Do bumble bees play? (paper in Animal Behaviour, 2022).
It seems like they do, yes.
Eighteen wooden balls (15mm diameter), sprayed yellow and purple, were present in the walkway to the hive for a separate experiment. But, an observation:
Despite there being enough space to avoid the balls, bumble bees often seemingly unnecessarily walked over and rolled balls on their way to and from food.
There’s no apparent reward; rolling the balls appears to be intentional; young bees play more than older bees… young being 5 days and old being 13.
If the bees get to choose between a room with balls to roll around versus one without, they choose the one with the balls.
Playful bees!
Oh, men will be men:
Unlike female bumble bees, males do not supply the colony with food, that is, they forage entirely for themselves. Shortly after emergence, bumble bee males tend to leave the nest and do not typically return, instead searching for queens with which to mate. In our experiments, no virgin queens were present.
Aaaaaand so.... male bumble bees were found to roll individual balls longer than females.
(trying v hard rn not to make a gag about incels playing video games in their basement.)
Ref.
Galpayage Dona, H. S., Solvi, C., Kowalewska, A., M”akel”a, K., MaBouDi, H., & Chittka, L. (2022). Do bumble bees play? Animal Behaviour, 194, 239-251. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2022.08.013
Play is a consciousness marker.
Like, observing play isn’t the same as observing consciousness directly. But it’s hard to imagine play from something that isn’t conscious.
Another consciousness marker? Learning.
From that same paper: Bees become faster at handling flowers with experience.
Another? Feelings.
Don’t worry, bees are happy: Study finds hints of optimism in insects.
In this experiment they gave some bees a 30% sugar solution, and then the opportunity to enter an ambiguously-labeled tube which would contain either yet more sugar solution or no reward:
The sugar-treated bees took less time to decide to enter the ambiguously marked tube, suggesting that the sweet treat had led them to be optimistic about what they would find, the researchers report today in Science. [Happiness] leads us to make optimistic choices in ambiguous situations, such as gambling – just like the bees.
Boooo: The scientists also ended the bees’ optimistic behaviors by giving them a dopamine inhibitor, which blocks the brain’s reward center.
Playful bees! Learning bees! Optimistic bees!
btw check out the recent episode of In Our Time about Pollination for more about bees.
So are bees conscious?
I get the feeling that bee-consciousness is the current consensus, yes. It didn’t used to be… insects were the biological robots of the animal world.
This article by Kristin Andrews covers both consciousness markers and the new consensus: “All animals are conscious”: Shifting the null hypothesis in consciousness science (Mind & Language, Jan 2024).
For instance, there’s a summary of the eight markers of pain
(possession of nociceptors through to associative learning), and it is observed that these are taken as very strong evidence
of sentience, and that is used in animal welfare legislation:
the report resulted in a change to UK law via the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill of 2022, which includes all cephalopod molluscs and decapod crustaceans as protected sentient animals for the first time.
Andrews generalises what’s happening here, arguing that
Rather than asking the distribution question [“Which animals are conscious”], we should shift to the dimensions question: How are animals conscious?
Another sign of the new consensus that animal consciousness matters:
The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness (Apr 2024), with many prestigious signatories.
That declaration in summary…
there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds
- there is
a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates … and many invertebrates
- and
it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility
They provide a background with tons of references, from gossipy crows to cuttlefish with episodic memory; snakes with a sense of self, curious zebrafish and lonely fruit flies who can’t get to sleep.
And of course books: More-than-human providing the theoretical underpinnings to decentring humans; Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith popularising octopus intelligence; Ways of Being by James Bridle widening the scope of consideration still further to organisms, collectives, AIs… Movements like Interspecies Internet working on interspecies communication…
Why now?
I don’t believe we would be talking about bee consciousness without the possibility of machine consciousness.
Because the challenge is not consciousness but rather the lack of it.
My instinct, today, is to say that AI is not conscious. Perhaps someday, but not today.
But if I am also to say that a bumblebee is not conscious… well:
Is a bee not conscious in the same way that an AI is not conscious?
No!
Somehow I find this framing of the question way more generative and challenging than arguing about consciousness itself.
Because immediately I find myself saying oh but a bee IS conscious though not human-conscious, it’s not an absolute, and oh but maybe an AI today isn’t conscious but a future AI might be.
So suddenly it is uncontroversial to expand our definition of consciousness to include bees (and we can argue about whether to exclude large language models).
Which is a neat consequence!
I love that the prospect of AI consciousness is causing us to be more open minded about animal minds! Organic solidarity!
We should keep going… make more comparisons that open our minds even more…
Is an LLM not conscious in the same way that a rock is not conscious? Or a corporation?
And being forced to confront what we mean by “consciousness” also forces us to confront how we imagine that definition changes things, if at all: rights? Ethics? Empathy? Simply, legalistic clarifications?
Good discussions to have. Consciousness raising, if you will.
The challenge is how to get the whole mixed-up rich and wonderful mess of the AI consciousness debate into the public discourse, as opposed to yes it is/no it isn’t.
Do bumble bees play? (paper in Animal Behaviour, 2022).
It seems like they do, yes.
Eighteen wooden balls (15mm diameter), sprayed yellow and purple, were present in the walkway to the hive for a separate experiment. But, an observation:
There’s no apparent reward; rolling the balls appears to be intentional; young bees play more than older bees… young being 5 days and old being 13.
If the bees get to choose between a room with balls to roll around versus one without, they choose the one with the balls.
Playful bees!
Oh, men will be men:
Aaaaaand so....
(trying v hard rn not to make a gag about incels playing video games in their basement.)
Ref.
Galpayage Dona, H. S., Solvi, C., Kowalewska, A., M”akel”a, K., MaBouDi, H., & Chittka, L. (2022). Do bumble bees play? Animal Behaviour, 194, 239-251. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2022.08.013
Play is a consciousness marker.
Like, observing play isn’t the same as observing consciousness directly. But it’s hard to imagine play from something that isn’t conscious.
Another consciousness marker? Learning.
From that same paper:
Another? Feelings.
Don’t worry, bees are happy: Study finds hints of optimism in insects.
In this experiment they gave some bees a 30% sugar solution, and then the opportunity to enter an ambiguously-labeled tube which would contain either yet more sugar solution or no reward:
Boooo:
Playful bees! Learning bees! Optimistic bees!
btw check out the recent episode of In Our Time about Pollination for more about bees.
So are bees conscious?
I get the feeling that bee-consciousness is the current consensus, yes. It didn’t used to be… insects were the biological robots of the animal world.
This article by Kristin Andrews covers both consciousness markers and the new consensus: “All animals are conscious”: Shifting the null hypothesis in consciousness science (Mind & Language, Jan 2024).
For instance, there’s a summary of the (possession of nociceptors through to associative learning), and it is observed that these are taken as of sentience, and that is used in animal welfare legislation:
Andrews generalises what’s happening here, arguing that
Another sign of the new consensus that animal consciousness matters:
The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness (Apr 2024), with many prestigious signatories.
That declaration in summary…
They provide a background with tons of references, from gossipy crows to cuttlefish with episodic memory; snakes with a sense of self, curious zebrafish and lonely fruit flies who can’t get to sleep.
And of course books: More-than-human providing the theoretical underpinnings to decentring humans; Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith popularising octopus intelligence; Ways of Being by James Bridle widening the scope of consideration still further to organisms, collectives, AIs… Movements like Interspecies Internet working on interspecies communication…
Why now?
I don’t believe we would be talking about bee consciousness without the possibility of machine consciousness.
Because the challenge is not consciousness but rather the lack of it.
My instinct, today, is to say that AI is not conscious. Perhaps someday, but not today.
But if I am also to say that a bumblebee is not conscious… well:
Is a bee not conscious in the same way that an AI is not conscious?
No!
Somehow I find this framing of the question way more generative and challenging than arguing about consciousness itself.
Because immediately I find myself saying oh but a bee IS conscious though not human-conscious, it’s not an absolute, and oh but maybe an AI today isn’t conscious but a future AI might be.
So suddenly it is uncontroversial to expand our definition of consciousness to include bees (and we can argue about whether to exclude large language models).
Which is a neat consequence!
I love that the prospect of AI consciousness is causing us to be more open minded about animal minds! Organic solidarity!
We should keep going… make more comparisons that open our minds even more…
Is an LLM not conscious in the same way that a rock is not conscious? Or a corporation?
And being forced to confront what we mean by “consciousness” also forces us to confront how we imagine that definition changes things, if at all: rights? Ethics? Empathy? Simply, legalistic clarifications?
Good discussions to have. Consciousness raising, if you will.
The challenge is how to get the whole mixed-up rich and wonderful mess of the AI consciousness debate into the public discourse, as opposed to yes it is/no it isn’t.