You’re a honeybee. Despite being around 700,000 times
smaller than the average human, you’ve got more of almost everything. Instead
of four articulated limbs, you have six, each with six segments. (Your bee’s
knees, sadly, don’t exist.) You’re exceptionally hairy. A shock of bristly
setae covers your body and face to help you keep warm, collect pollen, and even
detect movement. Your straw-like tongue stretches far beyond the end of your
jaw, but has no taste buds on it. Instead, you “taste” with other, specialized
hairs, called sensillae, that you use to sense the chemicals that brush against
particular parts of your body.
You’ve got five eyes. Two of
them, called compound eyes and made up of 6,900 tiny lenses, take up about half
your face. Each lens sends you a different “pixel,” which you use to see the
world around you. The colors you
see are different. Red looks like black to you and your three
“primary” colors are blue, green, and ultraviolet. You detect motion insanely
well, but outlines are fuzzy and images blocky, like a stained-glass window. (Your
three other eyes detect only changes in light to tell you quickly if something
dangerous is swooping your way.)
Now that you’re a honeybee you
can do all kinds of things you couldn’t before. Your four wings move at 11,400
strokes per minute. You can sense chemicals in the air. You’re fluent in waggle dance, so you’re
able to tell the other members of your colony where the nectar supplies are.
But how much does any of this tell us about what it actually feels like to be a
bee?
We all know what it’s like to be ourselves—to be conscious
of the world around us, and be conscious of that consciousness. But what
consciousness means more generally, for other people and other creatures, is a
hot potato tossed between philosophers, biologists, psychologists, and anyone
who’s ever wondered whether it feels the same to be a dog as it does to be an
octopus. In general, we think that if you have some kind of unique, subjective
experience of the world, you’re conscious to some extent. The problem is that
in trying to envisage any consciousness besides our own, we run into the limits
of the human imagination. In the case of honeybees, it’s hard to know if
interesting behavior is reflective of an interesting experience of the world or
masks a more simple stimulus-response existence. The lights are on, but is
anyone home? To examine these questions means to take a ride on that hot
potato—from philosopher to scientist and back again and again and again.
More and more, scientific
research seems to suggest that bees do have a kind of consciousness, even as
myths and misconceptions about their capacities persist. In a recent TED Talk, cognitive
scientist Andrew B. Barron of Macquarie University in Sydney,
Australia, described how he had had to be lovingly “talked down” from a
“pearl-clutching” moment after someone asked him whether bees actually have
brains. They do, of course.
Understanding what their
consciousness might look or feel like is probably a fool’s errand. It’s really
hard to imagine what it’s like to be almost anything or anyone other than what
you are, says philosopher Colin Klein,
also from Macquarie University, who has worked extensively alongside Barron.
With people, it’s much easier. “You can talk to them, you can read fiction,
there are a lot of things you can do—but it takes a certain amount of work to
get into that space and in particular to realize what you experience, what you
don’t experience, what your horizons look like,” he says. But the more
different the experience of the organism you’re trying to imagine is, the
harder it becomes. “You can start to think at least in what senses the
experience of something like a bee might be different from ours”—how they
structure the world around them, say, or whether they experience “space” the
way we do.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel’s
famous 1974 essay, “What Is It Like
to Be a Bat?” suggests that being “like” something else is possible
only if the target is conscious of the world around it. “The fact that an
organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is
something it is like to be that organism,” he writes. Or, “fundamentally an
organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it
is to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.” On top of that
mindscrabble, our ability to imagine ourselves as another being is limited by
the world that we know—as people. We might be able to imagine having webbed
arms and hands, like a bat, or five eyes, like a bee, but the specific senses
and abilities these animals possess are frankly inconceivable. “I want to know
what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am
restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate
to the task,” he adds.
Moreover, “I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present
experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it.”
Despite these difficulties,
what we want to know, Klein and Barron wrote in an op-ed
in The Conversation in 2016, is whether bees and other insects “can feel
and sense the environment from a first-person perspective.”
It seems likely that there are lots of different kinds of
consciousness, of varying levels of complexity. As human beings, not only are
we aware of ourselves and the world around us, we’re also aware of that
awareness. A step down in complexity might lack that awareness of
self-awareness. And a step down from that might be limited to a distinctive
experience of the external world only.
Such a simple ladder may not
be the best way to organize this kind of complexity, says David Chalmers, a leather jacket-wearing Australian philosopher
at New York University best known for his work in philosophy of mind—a branch
of philosophy that asks these kinds of questions. “But there are probably
different ways of arranging states of mind, or consciousness, in a hierarchy,”
he says. What’s harder to distinguish is the precise point where consciousness
ends, and what the light switch, “on-off,” moment might be, further down the
evolutionary chain. “It’s awfully hard to see what a borderline case of being
conscious would be,” he says, even while it’s not that hard to know what a
borderline case of being alive might look like, as in a virus. “It would sort
of feel like something,” he says, trailing off in thought, “but not.”
So far as bee consciousness
goes, however, he thinks there are likely to be some factors in consciousness
that we share, like vision, and some that we don’t at all, “whether it’s
sensory systems that humans have that bees don’t have, or whether it’s things
more like concepts, like language, that give us a kind of consciousness that
bees don’t have.”
Klein is more specific. “We
think that bees have experiences that feel like something to the bee,” he says.
“We don’t think the bees are aware of having experiences that feel like
something to them. The bee is not going round saying to itself, ‘Gee, it’s a
lovely day, look at that flower.’ It doesn’t have any of these more
sophisticated, reflexive kinds of consciousness.”
Still, despite having a brain that is a fraction of the
size of even the tiniest mammal’s, bees seem capable of some incredibly complex
behaviors and mental gymnastics. Studies over the last few decades have
revealed them to do everything from having a concept
of zero to experiencing
emotion, from tool use to social learning. If you give them cocaine,
they dance more vigorously and tend to overestimate how much pollen they’ve
foraged. If they watch a plastic bee
scoring goals with a soccer ball, they can follow suit for a sugar
water reward. Wouldn’t these complex behaviors be enough to assume some kind of
consciousness? Not necessarily, says Barron. “Honeybees are unusual among the
insects in that they have a whole list of clever things that they are able to
do,” he says. “And some people would say that that means that they are more
likely to be conscious. I disagree with that.”
Think of all the other things
able to perform complicated tasks that we’re pretty sure aren’t conscious.
Robots do everything from juggle
to play the piano,
but, as far as we know, are “dark” inside. Like bees, Roomba vacuum cleaners
make decisions, navigate around the world, and adapt—but there’s probably
nothing it’s “like” to be one of them. And plants have been shown
to have a kind of memory: Over time, for example, they can learn that being
repeatedly dropped isn’t anything to freak out about. But few suggest they
possess consciousness.
“I think this is one of the
problems with the behavioral approach, is that it encourages this looking for
very clever things,” says Klein. “Whereas if consciousness is a widespread
phenomenon, you should expect that it might be in a lot of different types of
things that don’t necessarily do the things that we take to be markers of
consciousness.”
If behavior can’t enough tell
us about the inner life of a bee, perhaps the structure of their sesame
seed–sized brains can. In a human brain, key studies suggest consciousness
lies in the midbrain, an evolutionarily much older section. In a study published
last year, Barron and Klein investigated the structure of the bee
brain, which seems to be made up of similar bits to our own, with a region
responsible for similar tasks. “It’s smaller, it’s organized differently, it’s
different-shaped, but if you look at the kind of computations it does, it’s
doing the same sort of things as the midbrain,” Klein says. “So if you think in
humans the midbrain is responsible for being conscious, and you think this is
doing the same kind of thing, then you ought to think insects are conscious as
well.”
This biological approach opens
up consciousness to a variety of other organisms that don’t do the clever
things that bees do, like beetles or potato bugs. They might be less obviously
interesting, but that doesn’t make them less likely to be conscious. The
technology that allows us to examine insect brains on a neuron-by-neuron level
is very new, Barron says. “If they really are instinctive, then we’re learning
something about what the insect brain is capable of. If they’re not, then we’re
learning something more profound.”
The technology also allows us
to map the brains of organisms that we think probably aren’t conscious, and
assess what they lack. Caenorhabditis elegans is a roundworm commonly
used in scientific research. In recent years, scientists have
developed a connectome—a sort of complex brain map—for this tiny
soil-dweller, which measures barely a millimeter in length. “They have 302
neurons,” says Klein, compared to a bee’s 960,000 and a human’s 86 billion.
“Those [worms], we think, are actually very much like robots, like complicated
robots.” If exposed to a particular stimulus, they respond in a particular,
predictable way. “Unless there’s some kind of danger, and then it does that,
unless it’s hungry, and then it does this—so you can really map out what it’s
going to do.” In bees, he says, there seems to be a kind of qualitative shift,
in which the brain is somehow more than its connections.
All of this neurobiology is
beginning to paint a picture—that it feels like nothing to be a C. elegans,
or a robot, or a plant, but it probably feels like something to be a bee. If
that’s the case, it is still not known where, between the roundworm and the
honeybee, that awareness switches on, if it does. While neurobiology is a very
important part of the story, says Chalmers, “it may not settle the issue of
consciousness. You very frequently find a situation where two people might
agree on the neurobiology of a given case, but disagree on what that implies
about consciousness.” He gives the example of fish, and the ongoing discourse
about whether their neurobiology suggests that they do or do not feel pain.
“Knowing the neurobiological facts doesn’t necessarily settle the question.”
We can try to imagine what
it’s like to have six hairy legs, or see in pixels, or crave nectar. We can
even try to imagine what it’s like to be part of a hive, a superorganism with
motivations of its own. But what it’s actually like to be a bee—its subjective
experience of the world—is going to remain elusive. But we’re starting to figure
out that it’s probably like something. And that’s not nothing.
Atlas Obscura
