The most haunting phrase in the Star Trek Universe is, “You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.” The terror of the Borg—an alien cybernetic collective seeking to assimilate other species into a unified hive mind—is that they rob their victims of their individuality and experience of subjectivity. The Borg, like the demonic “Legion” in the Gospel of Mark, represent a subjugation of the self, where freedom is forcibly taken away and the individual will is subdued to the control of “the Many.”
In contrast to the Borg stands the image of the humble honeybee. While the Borg embody the tyranny of the collective, the beehive has classically represented an economic and social ideal where individuals work together for the good of the whole. As Saint John Chrysostom reflected, “The bee is more honored than other animals, not because she labors, but because she labors for others.”
But is a single bee really an individual agent, or more like a cell within a larger organism? The tension between the individual and the collective is as old as culture and as ancient as multicellularity itself.
If a bee is an individual, does it think for itself? And if so, does it have its own subjective experience?
How does this all relate to humans? Are we, as humans, essentially collectives, too?
The “hard problem” of subjectivity
How do collective entities—such as a body of cells—give rise to the subjective self? Thirty years ago, philosophers and scientists labeled the question of subjective consciousness “the hard problem.” Since then, researchers have learned that this problem is not exclusive to humans, and that other animals—even individual honeybees—may have subjective experience. This raises a number of questions: what is the biological foundation of subjectivity, how does subjectivity give rise to the experience of the individual, and at what point does the individual emerge in evolutionary history? Furthermore, are cognitive processes fundamental to life itself (with subjective experience being a subcategory of such cognition) or are they the emergent properties of complex systems (where subjective experience emerges only in the minds of individuals who have reached a high enough degree of complexity)?
To bee or not to bee
An instructive place to explore the question of conscious subjectivity is the insect mind. While “insect brains may be small, they are not simple,” explains neuroscientist Andrew Barron, a member of the Templeton-funded project Cognition All the Way Up. According to Barron, “Even though the anatomy of the insect brain is very different from that of vertebrates…insects have specialized brain structures that solve the same basic problems.”
For example, says Barron, honeybees “display social structures, communication systems and cognitive abilities that rival those of many mammals.” Honeybees also make lots of decisions, such as choosing the best foraging sites, navigating elaborate artificial mazes, deciding whether or not to trust a particular human, and even avoiding difficult tasks when they lack sufficient information.
Consider how a single foraging honeybee will quickly and accurately choose which flowers to visit. Deciding which flower is most likely to offer nectar is incredibly difficult. To determine the presence and quality of nectar or pollen, she must assess factors such as flower color, shape, odor, and even the structure of the electromagnetic field that a single flower creates. Weighing her observations of different flowers, a bee will make her decision based on many sources of information while refining her choices through trial and error. At the same time, a bee’s foraging decisions involve weighing the potential reward of nectar or pollen from a flower with the amount of effort required to access it and the risk of encountering predators.
“Getting it right,” explains Barron, “demands correctly weighing up subtle cues on flower type, age, and history.” And getting it wrong is “at best a waste of time, and at worst means exposure to a lethal predator hiding in the flowers.”
Even though the brain of a honeybee is made up of only 1 million neurons (while a human brain has more than 80 billion), according to Barron, “She can make decisions faster and more accurately than we can.” A single bee’s “decision-making skills,” exclaims Barron, is “something only seen previously in humans and other primates.” And even though it is just the size of a tiny sesame seed, the bee’s brain “is still far more complex than the current state of artificial intelligence” powered by our most sophisticated supercomputers.
The thinking bee
Barron explains that “decision-making is at the core of cognition,” because decisions are “the result of an evaluation of possible outcomes.” Making a decision, he says, “involves analysis and classification of information, and selection of the most appropriate response, which often incorporates reference to memory of what has been learned previously.” Such decision-making cognition is the stuff that thinking is made of.
Barron thus argues that the fact that honeybees are making decisions means that they are thinking.
But what about preset genetic programming? Couldn’t it be the case that bees operate purely on instinct or simple stimulus-response mechanisms? Barron’s research strongly suggests that bees are not simply acting out genetically predetermined roles but are actively adapting, learning, and making complex decisions based on a combination of internal and external factors. His observations show that bees are not merely responding to environmental stimuli in an inflexible manner (as digger wasps do) but learning and remembering past experiences while combining all of this information into their final decisions.
Contrary to having a genetically fixed behavioral repertoire, “Honeybees and bumblebees are surprisingly good at solving tasks that no bee has ever encountered in its evolutionary history.” For instance, honeybees can count “with a precision that is comparable to much larger-brained animals,” and they can solve novel puzzles—such as pulling on a string that is attached to a flower on the other side of a glass plate in order to pull the flower under the plate.
Unlike insects that are genetically determined, bees also “display emotion-like states,” where their behavior becomes either “optimistic” or “pessimistic” depending on previous experiences. For example, bees under stressful emotion-like states show altered “pessimistic” foraging patterns—approaching flowers more slowly, scanning them carefully before landing—or even experience “false alarms,” aborting their approaches to safe flowers.
Barron and other researchers contend that the choices of individual bees—rather than being purely an expression of an inflexible genetic program—come from brains that are complex enough to sustain decision-making based on memory and learning. Certain neuronal structures in a bee’s brain are similar to those found in the midbrain of vertebrates—a part of the vertebrate brain that is crucially involved in the experience of the “self” as it orients and moves in space. This is also the place where Barron and others believe that the bee’s subjective experience happens.
Bees as selves
Comparing insects with vertebrates, Barron explains that in the vertebrate midbrain, “The channels of information are sufficiently unified such that the system as a whole creates a functional representation of the state of the mobile animal in space as a solution for effective decision making.” Citing research which concludes that this functional representation of the animal in space creates the phenomenon of the subjective self, Barron contends that this is likewise the case in bees: “Processing in the insect brain is unified to a similar degree as that in vertebrates, for similar reasons.”
Thus, says Barron, “We propose that the insect brain can also support a capacity for subjective experience.”
Speaking of both vertebrates and insects, Barron explains that “organisms capable of subjective experience do more than merely react: they have a perspective on the world with a unique phenomenological feel.” For vertebrates and honeybees, he explains, “The neural representation of the environment is both subjective and egocentric.” Barron and his collaborators thus believe that there is an “I” at the center of insect decision-making.
Because the neuronal structures of the midbrain are very ancient—going back to the beginnings of the vertebrate and invertebrate (arthropod) brains in the Cambrian period—Barron explains that “the capacity for subjective experience is both widespread and evolutionarily old.”
Arguing that such conscious subjective experience is genuinely emergent, Barron and his colleagues do not believe that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe (as panpsychism contends). Rather, says Barron, “We think there is a cutoff…Without the right kind of centralized integration and modeling, an organism cannot be conscious.” The capacity for such centralized integration of environmental information and modeling of the subjective self in space emerges for the first time among vertebrates and arthropods (the ancestors of the insects) in the Cambrian. Before this time, subjective experience did not exist.
Are bees assimilated into the collective?
Related to the question of subjective awareness is the phenomenon of biological individuality. Those animals who possess subjectivity would seem to experience themselves as unified individuals, but what is an individual? According to philosopher of biology Pierrick Bourrat, “there is no consensus in the literature regarding how individuality should be conceived.”
For bees, individuality and subjectivity are subsumed into the larger collective of the hive. Individual bees will often act in ways that protect and benefit the entire colony, even to the point of sacrificing their own lives to protect the hive or to sire the next generation. Bees will also make important decisions as a collective. For example, the choice of a new nesting site will typically be made by a swarm of up to 10,000 honeybees working together.
When such group decisions are made, are the individual bees assimilated into a type of Borg-like collective where resistance is futile? Not at all. Rather, “the decision-making process is broadly diffused among all the scout bees in a swarm,” and their final choice is “based on the actions of hundreds of individuals, each one an autonomous agent capable of providing unique information for solving the house-hunting problem.”
As they search independently, widely, and simultaneously, the hundreds of scout bees from a swarm bring back to the group diverse information—knowledge of mediocre, superb, and even lousy sites—which are shared with the other scouts by means of waggle dances. Every discovery of a potential nest site is “freely reported,” and “no scout is stifled.” In this way, “a swarm takes full advantage of its inherently collective nature to assemble rather quickly—often in just a few hours—a profusion of alternatives from which to choose.”
Human brains and bodies as collectives
While we, along with many other animals, experience ourselves as individuals, a closer look through the eyes of science reveals that we are—at the same time—collective entities akin to bee colonies. Philosopher of science Derek Skillings, leading a Templeton-funded project on collective behavior, explains, “Every macroorganism has been shaped in some way by microorganisms,” and “it is now widely accepted that microorganisms play many important roles in the lives of plants and animals.”
“This recognition of the ubiquity and importance of microorganisms,” says Skillings, “has led some to argue for a revolution in how we understand biological individuality.” Not only are we composed of cells in a similar way to how bee colonies are composed of bees, but we are also composed of a myriad of microorganisms that are essential participants in our physical being, which make our biological existence possible. Moreover, human brains and bee colonies adhere to the same general psychophysical laws when making decisions based on varying or conflicting information.
Consequently, Bourrat and his colleagues propose a new account of individuality in which individuals are collectives that summarize the processes occurring among lower-level entities. In a similar way that the behavior of individual bees gives rise to the behavior of the collective hive, the multicellular animal collective emerges as a summary of the actions and processes of its cells and microbiome.
From bees to the emergence of “me”
Biological individuals with agency did not always exist. But where did they come from? The answer, says Bourrat, has to do with the hierarchical nature of physical reality and life. All life is organized into a nested system in which each new level builds upon the one below it. Biomolecules form genes, genes form chromosomes, chromosomes form cells, cells form multicellular organisms, and multicellular organisms form social groups. Lower-level units are integrated into a higher-level entity, and properties appear that were not present in the simpler forms. These events during the history of life, where entities at one level of organization (such as genes, cells, or organisms) become embedded in a higher-level entity or collective (such as chromosomes, multicellular organisms, or eusocial organizations), are known as evolutionary transitions in individuality.
When these transitions take place, lower-level units no longer replicate independently and become reliant on each other for survival and reproduction. Such reliance allows the emergent higher-level unit to function as a cohesive whole and reduces intra-group conflict at the lower level. The consequence is that the new higher-level entity (or collective) may be considered a new “individual” which can be acted upon by natural selection. “These newly formed entities,” says Bourrat, acquire “features that make them behave as cohesive wholes.”
Even though we live in “the Age of the Individual” where individual rights and freedoms are the cornerstone of our Western ways, a closer look through the eyes of science reveals that our bodies and our brains are more akin to the hives of bees—collective entities composed of smaller entities whose combined coordinated actions and activities give rise to the whole that we call “me.”
Dr. Joshua M. Moritz teaches astronomy, biology, and physics at the St. John Chrysostom Academy in Bethlehem, PA. He has authored numerous books and articles, including Science and Religion: Beyond Warfare and Toward Understanding and The Role of Theology in the History and Philosophy of Science.
