Are bees intelligent?

What is the experience of being a bee?

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Are bees intelligent?

#1  Postby kennyc » Jun 17, 2014 12:38 pm

Interesting blog post:

Are bees intelligent?
By Anne Buchanan
The other day, Ken and I had coffee with a couple of philosophers who spend their time thinking about philosophy of the mind. What is consciousness? Do non-human organisms have consciousness? What is intelligence? How do we make decisions? What about ants? These are hard questions to answer, perhaps even unanswerable, but they are fascinating to think about.

Our meeting was occasioned by the recent paper in PNAS about the mental map of bees ("Way-finding in displaced clock-shifted bees proves bees use a cognitive map", Cheeseman et al.). Cognitive maps are mental representations of physical places, which mammals use to navigate their surroundings. Insects clearly have ways to do the same; whether or not they do it with cognitive maps is the question.

The "computational theory of mind" is the predominant theory of how mammals think -- the brain is posited to be an information processing system, and thinking is the brain computing, or processing information (though, whether this is 'truth' or primarily a reflection of the computer age isn't clear, at least to us). In vertebrates some at least of this takes place in the section called the hippocampus, or in non-vertebrates in some neurological homologs. But, what do insects do?

Previous work has shown that captured insects, once released, often fly off in the compass direction in which they were headed when they were caught, even if they were moved during capture and the direction is no longer appropriate. But, they then can correct themselves, and then have no problem locating their hives. That indicates that they've got some kind of an "integrated metric map" of their environment.

Some theories have held that they mark the location of the sun relative to the direction they take and then later calculate 'home' based on a computation of time and the motion of the sun. This by itself would be a lot of sophisticated computing, or thinking....and why not 'intelligence'?

Cheeseman et al. asked whether instead what they are relying on is a series of snapshots of their environment, which enables them to recognize different landmarks, one after the other as they come into view, rather than a completely integrated mental map. They experimented with anesthetizing bees and shifting their sense of time, so that they couldn't rely on the sun to get them home. It took some flying for the bees to recognize that they were off-course, but they always were able to re-orient themselves and get back to the hive.
...


http://ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2014/06/ ... igent.html
Kenny A. Chaffin
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