this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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A bee finding its way home is like my phone GPS plotting the way back. My phone doesn't "feel" or "experience" being lost. It just does what it's built to do.
Calling consciousness experiencing things to then apply it to everything just feels like a rebrand to make it fit. An interesting read, but until we can accurately measure how to perform a test on a rock to see if it experiences anything, I don't think it has a good scientific basis.
Like, how can we ignore awareness of self? A dog can experience pain from an infected tooth, but it can't theorize as to why it happened. Sure, there can be evolutionary traits or learned behaviour, but it's not aware of the bigger picture. They are always just "in the moment" and act on internal and external stimuli.
How do you know a dog is only ever "in the moment"? Dogs are quite complex and inteligent animals. What makes you think they're not aware?
Also why are we saying in the moment doesn't count as conciousness. You can argue that being present in the here and now is one of the most concious experiences we can have.
Because being aware of oneself in the past, present and future all at the same time allows us to view and theorise about our impact on ourselves and our surroundings. Animals don't do this, they run on stimuli and instinct and don't stop to theorise whether they are hungry or they got stomach ache.
edit: I wanted to say humans have an internal voice, but not all humans do so while it's a symptom of consciousness, I don't think an internal voice is the cause/reason
The exact kind of information processing is not necessarily relevant to predicting whether something is conscious. And to talk about animals in general while not including humans is extremely vague and misleading. The concept of other animals than humans being completely instinct driven is outdated. That said, there's no reason to link being instinct driven to lacking consciousness.
I'm always a little skeptical of anyone who denies conciousness / sentience to animals. We all do stuff based on stimuli.
Also there are layers to conciousness. If you want to make an argument that a fish doesn't have the same level of higher thought as a human I would agree with you depending on the type of fish, but to assume something operating on a more base level isn't having their own version of a concious experience is arrogant. Just because we don't have perfect empirical evidence does not mean it's not happening; we may need different measuring devices.
Seems like you're talking about metacognition. Not sure that's required for consciousness.
Yes, exactly. I find that that is what distinguishes us from animals. "I am happy because of this cool new toy that I got gifted to me because it's my birthday" versus "I am happy because I'm playing with this toy"
Dogs can be intelligent but that doesn't have to be linked to consciousness or awareness of self. See dolphins and how dogs and other animals react to their reflection.
Also, dogs are domesticated, so they don't just run on pure instinct. Selective breeding for traits is a thing, so wild animals (like bees as described in the article) is what I'm basing it on.
The reflextion test is overestimated. It won't really tell you much about self-awareness with either result.
Insects are a lot different from mammals. The further the organism is from us genetically, the harder it is to estimate anything about the way it experiences the world. It is reasonable to think there is as much diversity as there is in physical traits.