> So, are bees "conscious beings"? I don't see how it matters much
Jim, I get that it doesn't matter to you. Some folks don't even engage in discussions on human or any other consciousness, for the same reason. It matters to other people, however. I find the advanced work on the topic to be immensely fascinating, especially the boundary between human intelligence and AI.
C Klein, AB Barron (2016) Insects have the capacity for subjective experience. animalstudiesrepository.org
Abstract: To what degree are non-human animals conscious? We propose that the most
meaningful way to approach this question is from the perspective of functional neurobiology.
Here we focus on subjective experience, which is a basic awareness of the world without
without further reflection on that awareness. We argue that the insect brain supports
functions analogous to those of the vertebrate midbrain and hence that insects may also
have a capacity for subjective experience.
Some have postulated subjective experience in insects because they think that consciousness is even more widespread. For example, authors have postulated subjective experience in plants (Pelizzon & Gagliano, 2015), in any reasonably complex system (see Tononi, 2004), or even that it is a fundamental feature of the universe akin to spin and electric charge (Strawson, 2006).
We disagree. We think there is a cutoff. Many animals, all plants, and (as far as we know) all currently existing man-made artifacts fall below the line. Without the right kind of centralized integration and modeling, an organism cannot be conscious.
* * *
In other words, plants and thermostats are not conscious, though they respond to the environment. Consciousness in some form in insects, is certainly not unimaginable. The fact that we can imagine it, does not make it true. But the capacity to use mental images is one of the hallmarks of consciousness, and honey bees clearly do this.
PLB
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