The understanding that even bees have feelings is changing our view of consciousness

Bees seem to have surprisingly complex emotions Shutterstock/Qowi I recently discovered some scientific research that struck me to the core. I have spent many years exploring biology and the interconnectedness of life. Yet here was something that cut through all the knowledge I thought I had acquired: scientists have found that if male fruit flies are deprived of sex with females, they turn to alcohol. I immediately headed to the kitchen – not for a drink, but to watch some fruit flies I had seen earlier around a slice of lime my daughter had failed to clear away. I took my hand lens, carefully snuck close to a Drosophila and peered into its red, mosaicked eye. We might be separated in evolutionary time by some 780 million years, I thought, but we share fundamental similarities. Natural selection has equipped us both with a brain that functions to improve our survival and that of our offspring. Is this why both flies and humans, on occasion, seek to douse flames of sexual rejection with alcohol? Just because flies don’t write poetry about it doesn’t mean they don’t experience a rich inner life. My encounter with the fruit fly in the kitchen led me on a mission to understand the feelings experienced , including insects – to explore from a non-human point of view what it means to be conscious. Only a few decades ago, it was scientific taboo to suggest that even chimpanzees had personalities or feelings. Now, evidence of complex inner worlds in a wide range of non-human animals is mounting. Even “simple” animals make a good case. Fish seem to know themselves. Cuttlefish plan for the future. This is serious stuff, and it is incumbent on us to understand the extent of animal consciousness so that we can treat our fellow organisms with the respect they deserve. But the quest also sheds light on how this most murky and mysterious of attributes evolved, and what it actually means. Bumblebees appear to enjoy rolling balls around even if there is no food reward Richard Rickitt The big question is around what philosophers call phenomenological consciousness: having a subjective view of the world. The aptly named “hard problem” of consciousness is to explain not only why we have feelings at all, but to describe the physical basis of that subjective sense. Examining the lives of non-human animals can help tackle this notoriously difficult problem, says philosopher Tim Bayne at Monash University in Melbourne. “If we assume there is a kind of subjective experience in an animal,” he says, “what might it be like?