
amelius 2 hours ago [-]
"A society can be judged by the way it treats its mosquitos"
-- paraphrased from Fyodor Dostoevsky
m3kw9 2 hours ago [-]
Hey don’t generalize the entire population
praptak 2 hours ago [-]
Also it's not mosquitos' fault that deadly pathogens hop on the ride.
surfingdino 2 hours ago [-]
Aiding and abetting, that's what it is. Those mosquitos know what they are doing.
taneq 2 hours ago [-]
Them being conscious doesn't change anything, they're assholes and they chose to fight you by biting you.
2 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 07:48:24 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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?
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
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
That sounds like it is useful for training flying skills.
"Perhaps ground fighting is a useful skill"
If you are chased by birds of prey, I guess any advantage you have in flying is useful. When birds chase them through thick forests, they do have to fly upside down some of the time.
But very likely the bird does not think, "oh I need to train". No, they just have fun doing it. Like kids have fun wrestling. "Fun" is the motivator to do the right thing evolution wise. Our human problem with "fun" is just that we have other metrics for sucess, that are not that fun anymore.
Bowerbirds go to great pains to gild their nests. Humans go to great pains to maintain an aura of success, though the vast majority are just trying to survive with whatever they have at their disposal.
just like humans have sex to procreate, right?
some humans never learn to speak because they can't hear. I'm pretty sure they are conscious
so for most people it was far from obvious that the Earth was spherical
If the earth was commonly spoken of in day to day language as the round ball, than i would assume this meant that even commoners knew that it was round.
What it's like to be a bee by Lars Chittka, professor of sensory and behavioral ecology, Queen Mary University - London
https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/what-its-like-to-be-a-bee
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.
Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare - 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 - April 2024 (270 comments)
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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
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.
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.
really? don't snails have about a dozen (not saying sails are insects) neurons in their brains, and we've completely mapped them and we know what each one does?
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.
a 1995 thought experiment suggested that an etch-a-sketch could also be conscious
-- paraphrased from Fyodor Dostoevsky