To Bee or Not to Bee - Revised 11/22, 11/27, 2018-11-28
Bees have approximately one million neurons in 0.5 mm; humans have 100 billion neurons. And yet bees can learn, and understand abstract concepts, and make complex decisions
But does a bee know it's a bee?
With a mere million neurons in a speck of a brain, it's not surprising that a bee doesn't have a lot of mental hardware for luxuries like "consciousness." Its brain is busy doing things like being a skillful a flight controller. It's not surprising that we don't have bee philosophers. But if we did, would they ask a similar question of us? Do we know we are human?
Is it possible that I know less about what it is to be human than a bee knows about being a bee?
But don't I know everything there is to know about the experience of being me? Isn't this why it seems so silly to as if a bee knows it's a bee? And nothing is more important that consciousness - precisely that feeling that I know I'm having that feeling of knowing ...
We are at a loss to explain consciousness - it's known as the "hard problem of consciousness." In fact, we are so stuck on this problem that it's hard for us to imagine what an "explanation" would even look like. It's possible that we are totally wrong about what's going on and, by implication, completely wrong about what it is to be human. For thousands of years, many philosophers have been asking if consciousness is as important as it seems. Perhaps it's not even real.
But we know the important stuff, don't we? We know consciousness has something to do with those 100 billion neurons. That's the most important thing to know, right? Maybe. But we must admit that no neuron "knows" it's part of a brain (us), nor do we know just how all these neurons add up to "us". We could be on the wrong track. Maybe all our brain theories are on the wrong track entirely. Perhaps we are like the bee, which manages to offload the really important stuff so it can do its thing with the absolute minimum of hardware on board.
Most of us would agree that being a bee is to be a smart component of the hive. All the stunning capability of the bee is in service to the hive. Its brain is part of the "hive mind." Its knowledge is part of the collective knowledge of the hive. The hive thinks and behaves as a "superorganism." The individual bee is completely expendable from the point of view of the hive. One bee is as good as another. This may be the most important thing a bee doesn't know about being a bee.
Part of the problem is that my mind, like the iPhone, "just works". There's a lot of stuff going on under the surface.
Suppose I tried to explain my iPhone to Isaac Newton. I would quickly run into an infinite set of boxes within boxes. Along the way, I'd need to explain probability and Quantum physics before I could explain how transistors work before I could explain logic gates and computer logic. Then I'd need to explain the millions of instructions on the phone along with the trillions of instructions on remote services. Oh, and radio and telecommunications theory from scratch, along with such details as cell phone architecture and TCP/IP protocols. I would need to unpack a big chunk of all human knowledge to explain how my phone works. And that would just be the start. I'd need to explain how and where it is manufactured, the skills required for each tiny bit. Then, of course, I'd need to explain why I have one, what it cost and what I use it for. You get the idea.
But how is it that I use my iPhone so effortlessly without any of this crossing my mind? The answer is that I have been blessed with a mind that effortlessly rides a wave in a vast sea of knowledge. My mind floats along under the impression that it "knows" all this, when, in fact, what I really know is a tiny sliver of the knowledge I hold in my hand. For the bee, all the knowledge of aeronautics, navigation and "wiggle language" is buried in hive brain - the work of the "blind watchmaker," evolution. Am I so different?
And that's just the start. It's not just about iPhones. It's about language. It's about doorknobs and flush toilets. This illusion is eloquently described in "The Knowledge Illusion". This is the illusion that we feel that we move around in a world we "know" when what we actually know is next to nothing.
So, the next time I watch a bee, perhaps I will feel a little less superior.
What do I know?
I spent a long time thinking about this post and concluded that it is rather half-baked. The reader might wonder, what's the point? I wondered about the role of scale. Viewed from a "big picture" scale, humans do look a bit like ants. It's important to remember that they are not ants, but their ant-like behavior is not part of their consciousness - the "bee" phenomenon. Some connection is also needed to the concept of assimilation. I also thought a lot about the bubbles that our minds construct - we are not aware of the very small, the very large, things out of sight and far away, the past or the distant future. We seem to "move" into the future, partly because we pay so little attention ...
The "point", if any, is how our idea of who we are, why we do what we do, is so shockingly limited. This is hardly an original point but it may be possible to express it more forcibly with a hint of practical application.
From an emotional point of view, mindfulness allows a "reset" to "bubble zero", allowing us to cautiously expand awareness to what may matter a bit more than what we allow ourselves by media traps and daily emergencies. For example, I feel like I'm an American democrat, constantly outraged by the attack on America by DT. This is a media effect. Should I not worry more about what matters to me and what matters in general?
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