They mostly go around looking at mantabook ratings like: Best sand ever, it is making sac exchange great again, I have developed a new aesthetic of form that lets me fall like the Legion of Doom lamprey-risk free, and this is where I will be sharing it and chewing up things that could be me if they were not bite-sized. Let me know if you see any way to improve the process…
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A long time ago, I deliberately got too close to a swarm of bees, just to see what would happen. Exactly two bees peeled off from the swarm, and like fighter planes, escorted me to a place farther away. I tried it again, and the same thing happened. I can’t help but wonder if they were the same two bees! And how did they figure out how many girls to send out?
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Oh, you quote shakespeare every day!
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We’ve known for a while that bee brains respond to cocaine, so we shouldn’t be too surprised that their brains have some level of consciousness. How can you trip the light fantastic without a spirit to go tripping?
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When insects prove people are conscious?
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Then again, men have been trying to do this for years (or so I’ve heard 
)
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Here’s a page of dragonfly haikus which mentions dragonflies eating themselves as a possible urban myth:
When I was a child, living on an Air Force base in Okinawa, it was a common belief, among the elementary school set, a dragonfly would eat itself if you caught it and fed it its own tail. I looked online and didn’t find any references to this notion so maybe we were all sniffing the good Japanese glue.
What do you expect, given their ancestors?
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Took that last kid long enough to drop the sack! Reminds me of someone unable to get their hand out of a jar because they didn’t think to let go of the cookies.
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There’s never a hydraulic press around when you want one.
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The blood is the life! The blood is the life!
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This is either so meta I don’t understand it, or it’s a flawed analogy.
An alternative analogy; you can build a computer with a few thousand gates or a trillion gates, but they are both still Turing-complete.
What interests me about this is what we mean by consciousness. My own (inadequate, tentative and derived from my own work in control systems and control theory) definition is “having a model of the world, and also having the ability to draw external conclusions about the model”. At one level this might be the model including water falling out of the sky, and the external conclusions ranging from the generalisation “rain” through to meteorology, and working out “this isn’t rain, it’s someone with a hose”. At the bee level this might be identifying that a stimulus doesn’t fit the model.
Without a way of identifying that the stimulus doesn’t fit the model, how does a self-operating control system develop new responses to new stimuli?
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Well, if your few-thousand-gate Turing-complete computer needs fifteen billion times the life of the universe before heat death, to be able to, say, tell you how it’s feeling, then it doesn’t really matter, does it?
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“Consciousness” strikes me as one of those weak-assed delineators we prop up between ourselves and the rest of the animals. Like tool use, like language, like emotions, like all the conceptual barricades between Us and Them that keep getting knocked down with the regularity of bowling pins.
It’s the height of presumptuousness to say that recognizing an elephant or an orangutan or a whale grieving for a deceased friend or family member is “anthropomorphism.” It presumes that empathy is the exclusive domain of humans (as if!) and any effort to extend it to “lesser creatures” is folly. Nobody thinks that being hungry or horny is exclusive to our rarefied domain; why would it be any different for love or grief or jealousy or anything else? If anything, the category error is in hubristically regarding ourselves as somehow special and distinguished from the beasts. “We’re gonna need a bigger book.”
Okay, maybe we got an exclusive on existential ennui, but that’s nothing to write home about, even if we could somehow dredge up the energy to do so.
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There’s almost certainly something it is like to be a bat, and probably a bee as well, but there’s no way to know what it’s like.
Part of the problem is that when we use the term “consciousness”, we don’t really have a way to compare what exactly we are talking about. If some subset of people using the term “consciousness” are using it to refer to a process that involves complex grammatical use of language* (I find this to be a very plausible conjecture), then bees and bats are probably not conscious in the way they are using the term.
The whole concept of “consciousness” is so nebulous and poorly defined that it’s almost pointless to ask these questions, and we can never really answer them anyway. Like @boundegar points out, we can’t even prove or know for sure that other humans are conscious.
*Yes, bees have a “language” with some syntax etc., and yes bats make really complex noises that could hypothetically be used to communicate as well as be used for sonar, but I think it’s safe to say that neither spends very much time talking about “justice” or “romance” or even “beautiful sunsets”. Bees don’t seem to talk about anything besides where to find flowers of a particular color.
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Sure, but I’m sure there is some kind of stimulant we could give a roundworm to make it more aggressive, more hyper or whatever. And we could measure that effect in it’s neurons, but if someone told me that a worm with 300 neurons that don’t even form a proper brain was conscious I’d have to scoff at that a little (or really clarify what we mean by “conscious”).
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As more of this science gets developed, I begin to suspect that it’s not so much that we underestimate animal sentience, so much as we overestimate human sentience. When we’re good, we’re pretty awesome. But it’s that pesky hump in the bell curve we need to be paying attention to, not so much the skinny bit at the end.
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It is a very elaborate ruse we set up for ourselves, isn’t it?
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Yellow jackets, too! Little arseholes watch you when you get too close to one of their nests.
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