What It's Like to Be a Bee | Hacker News Reader

What It's Like to Be a Bee

press.princeton.edu

The title may be a play on a somewhat well-known philosophy paper, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by Thomas Nagel in The Philosophical Review (Oct 1974):

"Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals .... In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task."

Edit: The author addresses these questions - without mentioning Nagel by name - in the section "Why Imagining Other Minds Is Important for Understanding them".

Compared to a human brain with its 86 billion nerve cells, a bee’s brain may have only about a million. But each one of these cells has a finely branched structure that in complexity may resemble a full-grown oak tree. Each nerve cell can make connections with 10,000 other ones—hence there may be more than a billion such connection points in a bee brain—and each of these connections is at least potentially plastic, alterable by individual experience.

I remember from Robert Sapolsky's lectures that human neurons also take input from 10,000 (on average) other neurons. So bees are the same. But it feels like this paragraph is trying to convince me that the branching structure of bees is somehow more elaborate than the human equivalent.

Still reading, but I feel I can no longer trust the narrator.

Purkinje neurons are found in mammals as well. Huge branches and a lots of input. This paragraph is odd.

This elaborate structures of neurons is a big reason why many neuroscientist don't like point neurons artitecture. Personally I don't think this structure can be approximated by a later or point neurons -- at least not without a significant cost. After reading "More Is Different" I am more open to the idea that substrate matter quite a lot.

here is a lecture (on Zoom) from Prof. Chittka about the very same topic as the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSaqi2ysDoA

Same, that’s where they lost me. Intentionally misleading, and quite obviously so to anyone who’s read on the subject.

I believe the generally held view is the intelligence displayed by ants and bees is emergent — not resident in any individual. Most likely being a bee doesn’t feel like anything at all.

Not a great way to start a pretty challenging argument.

I forget exactly where, but one analogy I read was that an insect's brain is less like a CPU with various dedicated areas for different general forms of processing, and more like a Swiss watch, which uses extraordinary precision to get a few very elegant specialised functions out of relatively small components.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com