I think it was pretty well covered. The last relevant thread was called: INVERTEBRATE COGNITION. Anyone still interested might look at that and see if there is anywhere we can travel further. 

What comes to mind is that pain is not synonymous with consciousness. One can have one without the other. 

On the other hand, when a honey bee or a wasp comes after me, it seems pretty clear it has an _intent_ to do harm. This seems far more complex than simply a reflexive action. They evaluate the threat level and act accordingly. If a tree branch falls on a hive they can get pretty riled up but they settled down after realizing the branch is no longer a threat. Whereas, they are unlikely to stop attacking a clumsy beekeeper until he/she retreats a sufficient distance. These examples seem to reflec cognition. 

As far as driverless cars go, they have been programmed with a surrogate of human cognition, which they attempt to replicate. Honey bee or other animal cognition is not an imitation of cognition, it is an example of a stage in evolution which ranges from barely responsive to temperature changes in one celled organisms (not cognition but a precursor) on up to a human network which involves consciousness, cognition, and sophisticated communication with constant feedback (super-cognition).

The bee colony is somewhere on that spectrum. One would observe that evolution has produced species that survive for millions of years without complex behaviors. I just read that trilobites were on the planet for 500 million years, and then vanished. Maybe some better equipped creature came along and ate them all.

PLB

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