The Feelings Buzzing All Around Us
Human existence depends upon bees, and yet most of us don’t take their bumble and buzz seriously. We tend to think of them as tiny robots that can’t fly straight, doing hard labor in the flowers at the behest of royalty.
But a new study suggests that bees, and other insects, might be conscious. Consciousness wouldn’t “mean that a honeybee thinks, ‘Why am I not the queen?’ or even, ‘Oh, I like that nectar,’ ” James Gorman wrote in The Times. But “the honeybee has the capacity to feel something.”
Whatever it is that a honeybee feels, it probably isn’t gratitude if they are at all like mosquitoes. Just ask the 14th Dalai Lama. He said he shares his blood with mosquitoes when he knows he isn’t sick and he’s in a pleasant mood, Ellen Barry wrote in The Times. The Dalai Lama said he can see their bodies turn red while they drink from his body, “but there is no indication of appreciation.” He was so bothered by this that he asked scientists if insects were capable of gratitude.
It’s difficult to imagine that the next brood of cicadas won’t feel some form of gratitude when they emerge to mate in parts of the United States this month after a 17-year wait. And if insects are conscious, we know what will be on the minds of the cicadas, which will number in the billions, as they sing their love songs throughout the night.
How cicadas know when to emerge is still a mystery, but perhaps some form of consciousness plays a role.
“This particular generation of insects last emerged in 1999 (a year filled with anxiety about a different kind of bug, the computer-based Y2K),” Christopher Mele wrote in The Times.
Y2K turned out to be a bit of a joke. And if these cicadas are conscious, maybe they were in on the laugh. Humor is integral to consciousness, according to The Times’s Ken Johnson, “and I think since the ’60s, the nature of consciousness and how consciousness processes reality has been a big concern” in fields as diverse as art, philosophy and neuroscience.
It’s true. More philosophers and neuroscientists are concerned with this, but the degrees to which insects might be aware is still a question.
“Insects might have subjective experience,” Peter Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher at the City University of New York, told Mr. Gorman, “but not of a kind that has a lot of ethical consequences.” So maybe saying thanks is some time off for bees, mosquitoes and cicadas.
Whatever the level of consciousness, why stop at bugs? Mr. Gorman wrote that some experts say con- sciousness is nearly ubiquitous and “can be present even in nonliving arrangements of matter, to varying degrees. They say that rather than wonder how consciousness arises, one should look at where we know it exists and go from there to where else it might exist.” This could include a robot with artificial intelligence, sensory data, memory and awareness of its body.
The concern for consciousness in the nonliving is also present in a painting Mr. Johnson recently displayed at a benefit in New York. His work, “Untitled,” is a joke without a punch line: “A duck and a sphere walk into a bar.” Left unfinished, it raises more questions for anyone with the time and desire to think about it.
“As scientists lean increasingly toward recognizing that nonhuman animals are conscious in one way or another,” Mr. Gorman wrote, “the question becomes: Where does consciousness end?”