Задача по теме: "Понимание информации в тексте"

For centuries, scholars such as René Descartes have argued that consciousness is a uniquely human attribute. In this view, animals were regarded as merely cleverly designed robots with a toolkit of pre-programmed behaviours, each triggered by certain environmental stimuli.

Social insects such as bees and ants seemed to confirm this viewpoint. Some scientists acknowledged, though, that a large behavioural repertoire is required for  such insects to construct their elaborate homes and provide their young with adequate nutrition. Nevertheless, until recently, prevailing theories claimed that these animals were just “reflex machines” without internal representation of the world or an ability to foresee even the immediate future. Increasingly, however, scientists are taking note of indications that insects exhibit consciousness-like behaviour. Honeybees, for example, have a symbolic, movement-based language by which they communicate about the precise coordinates of floral food sources or potential nest sites.

Some lines of evidence are from experiments that have been buried for centuries without anyone recognizing their significance for consciousness. For example, more than 200 years ago, the Swiss entomologist François Huber suggested that honeybees might display foresight  in the construction of their honeycomb. To prove his suggestion, Huber placed glass panes into the path of honeybees building a hive. Glass is a suboptimal surface for attaching wax, so the bees took corrective action long before they reached the slippery surface. They shifted the structure’s orientation by 90 degrees to attach the comb to the nearest wooden surface. That means that the bees had anticipated a suboptimal result before it occurred.

Another example is a 2017 study in which some bumblebees were required to transport a small ball to a defined location. Observer bees learned how to solve the task through social demonstration by skilled bees. When later tested on their own, the observer bees chose a ball closer to the designated location. They did this even when the closest ball was coloured black instead of the trained yellow. Rolling a ball is not a behaviour that bees perform in nature, so the observers had no prior experience of rolling the balls. These results indicate that instead of “aping” a learned technique, the bumblebees spontaneously improved on the strategy used by the demonstrators, suggesting they appreciated the outcome of their actions.

One objection to the hypothesis of insect consciousness is that their brains are simply too small. Although a bee brain has only about 1 million nerve cells (compared to approximately 80 billion in a human brain), some individual neurons have a complexity of branching that rivals a fully-grown oak tree. A bee brain may have about 1 billion connections between neural wires that can be shaped by experience. Thus, we can say that insects’ nervous systems are anything but simple.

Another objection is that much of human behaviour depends on subconscious processing. According to this theory, the brain collects and weighs environmental stimuli and data from memory, computes the best option, and makes the behavioural choice for us by initiating an action. One could interpret this as evidence that consciousness has no causal input into behaviour. In this case, the argument that animals need it for living is unavailable or, perhaps, what we need consciousness for is fully automated in them. 

These arguments, however, do not diminish the case for widespread consciousness in the animal kingdom. It is obvious that despite the wonders of unconscious processing, human beings cannot nourish themselves, engage in social lives, or find the way to a new destination without consciousness of the world outside their bodies.

Consciousness is an evolutionary invention — akin to wings or lungs — that is useful to us, and it is most likely useful to other organisms with traits deeply homologous to ours. They share with us the difficulties of remembering, predicting the future, and coping with unforeseen challenges. If the same behavioural and cognitive criteria are applied to much larger-brained vertebrates, then some insects qualify as conscious agents, with no less certainty than dogs or cats. Their experience of the world is not as rich or as detailed as our experience – but it still feels like something to be a bee.

(Adapted from ‘Expanding Consciousnessʼ by Lars Chittka and Catherine Wilson)