Anyone interested in what is going on inside bees' or any animals' minds
will find this book interesting. She takes great pains to present the whole
story, not just a certain side of it, although she finally rejects the
mechanistic approach to the study of animal behavior.

It's part of the human personality, though, to try to use "machine
metaphors" to model everything from weather to animal behavior, because: *We
make make machines, therefore we know can understand them*. Apparently, no
machine is too complicated for humans to "reverse engineer". Witness the
code-breakers of WWII, to name one instance.

However, we are also conscious, so we understand consciousness a bit. It is
perfectly logical to suppose animals have some level of consciousness,
because they have neural networks similar or identical to ours and produce
representations of their world like we do. Whether it is instinctive or not
is not the main thing. The point is that bees use symbols to represent the
world, which is a hallmark of imagination (the making of images).

* * *

Images of Animals
Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind
Eileen Crist

"A tension is built into the foundations of the pursuit of knowledge about
animal life, for it is heir to both the cartesian verdict of an unbridgeable
hiatus between humans and animals and the Darwinian affirmation of
evolutionary continuity. The consequence of an intellectual and cultural
heritage of opposed visions of the relationship between animals and humans
is that the problematic of animal mind — whether affirmed or refuted,
celebrated or doubted, qualified or sidestepped — is ever present, perhaps
even the heart of the matter, in behavioral writings. Representations of
animal life, whether intentionally or not, are always addressing what is for
Western thought a most engrossing mystery — the contentious topic of animal
mind or animal consciousness."

    —From the Introduction

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