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I am not qualified to discuss whether his arguments about the bee industry and bee suffering are correct, but his comments on whether bees are conscious is far more interesting to me, and worth discussing.
It certainly may seem the entire ethical question depends primarily on this former question, the suffering of any animal seems it only matters to us if there is something it is like to be them, otherwise, we tend to think, causing a bee suffering is no different to kicking a table leg, although we may get to whether this distinction helps.
Some think all life down to bacteria is conscious, some think any organism with affective states or certain kinds of abstract thought or memory is conscious, some that consciousness is a global workspace that results from the possession of higher cortical functions.
...that strongly evoke the idea of affective and thus inferred feeling states as signaling consciousness, perhaps naturally since the argument is an ethical one.
There is some recourse to things like problem solving, but the weight seems to rest on the appeal to feeling:
To some neuroscientists, yes. There is certainly a strand within neuroscience that believes affect is key to consciousness, Jaak Panksepp for example showed that a basic set of feelings are vital to conscious experience, although he focused these largely on the mammalian brain.
Mark Solms, a neuroscientist known for the discovery of the parts of the brain responsible for dreaming, has taken Panksepp's work further, arguing that consciousness simply is affect, and is rooted in the systems emerging primarily from the brain stem.
Solms argues that feelings are conscious by definition, something many appeals to the idea that animals of any kind are conscious rely on.
It's hard for us to conceive of a bee being afraid and it not be conscious because it seems that any feeling-word must also be a consciousness word.
The question then depends on whether affective states may simply be behavioral states we mistake as affective states or whether they are conscious states all the way down by some kind of arbitrary definition.
Affect has a behavioral role but it also has a role in terms of provoking higher conscious responses, and most studies in bees that attempt to demonstrate affective states involve very general assessments of behavior, for example BB mentions "pessimism" responses to stress, and studies have shown bees are behaviorally less investigatively confident after being exposed to stress such as shaking, more so if exposed to a sugary treat:
But whether these studies combined with the comparatively simple neural structures they possess are enough to argue that said stress or reward is a state of affect I personally think is questionable, if they do it would be extremely primitive (if 'primitive' consciousness is even conceivable) and using words like "afraid" that clearly evoke our own complex human emotional conscious states is in danger of smuggling anthropomorphism in the back door of the argument.
Instead all we can say is that there may be slightly behavioral changes that may indicate degrees of 'affective' state such as stress or foraging.
Given that plants also show behavioral responses to states such as drought or low nutrition (for example mechanical stress induces response-changes in respiration in cabbages), it's hard to argue that means consciousness by itself.
Even so, this still rests on the idea that consciousness and affect are the same thing, which I find questionable for many reasons.
We are conscious of more than just feelings, consciousness as we experience it (to me) seems to be nearer to the global workspace conception of consciousness as a function and there have been studies that suggest cortical connectivity is the best way of tracking conscious recovery in coma patients.
Stephen Buchmann, for example, an ecologist who specializes in bees argues that,
Again, I might question what a "primitive form of consciousness" actually means, it seems obviously defined but it's less than clear what it's actually talking about; nonetheless, bees certainly are incredible,
They may well map and remember the world, and some scientists have argued they have some kind of bodily self awareness.
One problem is that right now theories of consciousness are not competing about showing the causal sites or features of consciousness and its contents that we can then compare with animals as much as they are competing over the question about what consciousness actually is.
Theories like,
... these are ideas that compete over a definition of what consciousness fundamentally is, be it attention, affect, information density or whatever else.
Showing some things bees can do that might make us realize they are more than randomly buzzing around doesn't mean anything unless you are clear about what consciousness is and what it is doing, and most theories about consciousness depend not on you convincing anyone that brains or animals do things, but that one particular part of that doing is what consciousness is.
This seems lacking in any of these claims about bee consciousness, they just offer some impressive facts about bees but are light on specificity.
Access consciousness means you are capable of drawing cognitively upon actual conscious experience which implies by extension the ability to be aware that you are aware:
The question I would ask is,
We know you can have simply phenomenal consciousness since we can drift through our day without attending to consciousness itself, you can also dream in such a way that it seems like a movie-reel playing that you only become aware of when you wake up.
But the question is,
I personally lean towards no...
We feel affect consciously precisely because it makes us aware of something which then produces a conscious response in a mental workspace.
Perhaps pain for example could simply in an animal such as a bee go,
...but then what is the point in the middle stage,
Our experience is more like,
If we take this latter branch as synonymous with conscious experience, we would then limit conscious experience to us and animals that show smaller signs of cognition and self awareness.
Bees can seemingly remember things or solve problems but they are not "thinking" about those problems, the solution has to be described as behavioral rather than mental.
I personally favor a more metaconscious leaning definition of what consciousness is functionally rather than identifying it per say with affect, and I personally think advocates of bee consciousness are playing with a definition of consciousness that is functionally undefinable.
Bees may make decisions using memory, but it's hard to say that that justifies the claim that within them is a decision maker who remembers, the latter seems to require a much more developed brain.
But as with much of the discussion around consciousness, the case is both open in terms of the science we don't yet know, and also will forever be open since we are talking about something we can't prove one way or the other.
I am open to being wrong (you can tell me why I am), and perhaps some level of affective consciousness goes all the way down to bacteria, perhaps it is a fundamental constituent of all life.
I also think we still have some responsibility to other complex life whether we can know it is conscious or not, and our treatment of animals shouldn't exactly rest on the degrees to which we can project our own consciousness onto theirs.
I happen to think we should care more about trees, plants, the sea, the air, all the clichés we would bundle in the world 'nature' than we do in an increasingly detached world, not for reasons of a kind of Greta Thunberg style environmentalism that rails indiscriminately against progress, but for reasons of value.
Industrialized farming is the result of an attitude to the world rooted in agricultural hierarchy and control, which at its worst becomes indifference to the interconnectedness of everything.
Bees are declining, and large amounts of our food depend on their pollination, and self-aware or not, bees are also fascinating, complex and incredible creatures.
There are more reasons to realize our treatment of the natural world and the bees in it is damaging and harmful than needing to depend on the extent to which they are conscious or not, because who knows, perhaps everything is.
If we assume that bees aren't conscious, that may assume we are making the claim that they are not subjects but objects, akin to a rock or a baseball bat.
This also assumes that in an evolutionary sequence there is a point where the lights come on and a brain that in previous evolutionary stages wasn't conscious is.
A naturalist or materialist must assume this either way, however far back you push it.
Indeed they must assume that when we scan a brain we are looking at something conscious, an object that is a subject, while something adjacent to it is not, and at some point the physical objects around became an... experience.
Increasingly I find this description to be nonsensical, and the question of how or when consciousness 'arises' out of a functional system seems to be a question that simply defies logical sense, we are just asking a bad question.
Here I think any scientific or to some extent even philosophical argument runs aground of what words can really express, and arguments about global workspaces or qualia embeddings become all but useless.
Consciousness bridges the scientific to what we might meekly call the 'spiritual' and as such it is easy to confuse categories or suggest we can answer questions in one arena using language from another when we simply can't.
On a level of science and to some extent philosophy, I'm not entirely convinced we can say that bees 'have' consciousness, in another arena I am convinced that they exist like us in that which we live and move and have our being.
Square those things however you like...
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