Can We Tell if Insects Have Consciousness?
Executive Summary
- Humans have a long term established pattern of understating animal intelligence.
- We will review insect intelligence, which is often considered automatons.
This beautiful close up of a bee is courtesy of the Being Mark website, which has a bunch of fantastic insect photography.
Introduction
The following describes the origin of consciousness.
And the following video describes how insects think, which is in a decentralized fashion using “multiple brains or ganglia.”
Insects’ distributed brain is very similar to those in octopus.
Only about 10% of the “brain” is in the central structure. Octopuses have been around for roughly 300 million years, which means they developed their brains long before anything resembling humans did.
Conscious or Unconscious?
It has mostly been assumed that insects are unconscious. However, recent studies point to the opposite being true.
Brain scans of insects appear to indicate that they have the capacity to be conscious and show egocentric behaviour, apparently indicating that they have such a thing as subjective experience.
Though insects have tiny brains, they appear to serve the same function that the midbrain does for humans. They are able to tie together memory, perception and other key parts of consciousness, and use it to decide what to do – which is the same function that human’s brains do.
If the researchers are correct about the insects’ consciousness, then it will allow them to look at the characteristic with far more detail. Bees brains are far less complicated than – and that makes them far easier to study.
“Their experience of the world is not as rich or as detailed as our experience – our big neocortex adds something to life!” the scientists wrote recently. “But it still feels like something to be a bee.” – The Independent
Conclusion
There has been comparably little effort in trying to determine how insects think. Of course, there are many insects in the world, and very little money allocated to fund researching them. People will often tend to assign “instincts” to insects, without considering that an instinctual response, can promote or motivate behavior, but cannot usually direct how to achieve the objective of the instance (mating, obtaining food, etc..).
Consciousness is extremely useful as it promotes the entity to try to achieve objectives. Consciousness exists for this reason. The only question is whether insects have sufficient processing power to be conscious. Secondly, there are gradations of consciousness. In humans, one’s consciousness at one month, is not the same as the consciousness at 30 years old. Up until this point, I have yet to see a specific test for consciousness that is applied to many types of animals.
References
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/insects-are-conscious-claims-major-paper-that-could-show-us-how-our-own-thoughts-began-a7002151.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect_cognition
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/do-insects-have-consciousness-180959484/
https://jeb.biologists.org/content/209/22/4420
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/could-fruit-flies-reveal-the-hidden-mechanisms-of-the-mind/
This fungus actually takes control of a fruit fly’s brain.