All of this reinforces my belief that nearly everything is conscious and aware, we differ in a capabilities and resolution but we are all more similar than we are different.
Growing up on a farm taught me that animals are absolutely able to think and learn. Not in the same way as humans, but I'm fully convinced there are degrees of consciousness.
Watching new calves play in spring meadows is one of the most purely joyful things you can ever see. They have best friends and will avoid playing with other calves until their friend comes to play with them.
Animals also grieve and mourn their dead, much like we do.
They are fellow sentient beings capable of experiencing pleasure, pain, fear, and forming social bonds. It's a lot of why I take issue with anthropocentrism, and think factory farming is an absolute tragedy. It's the industrialized denial of a meaningful life and one of the biggest examples of human cruelty.
Do you still live on a farm on in a city? Here in the suburbs, something is making animals "less smart". Every neighborhood has signs about missing pets. I suspect it also affects people too. Why get a pet when everyone is too busy to take care of it?
I love bees and ants, but I love bees the most. I would recommend people to study the behavior of bees and ants. Additionally, honey, propolis, etc. are super healthy, and we can thank bees for that.
I promise this isn’t a trap, it’s just my curiosity as a “flexitarian”. What (mostly) keeps me from eating animals is my mind wandering sometimes when making a protein choice about how they ended up there, wherever I am, not by choice.
Maybe it is the same level of consciousness but different physical limitations? Simply imagine being locked in in an insect body with different perception and abilities, and a wiped memory.
This is also what upsets me most about habitat destruction (aka global warming). We're burning books (making species extinct) that we haven't even read yet.
Thinking of smart bugs, check out the portia (aka jumping) spider. They plan multi-step, out of sight detours to ambush prey, and demonstrate impulse control. They have specialized hunting techniques for different menu items, one such is mimicking specific prey items stuck on a web to lure various types of spiders out.
Insect wise, bees have to take the cake. Symbolic communication and counting, and now time. This all tracks for something that needs to share the location of food with the colony.
When I think of insects, I see them as tiny microcontrollers. In my head bees have a little shift register to measure time.
While ants have control over each limb, they mostly move by rotating two tripods one at a time. It's like they turn on an output for three legs, turn off the output, and then turn on the output for the other three legs.
Ants can walk backward, though, so perhaps it is more like a half-bridge rectifier with multiple channels.
I read a paper long ago (so there's no chance of my recalling the source!) and one of the takeaways was that in a cockroach one of the neural ganglia basically had a binary "run!" mode that was flipped on instantly if sense nerves very close to it were triggered. So when researchers tapped or blew air on the rears of the roaches the roach in question would sprint away, its powerful legs being efficiently driven at full tilt by this little sprinting circuit without needing any input or interaction from the more complex main brain. Imagine getting used to that effect! "Ahhh! Why am I suddenly running and where am I going to steer this runaway body?"
Humans have that too. Startle response, withdrawing from pain (hot stove), blink response upon incoming object - all these happen without involving the higher brainstem at all. I think some of them barely even connect with the brain.
I don't know much about insects, but spiders at least seem to be much more than mere automatons. The way jumping spiders are aware of their environment makes them feel much closer to a dog than to a microcontroller.
I’m curious if this experiment actually tests for time perception at all or if it’s a very different effect that we attribute as being actual experience of time.
this might be more of "it's hard to find a behavioral experiment that proves you're using time" rather than "it's hard to find an animal that uses time"
Yes, it means it’s the first insects we know of with this ability. It of course has no bearing on whether other insects can and we simply don’t know yet.
I was unable to find the paper. I'm still wondering, if it is a cross-over experiment, as:
> The circles were in different positions at each room in the maze, but the bees still learned over varying amounts of time to fly toward the short flash of light associated with the sweet food.
Do not state, if the light suddenly changed in the rooms. If not, other factors might come into place.
To clarify, the CNN article asserts that this is the "first [discovered] evidence" that bees possess this capability, not that bees are the first insect to have ever developed this capacity, as the headline may suggest.
Readit News
They can count https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21222227
Bees play https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33369572 https://www.science.org/content/article/are-these-bumble-bee...
All of this reinforces my belief that nearly everything is conscious and aware, we differ in a capabilities and resolution but we are all more similar than we are different.
Spider Cognition: How Tiny Brains Do Mighty Things https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46003146
Watching new calves play in spring meadows is one of the most purely joyful things you can ever see. They have best friends and will avoid playing with other calves until their friend comes to play with them.
They are fellow sentient beings capable of experiencing pleasure, pain, fear, and forming social bonds. It's a lot of why I take issue with anthropocentrism, and think factory farming is an absolute tragedy. It's the industrialized denial of a meaningful life and one of the biggest examples of human cruelty.
Societal dogma aside, I think this probably applies to all critters, including within species, including us.
I recently read that honey bees in particular get the most attention from humans lately, so they are kept in high numbers.
This has some adversarial effect on other pollinators, which hurts ecosystems more than it helps.
Are you vegan?
I also keep my dietary preferences very low key. In a social setting, if I accidentally eat something I try and avoid, I don't make a fuss.
How and why you draw the line on what is acceptable to kill is mostly arbitrary
I’d argue a mushroom or a bee are more “conscious” than most chickens
Insect wise, bees have to take the cake. Symbolic communication and counting, and now time. This all tracks for something that needs to share the location of food with the colony.
Nature sure is neat.
While ants have control over each limb, they mostly move by rotating two tripods one at a time. It's like they turn on an output for three legs, turn off the output, and then turn on the output for the other three legs.
Ants can walk backward, though, so perhaps it is more like a half-bridge rectifier with multiple channels.
They're like little organic ICs.
Just imagine how cool would it be to have programmable bees.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100612184109/https://nelson.be...
Neural Circuit Recording from an Intact Cockroach Nervous System https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969889/
Descending influences on escape behavior and motor pattern in the cockroach https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11536194/
Multisensory control of escape in the cockroach Periplaneta americana https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00192001
> "Ahhh! Why am I suddenly running and where am I going to steer this runaway body?"
I wonder if it's tied to the optical sensors to steer toward darker places.
Deleted Comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40466814
I’m curious if this experiment actually tests for time perception at all or if it’s a very different effect that we attribute as being actual experience of time.
We have no idea what other insects can do this or when they got the ability. Sounds more like a first in Scientists. (tongue somewhat in cheek)
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xlGuBT5GT10
> The circles were in different positions at each room in the maze, but the bees still learned over varying amounts of time to fly toward the short flash of light associated with the sweet food.
Do not state, if the light suddenly changed in the rooms. If not, other factors might come into place.
To clarify, the CNN article asserts that this is the "first [discovered] evidence" that bees possess this capability, not that bees are the first insect to have ever developed this capacity, as the headline may suggest.
It was such a rare event that "evolution" didn't explain her more than simply mechanical response to something uniquely different that day.
— former beekeeper