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Comment by acyou | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

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

"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.

> 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.

Survival is success, and humans are social creatures, maintaining group aura is vital to all social animals' survival success.

I’m not sure if you’re making a counterpoint or not, but this isn’t in contradiction to the notion that all animals including humans are tethered to the joyless daily grind

Joyless? Why is your life joyless?

One could revel in the daily grind, I suppose. But mostly I’m just following the premise of this thread, which may not be entirely true, that modern humans are slaves to contrived parameters of success that don’t align with fun. By way of the bowerbird example, I’m suggesting such contrived and superficial fitness measures are present in the broader animal kingdom as well

I would say there are very different kinds of grind. One that leaves you exhausted, but satisfied with it and one that just leaves you empty. I would say our civilisation is full of the latter and this is not something to be found in the animal kingdom, as it is also not found in human indigenous tribes. Don't get me wrong, there surely is misery and hardship in the "natural" life as well. But a hungry hunter does not have to look for meaning in his work - he knows the meaning is literal food. A modern office job also means food, but way more abstract and disconnected and often requores to do things, we did not optimize fore during evolution.

The daily grind is specifically of a negative connotation. A fulfilling occupation is the counterpoint to that.

I saw a crow use a slippery metal roof as a slide one time. It would hop up to the top, step out on the slippery part, slide down while carefully keeping balance with the wings, rattle with joy at the bottom, and repeat.

Wheeee!

Clever little birds.

Example of this from another comment: https://youtu.be/1WupH8oyrAo

I read this as "cow" initially and it changes everything about your story. Especially the part when you say "clever little birds." That part did cause me to reread it.

At an aquarium I watched a tropical fish have fun with a water jet. It would swim into the jet, get propelled from it across the tank, then swim back, repeating as long as I watched it.

Part of me felt bad for how bored it must've been living its life in such a tiny habitat. Part of me felt joy that it was indeed having fun doing loops in its waterpark.

You’ll probably enjoy this article

https://lithub.com/shes-bouncing-the-ball-on-the-uncanny-way...

Fighting birds often end up on their backs. I’ve seen it in many species. What you saw seems no different than puppies play fighting.

The bird was just goofing around on its back, perhaps aware that its companion might join it. It was more a tease than a fight. Perhaps novelty seeking behaviors are just of broad utility evolutionarily speaking, but there didn’t seem to be any directly obvious utility in this case

So, they seemed to be playing? That was my point. Just like puppies play fight.

It wasn’t a fight, it was more like trolling. It could be practicing delay tactics or entrapment or something, but still this implication of this being some kind of evolutionary driven behavior as distinguished from the novel pursuits of humans is wrong. All human behavior can also be attributed to evolutionary fitness, and this garners no distinction in terms of whether a being would be conscious or not

It only takes one step meta-wards to explain "fun" as evolutionarily valuable.

I'm getting really tired of consciousness and qualia being talked about as binary, all-or-nothing, divine rights. If you drive a familiar route, and retain no memory of the event, were you a p-zombie?

Consciousness is a trainable, competitive skill.

> 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.

I disagree on that. We could ask them. At least the social ones with higher intelligence. And the "could" will eventually become a can thanks to advancements in inter-species communication. Actually one of the very few uses of AI that I'm exited about.

> Kittens play to practice hunting

just like humans have sex to procreate, right?

Or they play to practice procreation

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.

Some studies suggest that Dolphins have sex for pleasure too

Some graduate student stories I've heard suggest that some Dolphins may (like Ariel?) be "skinnies".

You’ll have to explain your post a little more. I’m afraid I don’t get the “skinnies” reference

If furries like creatures with fur, skinnies would like creatures with skin.

(this was not a Starship Troopers [book] reference)

Don't you mean the other way? I'm pretty sure all animals have sex because they enjoy it, not because they want to procreate - since they most certainly don't even know what procreation is. So sex for procreation is something that only humans are able to do.

I don't know why you're sure of that opinion: it is well beyond current scientific evidentiary support. And sex in some species (e.g. ducks) appears deeply unpleasurable for at least one of the participants.

But homosexual behavior is widespread across animal species, which does undermine the parent's case.

So somewhere there's a gay duck having a bad night.

or that other thing humans do, by themselves, probably a more accurate comparison

> 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.

Could be. But the point is rather that you can say the exact same thing about our behavior. And that's why we should consider the possibility that if our behavior is similar to theirs, that they have similar inner experiences of what they are doing. Of course with difference due to different sensors and bodies.

Imagine fighting every headless manequim in Zara for practice. I will never look at that shop the same whey again.

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