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Comment by s1artibartfast | Hacker News Reader

I think dogs can be self aware. I think self-awareness is the ability to comprehend the "Self" as distinct from the "environment" and then compute and weigh the likely outcomes of different actions. It is high level thinking with many pre-requisites.

An alarm clock is not self aware, because it doesn't model the world, and select between actions.

Similarly, a bee, (which I believe to act on pre-programed instinct, not in the moment reason), is not self aware. This is because it selects between actions, but can not logically model the world.

A dog, on the other hand, can build logical models of the world, and then take actions based on that. It can that begging from one person results in treats, while begging from another results in discipline. It can update this logic and behavior based on new information.

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I mean, it's pretty hard to tell what's going on inside any other creature's brain, from dogs to bees to humans. It's generally easier the closer they are to yourself, so it's easier with dogs than with bees.

I think you are shortchanging bees a bit, based on your description of a dog building a logical model of the world, I would say bees definitely qualify.

>A dog, on the other hand, can build logical models of the world, and then take actions based on that. It can that begging from one person results in treats, while begging from another results in discipline. It can update this logic and behavior based on new information.

Bees are capable of a lot of interesting and complex behavior, from learning to communication with other bees.[1] It's been theorized that they can play around just for fun, which is hard to reconcile with them behaving on entirely pre-programmed instincts.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee_learning_and_communication [2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/bees-can-...

So you have arbitrarily decided on units, such as bees and dogs. But perhaps it is an error to consider a singular bee as an arbitrary unit. What if we consider the entire hive/swarm as a unified organism? What would our results be then? What about considering individual cells of a dog instead of that whole dog? Wouldn't that tend to skew your results unfairly?

My examples weren't arbitrary, they were made for specific reasons. I selected bees because the article and my OP was about bees, and I selected dogs because I was asked about dogs.

I don't think a hive is self aware for the same reasons as the bee. It acts conditionally but does not create new logic models of the world.

As for the cells, I think they closer to complex alarm clocks than the bees, and are not self aware for the same reason.

I think my logic is consistent.

I think this is inaccurate. Bees definitely model the world, how else would they fly around it? Further they do communicate with one another about their environments which suggests that the hive would have a greater model of the world than any singular bee.

> What if we consider the entire hive/swarm as a unified organism?

We get a less-predictive model for some questions and a more-predictive one for others. Sort of like how asking whether we should model humans as collections of cells, individuals or societies is freshman dorm stuff until we pair it with an actual question.

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