‘A crazy hippy idea’
April 10, 2023 3:21 PM Subscribe
Because a bee’s brain is so tiny – the size of a poppy seed – it’s only in the last decade that research technology has become sophisticated enough to analyze its neurobiology. Before these innovations, most scientists studying the insects assumed there could not be much going on in a brain so small and with so few neurons. Insects were considered to be like instinct-driven robots, with no capacity to feel pain or experience suffering. Now, that premise is being turned on its head. from ‘Bees are sentient’: inside the stunning brains of nature’s hardest workers [Grauniad]
“The Mind of a Bee”, a recent book written by a researcher interviewed for this article, is well-written and thrilling. It goes into a lot more detail about the connections between the bee’s physiology, neural systems, and behavior.
posted by lasagnaboy at 4:19 PM on April 10, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by lasagnaboy at 4:19 PM on April 10, 2023 [4 favorites]
It's certainly interesting, but I'd love to hear from some other researchers in the same area who are maybe not quite as on board with these ideas. A lot of external behaviors can seem sentient or human-like to us, because, well, we're humans, but the internal mind state and mechanisms that lead to them can be vastly different and not really indicative of sentience at all. Humans anthropomorphize, it's what we do, we feel bad for lamps in IKEA commercials, given the right emotional triggers. I'm all for treating all animals well, but a little bit of skepticism might go a long way here.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 4:26 PM on April 10, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 4:26 PM on April 10, 2023 [6 favorites]
I'll just drop in this video of two bees unscrewing a soda pop lid.
(Though I'm a bit less amazed than some that they "know how to unscrew a lid". It's more like, they can smell something they really want, they try a variety of motions and vibrations to get closer to it, they keep doing what's working to make that happen, two of them noticed the same target so they are working together on some level, etc. It's still impressive in many ways but not quite like, two bees flew by and said to each other, "Hey, let's go down and unscrew that lid to get us some delicious Fanta. Do you think it will work just like that Dr Pepper bottle we got into last week?")
posted by flug at 4:26 PM on April 10, 2023 [6 favorites]
(Though I'm a bit less amazed than some that they "know how to unscrew a lid". It's more like, they can smell something they really want, they try a variety of motions and vibrations to get closer to it, they keep doing what's working to make that happen, two of them noticed the same target so they are working together on some level, etc. It's still impressive in many ways but not quite like, two bees flew by and said to each other, "Hey, let's go down and unscrew that lid to get us some delicious Fanta. Do you think it will work just like that Dr Pepper bottle we got into last week?")
posted by flug at 4:26 PM on April 10, 2023 [6 favorites]
Both Chittka and Buchmann suspect other insects could possess sentience and emotion-like states too, but studies have not been conducted to prove it
How would we prove this for any creature? Emotion-like states, sure, but proving if something has a subjective experience or not is surely one of the great Hard Problems. Personally I'm pretty willing to ascribe having-some-sort-of-subjective-experience to a lot of things, these days, maybe even erring on the side of pantheism, but I don't know if it's ever going to be provable.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 5:05 PM on April 10, 2023 [9 favorites]
How would we prove this for any creature? Emotion-like states, sure, but proving if something has a subjective experience or not is surely one of the great Hard Problems. Personally I'm pretty willing to ascribe having-some-sort-of-subjective-experience to a lot of things, these days, maybe even erring on the side of pantheism, but I don't know if it's ever going to be provable.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 5:05 PM on April 10, 2023 [9 favorites]
You really wonder why we carry around such gigantic brains and what takes up so much more capacity? Does running our larger bodies really require so much more brain matter?
Moravec’s Paradox has been coming up a lot lately, in light of all the AI buzz.
it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility
Doing basic definitional animal stuff is pretty damned complicated!
posted by atoxyl at 6:14 PM on April 10, 2023 [5 favorites]
Moravec’s Paradox has been coming up a lot lately, in light of all the AI buzz.
it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility
Doing basic definitional animal stuff is pretty damned complicated!
posted by atoxyl at 6:14 PM on April 10, 2023 [5 favorites]
Bumblebee Economics (1979) is a book about bumblebees' energy budget. Executive summary: bumblebees are machines for turning pollen into more bees.
posted by neuron at 9:09 PM on April 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by neuron at 9:09 PM on April 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
The consciousness of bees - "Experiments indicate that bees have surprisingly rich inner worlds."*
posted by kliuless at 10:34 PM on April 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by kliuless at 10:34 PM on April 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
Bees could impart a bit of much needed brain functioning to some politicians in the USA and other parts of the planet.
posted by DJZouke at 5:03 AM on April 11, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by DJZouke at 5:03 AM on April 11, 2023 [3 favorites]
I'll just drop in this video of two bees unscrewing a soda pop lid.
I don't see any 'unscrewing' there; the logo on the top of the screwtop lid barely moves a fraction of a degree. The screwtop was just set on top of the bottle without any tightening at all, and two bees, in trying to crawl underneath it to reach the soda, ended up flipping it away from the bottle.
posted by AzraelBrown at 6:59 AM on April 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
I don't see any 'unscrewing' there; the logo on the top of the screwtop lid barely moves a fraction of a degree. The screwtop was just set on top of the bottle without any tightening at all, and two bees, in trying to crawl underneath it to reach the soda, ended up flipping it away from the bottle.
posted by AzraelBrown at 6:59 AM on April 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
I don't see any 'unscrewing' there; the logo on the top of the screwtop lid barely moves a fraction of a degree
Cut them some slack, they're beeees!!
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:56 AM on April 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
Cut them some slack, they're beeees!!
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:56 AM on April 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
Moravec’s Paradox has been coming up a lot lately, in light of all the AI buzz.
Does this still hold? The "the perception of a one year old" part seems to be pretty clearly already achieved, and the mobility part seems to me to be more a matter of the mechanics and power supply and so on of the actual mobility systems, not processing power, but I think the Boston Dynamics stuff is more athletic than any one year old I've ever seen, at least.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 11:44 AM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
Does this still hold? The "the perception of a one year old" part seems to be pretty clearly already achieved, and the mobility part seems to me to be more a matter of the mechanics and power supply and so on of the actual mobility systems, not processing power, but I think the Boston Dynamics stuff is more athletic than any one year old I've ever seen, at least.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 11:44 AM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
Today I revisited an-Nafl, the Quranic surah named for the bee... So this post is delightfully timely for me.
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 1:21 PM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 1:21 PM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
Does this still hold? The "the perception of a one year old" part seems to be pretty clearly already achieved, and the mobility part seems to me to be more a matter of the mechanics and power supply and so on of the actual mobility systems, not processing power, but I think the Boston Dynamics stuff is more athletic than any one year old I've ever seen, at least.
The exact quote is no longer accurate, because it’s from the 1980s - which is also why the “intellectual” bar is set at “checkers.” I think the “hard stuff is easy and easy stuff is hard” principle still holds, as a rule of thumb. There’s some bias on the basis of recent splashy releases here but it would be hard to argue that robotics is moving as fast as “in the box” machine learning applications right now.
posted by atoxyl at 1:36 PM on April 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
The exact quote is no longer accurate, because it’s from the 1980s - which is also why the “intellectual” bar is set at “checkers.” I think the “hard stuff is easy and easy stuff is hard” principle still holds, as a rule of thumb. There’s some bias on the basis of recent splashy releases here but it would be hard to argue that robotics is moving as fast as “in the box” machine learning applications right now.
posted by atoxyl at 1:36 PM on April 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
Although, yes, the mechanical engineering and materials side is part of that, too. LLMs or computer vision tools can become cost-effective products pretty much as soon as the model is there and not producing total garbage and you can hook an API up to it, which obviously isn’t the case for robots.
posted by atoxyl at 1:41 PM on April 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by atoxyl at 1:41 PM on April 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
I have for a long time, been entertained by the notion, humans are one way the universe, examines it's self. Bees have to bee even moreso, all those wavelengths and colors! I see therefore I bee!
posted by Oyéah at 3:44 PM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Oyéah at 3:44 PM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
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