Consciously agnostic
Sorry for not having written for so long time, but I literally have SO many things to do, especially with my new projects, that I really don’t have time for anything!
Anyway, I am writing this post to comment on an article I found on Scientific American: Exploring Consciousness through the Study of Bees
This article is written by Christof Koch. If you remembered we have dealt before with him in past articles (Introducing Scholarpedia and the Neural Correlates of Consciousness)
Christof Koch
Christof Koch is neuroscientist whose main interest is consciousness. In this article he presents the following argument. We don’t have a complete theory of consciousness, so we should follow an agnostic approach on the subject, since we can’t say for sure which things posess a consciousness and which do not.
His discussion starts with bees. We all consider insects to be utterly stupid. After all, insects are so much different than us. They are small, they have a different social structure, since they are not mamals, and their appereance seems alien to us.
Nevertheless, they are capable of some interesting feats
Bees live in highly stratified yet flexible social organizations with group decision-making skills that rival academic, corporate or government committees in efficiency. In spring, when bees swarm, they choose a new hive that needs to satisfy many demands within a couple of days (consider that the next time you go house hunting). They communicate information about the location and quality of food sources using the waggle dance. Bees can fly several kilometers and return to their hive, a remarkable navigational performance. Their brains seem to have incorporated a map of their environment. And a scent blown into the hive can trigger a return to the site where the bee previously encountered this odor. This type of associative memory was famously described by French novelist Marcel Proust in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
Our new conscious friend…
Koch presents a very nice argument here. Our criteria about what is conscious and what is not are highly subjective and instictual. His argument calls us to take a look at the functions and the structure of the species that we know that have consciousness (this is us) and compare it with that of other creatures (like bees).
Based, on this new criterion, we don’t have any reason not to accept that bees have consiousness. On the other hand, we don’t have any reason to accept that bees have consciousness. And this for two reasons: Bees can speak to us, to ascertain our hypothesis and, secondly, we don’t know of what use consciousness would be to the bees.
However, these arguments are not absolutely right. Concerning the first argument, we can’t take communication as a proof of consciousness. A possible artificial intelligence life-form could communicate with us, but this wouldn’t mean that it is conscious.
The second argument is a little trickier, since we don’t know in what consciousness is useful. Maybe consciounsess is useless and it is just an epiphenomenon of neural processes.
Furthermore, we can’t even rule out the case of zombies, which connects the two arguments. The zombie-case in consciousness makes the assumption that a being that we consider conscient, let’s say another human, is exactly as it is, but doesn’t have consciousness. If such a creature could exist, then we maybe we could accept that consciousness is just an epiphenomenon, and it is useless. We would also be sure that communication would not mean that a creature is conscious, even though we have verified this hypothesis with the AI argument above.
The undisputable future of neuroscience…
So, we are at the point we just began this conversation. We don’t know jack about consciousnes 
, and so, we don’t any reasons to accept or reject the hypothesis that bees are have consciousness and are our friends 
.
However, at this point I want to make a connection with an older post: Can computation be the answer? The violation of the second law of thermodynamics
At this post, we had talked about Stephen Wolfram and his approach to science that circles around simple systems and cellular automata. If simple systems can describe the neural networks that govern our brains, maybe they could explain the existence of consiousness as an emergent phenomenon.
Complexity out of simplicity
Cellular automata are characterized by the fact that by a set of simple rules, complex patterns emerge. This explanation doesn’t require consciousness to be evolutionary adaptive (even though it might be). It doesn’t require consciousness to perform some special functions. It only requires that neural networks are governed by some simple rules, and these rules eventually, seem to give rise to the phenomenon of consciousness.
So, that was it for today! Until next time, try to be more gentle with the little bees. They might conscious you know!
