Joys and pains of insects

After watching small creatures for awhile (insects/fish/birds), one will become rather aware there is a lot more going on than first assumed.

Bee hives in particular have collective temperaments, and being around a group everyday for awhile changes how they perceive your presence. For example, those who carelessly crush too many workers, will have their body odor associated with a threat. Accordingly, one may find your proximity to the hives will not be tolerated for the season.

  There were studies which tried to inject fake food-source location data into bee dances, and it showed even simple individual insects could distinguish nonsense. 

It is arrogant to apply our own emotional constructs onto these creatures, but one should certainly respect the fact they are alive and understand the world in their own way.

Note, the bees can teach you a lot about resource management in complex distributed systems. In a way, the 1U rack standard could be seen as the IT hive cell structure.

"Bee" good to each other, =)

Anecdote from Texas:

I have admired the various dragonflies across north Texas. A wide range as you might say. From urban to rural lakes, I spot them, the most magnificent flight system I’ve seen.

And they eat mosquitoes.

At my residence a juvenile dragonfly accidentally made it indoors. I spent a good 30 minutes off and on guiding it back outside. It wouldn’t survive here in captivity I’m not qualified.

Here’s the interesting part:

There is a beautiful adult green dragonfly on this property that when I walk thru the pathway where it lives, it engages and either leads the way, shows off, or in general does things that unless you really believe in the nature and nurture overlaps, well, I’m just glad to participate.

If you're the kind of person who is suspicious of small sample sizes, several of the bee studies cited in the article as evidence [1, 2, 3] draw conclusions from small groups of 10-20 bees.

I think this is a good question, and I get why it's hard to do animal research at more statistically significant scales, but for me the current evidence is uncomfortably close to "behavioral psych, but for bees", right down to the fun pop-sci conclusions ("bees like to play!"), which again, cute! but overstated as something that "science tells us".

(This is all separate from the larger question of the relationship between response to external stimuli and emotional states, which just seems hard to answer.)

[1] https://europepmc.org/article/med/27708101

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000334722...

[3] https://europepmc.org/article/med/27708101

The article seems to mostly equate emotional states with consciousness but doesn’t make the case for that equivalence. Paramecia also exhibit negative stimuli avoidance behavior but I don’t think that can plausibly be cited as evidence that they experience pain. I am generally persuaded by Antonino Damasio’s arguments that consciousness is roughly a system “on top of” emotion, the latter essentially being a shorthand for a variety of behaviors related to the body’s efforts to maintain homeostasis. (I’m simplifying and probably getting details of his argument wrong, it’s been more than a decade since I read his stuff.) I am sympathetic to the idea that “lower” animals may have something like mental states or conscious experience, I just don’t find the arguments in TFA convincing.

One may be tempted to use these findings as a justification for (indirectly) killing sentient mammals. Add studies showing that even plants and fungi have senses and try to avoid harm, and you might as well consider that there should be no ethical considerations around various diets. Since everything living can feel pain for a generous definition of the term and since you kill plants and indirectly insects even on a plant based diet, there is little difference. Unsurprisingly this is a very common argument against veganism.

But if you truly care about the feelings of insects or plants you should switch to a plant based diet as you'll probably indirectly kill at least an order of magnitude fewer plants and insects, the majority of which are consumed by practices related to industrial farming (large scale deforestation, waterway pollution, feedstock).

This is one of the many reasons I'm starting to be a strong advocate for none-anthropocentrism. (And I hope more people can join me.)

Despite how almost every scientific and engineering break-through in history always has had its roots traced to none-anthropocentrism thinking (of that time), and tech has advanced so much in the past 50 years, yet we still live in rather anthropocentric systems, espeically socio-politically. This is really sad. A lot of problems and sufferings (as well as the inability to find solutions) we have created for ourselves as a civilization are in retrospect clearly the direct products of excuses, both for the exploitation (of "others") and the normalized incompetency (of the self-entitlted "us"), that which we bestow on ourselves.

I really hope within the next 50 years things will change.

related project: https://0a.io/

People often think that lowering meat consumption (something we absolutely have to do) means eating bugs.

I'd worry exactly about how this shift might inadvertently overlook the ethical considerations, especially given the sheer volume of conscious beings involved.

"If death is instantaneous, such as when you slap the mosquito on your skin, there is little room for suffering."

This assumes that mosquitos perceive time as we do. While all living things operate with the same molecular building blocks and physical laws, I don't know that perceiving time is as low level as that, so qualitatively what is an instant for us could be a long time for a much smaller organism.

I also had a microscope and loved to watch things under the microscope. It took patience: I would get something under the microscope and I would watch it interminably. I saw many interesting things, like everybody sees ­­ a diatom slowly making its way across the slide, and so on.

One day I was watching a paramecium and I saw something that was not described in the books I got in school ­­ in college, even. These books always simplify things so the world will be more like they want it to be: When they're talking about the behavior of animals, they always start out with, "The paramecium is extremely simple; it has a simple behavior. It turns as its slipper shape moves through the water until it hits something, at which time it recoils, turns through an angle, and then starts out again."

It isn't really right. First of all, as everybody knows, the paramecia, from time to time, conjugate with each other ­­ they meet and exchange nuclei. How do they decide when it's time to do that? (Never mind; that's not my observation.)

I watched these paramecia hit something, recoil, turn through an angle, and go again. The idea that it's mechanical, like a computer program ­­ it doesn't look that way. They go different distances, they recoil different distances, they turn through angles that are different in various cases; they don't always turn to the right; they're very irregular. It looks random, because you don't know what they're hitting; you don't know all the chemicals they're smelling, or what.

One of the things I wanted to watch was what happens to the paramecium when the water that it's in dries up. It was claimed that the paramecium can dry up into a sort of hardened seed. I had a drop of water on the slide under my microscope, and in the drop of water was a paramecium and some "grass" ­­ at the scale of the paramecium, it looked like a network of jackstraws.

As the drop of water evaporated, over a time of fifteen or twenty minutes, the paramecium got into a tighter and tighter situation: there was more and more of this back­and­forth until it could hardly move. It was stuck between these "sticks," almost jammed.

Then I saw something I had never seen or heard of: the paramecium lost its shape. It could flex itself, like an amoeba. It began to push itself against one of the sticks, and began dividing into two prongs until the division was about halfway up the paramecium, at which time it decided that wasn't a very good idea, and backed away.

So my impression of these animals is that their behavior is much too simplified in the books. It is not so utterly mechanical or one­-dimensional as they say. They should describe the behavior of these simple animals correctly. Until we see how many dimensions of behavior even a one­celled animal has, we won't be able to fully understand the behavior of more complicated animals.

--From Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynmann

One of the thought provoking consequences of our progress with AI is how we are being forced to re-examine the philosophical underpinnings of “existence” as a being.

“I think, therefore I am” has been the gold standard for millennia, but is falling into a crisis in the face of thinking machines that are algorithmically incapable of an inherent sense of existence.

LLMs have demonstrated that symbolic intelligence is a product of a vast corpus of symbolically represented memetic data. It can be taught to and interpreted by both biological and digital neural networks, and it enables us to reason about the world. Much of what we understand as being human lies within this cultural-linguistic framework of data, so it is unnerving to watch a machine parse this data with a similar facility as a person.

Despite their uncanny ability to access and express the memetic code of human culture, LLMs are merely windows into human intelligence, devoid of an existence or a self outside of symbolic manipulation.

On the other hand, we experience a state of “being” that is impulsive and emotional in character, that can exist without the use of symbols or tokens. In this framework we can experience pain, pleasure, desires, needs, happiness, and distress. We have no reason to expect that this experience exists within a large language model, and we can derive that this is the critical feature of sentience through the process of elimination now that we have evidence that “thinking” can exist outside of “being”.

Yet, we can see clear evidence of this experience in other animals, including insects.

Is it then, “I feel, therefore I am?”

This has extremely profound implications across the board that we have yet to touch on as a species.

One of the most obvious and far reaching of these implications is what it is to be human.

If we are to accept that a sense of being does not a human make, and neither does the ability to think in symbolic terms, then what?

Are we -primarily- genetic in nature, or primarily memetic creatures?

Which is less human? A specimen of homo-sapiens with no access to the memetic code, or an LLM augmented dog that shares both our experience of existence and our culture?

What if it were an LLM enhanced honey bee?

We can easily presume that a lab gestated biological human, given access to culture is fully a human. What if they were gestated from fully synthesised germ cells? What if they were modified to include synthetic inference instead of biological inference, but maintained the biological sense of self? What if it was all digital?

We have a new tool to differentiate the human experience, and it is going to change humanity in ways we have not even imagined yet.

"Back then, my views were in line with the mainstream. Pain is a conscious experience, and many scholars then thought that consciousness is unique to humans. "

I don't understand that. Anyone knows that a cat or a dog or a lizard or a chicken can feel pain, that's so obvious. How can scientists deny something so obviously obvious ?