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Comment by PopePompus | Hacker News Reader

I think claiming that bees rolling little wooden balls are playing is like claiming that moths endlessly flying around a porch light at night are dancing. When a creature with a brain far simpler than a mammal's encounters stimuli that were not present during most of its evolutionary history, it isn't terribly surprising that it behaves in a way that does not enhance survival or demonstrate fitness.

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Rolling little balls for no reason cannot be compared to insects trying to orient themselves upright. Insects have no inner ear like mammals to figure out what's up and what's down, they use light. Light is up, because in a natural environment in which they have developed up is where the sun is.

So the moths are doing something useful, they want to fly straight, but get tricked by the artificial sun, which happens not to be up, but hovering in mid air. The bees however are doing something that has no apparent purpose, they're not trying to eat the balls, they don't attack them.

An analogy would be the bees think the little balls are the surface of the earth and they are desperately trying to stand on it.

good explanation! ++1

same with donkeys vs horses

Good point. It could simply be learning how to enhance its survivability by interacting with its environment, testing to see if it was a new type of egg for a creature that eats bees, or something else that takes more than three seconds to think of.

This is what passes for science these days: a test designed to prove the hypothesis true, and analysis without enough skepticism. Simply saying "more data needed" doesn't make for new grants or exciting headlines.

Humans are just evolutionarily driven machines that respond to stimuli also, but how is it that we are conscious? What is the bar at which you say consciousness has emerged, and why is that limited to mammals?

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