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Do Honeybees Feel? Scientists Are Entertaining the Idea 2016-09-08 15:32:08 Post No. 2211551
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Do Honeybees Feel? Scientists Are Entertaining the Idea 2016-09-08 15:32:08 Post No. 2211551
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Do Honeybees Feel? Scientists Are Entertaining the Idea
Anonymous
2016-09-08 15:32:08
Post No. 2211551
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/19/science/honeybees-insects-consciousness-brains.html?_r=0
>Bees find nectar and tell their hive-mates; flies evade the swatter; and cockroaches seem to do whatever they like wherever they like. But who would believe that insects are conscious, that they are aware of what’s going on, not just little biobots?
>Neuroscientists and philosophers apparently. As scientists lean increasingly toward recognizing that nonhuman animals are conscious in one way or another, the question becomes: Where does consciousness end?
>Andrew B. Barron, a cognitive scientist, and Colin Klein, a philosopher, at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, propose in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that insects have the capacity for consciousness.
>This does not mean that a honeybee thinks, “Why am I not the queen?” or even, “Oh, I like that nectar.” But, Dr. Barron and Dr. Klein wrote in a scientific essay, the honeybee has the capacity to feel something.
>Their claim stops short of some others. Christof Koch, the president and chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, and Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin, have proposed that consciousness is nearly ubiquitous in different degrees, and can be present even in nonliving arrangements of matter, to varying degrees.
>They say that rather than wonder how consciousness arises, one should look at where we know it exists and go from there to where else it might exist.
>They conclude that it is an inherent property of physical systems in which information moves around in a certain way — and that could include some kinds of artificial intelligence and even naturally occurring nonliving matter.
(cont'd)
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>He and Dr. Barron propose that it may well feel like something to be a honeybee, or another insect, although what that feeling is, no one knows.
>They make their case this way:
>...scientists have argued that a part of the human brain called the midbrain can...give a person lacking more advanced parts of the brain simple awareness.
>The insect brain does something [akin] to the midbrain in absorbing information from the environment, from memory and from the body to organize its activity.
>If the insect brain does the same job as the vertebrate midbrain, then the insect has the capacity for awareness.
>If this...reasoning is correct, Dr. Barron and Dr. Klein say, a robot...with artificial intelligence that could integrate sensory data, memory and body awareness would have the capacity for the minimal level of consciousness they describe.
>By the same token, plants do not have...structures that would allow for awareness, says Dr. Barron, nor does a simple animal like C. elegans, the roundworm used in so many experiments. It has 302 neurons. A honeybee, by contrast, has almost a million.
>Dr. Koch said in an email that he thought Dr. Barron and Dr. Klein were making a reasonable argument. The brains of bees and flies, he wrote, “possess intricate circuitry...denser than the circuits of the celebrated neocortex,” which is central to human thinking.
>Peter Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher at (CUNY)...said...that he found the argument...plausible. But, he said, there could be many different kinds of awareness and insects might be aware of motion, for example, but “were not good candidates for feeling pain,” unlike octopuses and crabs.
>“Insects might have subjective experience,” he wrote, “but not of a kind that has a lot of ethical consequences.”
>Dr. Barron emphasized that the article was intended...to propose a hypothesis rather than offer a proven conclusion. “We put it forward because we think we should have this debate,” he said.
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Well it would be stupid to say that we understand what any of this is, consciousness, life, whatever. Though certainly more serious study is going on in the higher institutions and not reaching the media that we normal people get to read. I do think artificial intelligence should eventually give some interesting insights.
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>>2211568
Thank you for your contribution to the discussion.
I wonder if mind uploading will one day become a reality.
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>>2211551
>Andrew the bee baron
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>>2211551
>the honeybee has the capacity to feel something
This seems obvious. Nearly everything can feel something, usually it's pain which is a useful biological mechanism to keep things alive.
This entire study seems like pointless fluff designed to grab headlines and grant money.
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>>2211638
You mean "mind copying".
I'm more interested in the Ship of Theseus approach, replace brain with synthetic equivalents piece by piece, and see when things go to hell.
But that must be thousands of years away. Unless we get our shit together and the aliens decide to help us.
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>>2211552
Plants don't have the structure for awareness? Ha! What a statement to make while at the same time pressing forward with saying bees have a consciousness.
The fact is we've already moved far enough down this path to not recognize the consciousness (however limited) of everything. Consciousness as awareness now, awareness as existence soon.
Plants suffer and fight to stay alive, it is all they do and they do it with every gene they have. Then they reproduce and improve, remember and specialize.
The bark of some trees makes them resist fires. In some ways, it is a learned anticipation. Prediction on a genealogical level, the same sort of predication that tells us not to touch a hot stove because if we do it will hurt.
The line is too blurred to be of any use. Saying bees are conscious proves nothing.
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>>2211926
except arthropods don't have nociceptors. a dog with a nail through its paw will limp. a grasshopper with a foot singed off will still put full weight on that limb as though nothing is wrong
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