This continues my discussion of an analogy between the human situation and that of a bee. I contend that neither of us knows the most important fact about our existence, namely that we are embedded in a "hive". " Surfaces and Essences " reminds us that analogies underlie our thinking, but to watch out. Some analogies are better than others. Humans are not bees. For one thing, as far as the hive is concerned, the individual bee is expendable and interchangeable with any other bee. We are tempted to regard our enemies this way. Enemy soldiers are robots but ours are heroes with families back home. But the fact is that humans are far from interchangeable. Even if we have been exposed to the same environment and the same education, we manage to draw different lessons from it. It's also true that humans are not expendable, or at least they have different degrees of expandability. The skills of individuals often contribute to the fate of the "hive"...

This essay is an " intuition pump ". The term was invented by Daniel Dennet. An intuition pump is a thought experiment designed to nudge us from our usual way of thinking to see the world in a new way. 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 b...