Bumble bees play, according to new research
phys.org
phys.org
That said, I learned to tolerate the carpenter bees on my deck because they'd bonk all the wasps away.
> 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
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 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.
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. :)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/07/29/bee-cognit...
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.
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.
I strongly recommend everybody interested in play to read Huizinga's Homo Ludens.
"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."