Do bees have feelings? What would that mean? And if they do have feelings, how should we treat them?

Do we have a moral obligation toward insects?

Honeybees “exhibit pessimism” according to a recent study published in Current Biology, and summarized in Wired Science. The Wired headline, “Honeybees might have emotions”, these choice clippings, “You can’t be pessimistic if you don’t have an inner life” and, “invertebrates like bees aren’t typically thought of as having human-like emotions” all imply, of course, that these invertebrates have been shown to have them.

Inner life? Human-like emotions?

From an ethics standpoint, questions like these make a big difference. As Sam Harris has recently argued, morality is all about the well-being of conscious creatures—that is, creatures with inner life, felt emotions, or “qualia” to use the philosophers’ term. Humans are a paradigm example of qualia-possessing beings, and most of us would agree that there are certain ways we should (and shouldn’t) treat each other, based primarily on the principle that it’s bad to cause unnecessary suffering. Why is it bad? Because suffering hurts—it feels bad, subjectively—and it would be supremely selfish for any of us to avoid suffering only for ourselves.

Why shouldn’t we be selfish, you ask? Good question, but not right now, Johnny.

Ethicists like Peter Singer have done a lot of work to get us thinking about the suffering of non-human animals, and have urged that we have a moral responsibility not to harm them. That is, we have a responsibility to extend the “do no harm” principle beyond the realm of homo sapiens. This feels intuitively right when it comes to the family dog or cat; and it’s certainly no surprise that many vegetarians come from the ranks of former meat-eaters who read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Cleary other animals feel pain, and we shouldn’t inflict it on them willy-nilly. Maybe we shouldn’t inflict it at all.

But bees? Those stinging little buggers from the garden? Who cares?

Well, let’s not raise the morality alarm just yet. First we should take a more detailed look at the bee experiment, due to Melissa Bateson and Jeri Wright from Newcastle University, to see what it actually involved, and what it can reasonably be taken to show.

Here’s what they did. The researchers trained a handful of worker bees—strapped in little tiny bee-harnesses, by the way—to associate a certain distinctive odour (call it odour A) with a reward, namely a lick of sugar. In addition, they trained those same bees to associate a certain different odor (call it odor B) with punishment: a lick of quinine, which tastes bitter and unpleasant. Spray the odor, give the sugar or quinine, rinse and repeat. It’s “Pavlov’s Dog” for bees. The actual behavior they looked at—to measure the “association”—was the extension or retraction of mouthparts. Pushing mouthparts outward showed the bee was reaching for an anticipated reward; pulling mouthparts inward meant it was avoiding anticipated punishment.

After this training session, the researchers took half of the bees and shook them for 60 seconds (leaving the other half alone) and then exposed both groups to some odours that were gradient between odour A and odour B.

Shaking is stressful for bees, as it can signal an attack by a predator.

They found that the all-shook-up bees were more likely to associate the in-between odours with punishment compared to reward. That is, they were more likely to retract their mouthparts when faced with the ambiguous smells than they were to extend them.

This pattern of behaviour can pretty fairly be called a bias, and the agitated bees clearly exhibited it, when compared to their undisturbed counterparts, to a statistically significant degree.

That’s a pretty interesting finding, and it tells us something about how bees respond to ambiguous stimuli after they’ve been rattled around a bit. Maybe it’s an evolved survival strategy with a logic something like this: When you’re in a dangerous or stressful situation, it’s best to play it safe when it comes to (possible) poison. OK—so far so good.

But what is all this talk about human-like emotions and inner life? Are we supposed to bee-lieve (sorry) that the jangled-up insects subjectively felt pessimistic—or maybe even depressed? Are bees “conscious” in the way that humans are?

Not necessarily. I think there’s some confusion going on about the word “emotion” – and I’ll explain what this confusion is in just a moment. First, though, let’s take a closer look at the scientists’ argument, in particular their reasons for suggesting that bees may have emotions.

Step one: Human beings sometimes show “pessimistic” cognitive biases, as when a depressed person sees a frown in a neutral expression.

Step two: We know that these cognitive biases correlate with certain felt emotions in humans—like the sad feeling that comes with depression—as well as with certain chemical and physiological signals that can be measured objectively.

Step three: Human beings have a really handy self-report tool—language—which they can use to tell other human beings about their internal states. In addition, each of us knows, from our own experience, what it feels like to be in a state like sadness, and we assume that others feel that way when they tell us, “I’m feeling blue.” Other animals, and insects like bees, don’t have this nice language tool, so we’re stuck using the “objective” measures only when trying to decide what’s going on inside their heads.

Step four: Other animals, and now insects like bees, have been shown to exhibit the following things: (1) pessimistic cognitive biases (as shown through their behavior), and (2) some of the chemical and physiological signals that correlate with felt, subjective emotions (like sadness) in humans. (I didn’t tell you about this part, but the researchers took a separate group of bees, shook them up, and extracted chemical samples to prove the point.)

Step five: Given that the bees show the very same type of behavior (as well as the same chemical markers) that humans show when they experience certain emotions, shouldn’t we suppose that bees experience those emotions, too?

What do you think?

I’m not totally convinced. Here’s where I’ll tease out the confusion about the word “emotion” because it will help me explain why not. “Emotion” can refer to any number of things, but there are at least a couple of major senses of the term as it applies to human beings. On the one hand, “emotion” can refer to certain brain processes and physiological states of arousal that are triggered by stimuli and which guide behavior—a sort of “brain-level” or unconscious sense of emotion, and the sort we can measure “objectively” in ourselves and other animals. On the other hand, it can refer to that first-personal, private, subjective, self-reportable feeling people have when their brains and bodies are going through those processes and states.

It should be pretty easy to believe that bees have emotions of the first kind. But to call those emotions “human-like” assumes that the first sense always goes together with the second sense, as it seems to do in humans. But why should we think it does?

To be fair to the scientists, they were careful to address this point in the original Current Biology article:

“Although our results do not allow us to make any claims about the presence of negative subjective feelings in honeybees, they call into question how we identify emotions in any nonhuman animal.”

So what does all of this mean for morality? In the case of humans, we think it’s wrong to cause needless pain, in large part because we know, from our own, first-person experience, what it’s like to feel pain. And we sense that there is something unfair about wishing that felt experience on someone else—specifically someone else capable of subjectively having those very same sort of feelings. It’s not that we want to avoid triggering certain brain states in our fellow humans; we want to avoid triggering the way those brain states feel to them.

To extend this reasoning to bees, then, we’ll have to make up our minds about the relationship between objective “brain states” and subjective, felt experience in the case of other animals and insects. I haven’t made up my mind yet—at least when it comes to bees. Have you?

Originally published at Practical Ethics:  http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2011/06/what-is-it-like-to-be-a-bee/

A semi-autobiographical black comedy of academic life, abusive friendship, and rising damp, Lars Iyer’s debut novel Spurious came out earlier this year, to critical praise – including in these pages. Distracting Iyer from his day-job as a philosophy lecturer at Newcastle University, and from writing the follow-up, Dogma, we asked him some questions:

 One of the striking things about Spurious to me is the lack of superfluous detail (and characters!). It makes Lars’ life seem very thin. Is that how your memory works, or just how your writing works?

I think Spurious is largely made up of superfluous detail! The conversations between W. and Lars are, to me, examples of pure superfluity, pure excess. In one sense, Lars may seem to be a thin character: we hear little about the main events of his life. But we hear a great deal of the banter and conversational back and forth that constitutes Lars’s friendship with W. and that takes place in the dead time of their travels.

Much of the life of our friendships depends on enduring dead time together. This is why our memories of friendships at school are so vivid. All those boring lessons! All those transitional moments between class or during lunchbreaks. The long summer holidays, in which time seemed to stretch out endlessly… What we had in common was passing time together, when we had nothing in particular to do.

The big events of our life – bereavements and divorce, romance and career changes – take place against a background of apparently non-eventful banter and chat. But this apparent non-eventfulness can be extremely inventive. Forced to pass the time together, you come up with all kinds of nonsense, it is true; but some of it has real comic value.

I want to remember the kind of relationship, the kind of friendship, that seems to exceed and even precede any particular characteristic or contribution of those involved. In such friendship, your life alone is not of great interest; it is rather what happens when you are together as friends that is worth remembering. As such, the Lars of Spurious is not so much a thin character as one term of a relationship which is the real subject of the novel. It is the relationship, the friendship, which is, as it were, thick.

 How much has the success (does it feel successful to you?) of the book changed your life, and will that appear in the sequel? Will Lars have written this book? What will W think? What does the real version of W think of Spurious? Have many of your other colleagues read it? Your students?

To have a novel published at all is a success. If it is not self-published, it means your work has been positively valued by an independent authority. Am I mad to think what I’m doing is worthwhile?, you say to yourself as you submit your novel. You are not mad, says the publisher who puts it out. And now you are a novelist; you can call yourself that without shame. You’re a legitimate part of what William Burroughs called ‘the Shakespeare squadron’, even if you’re its most humble foot-soldier. That, I think, changes your life.

But the publication of Spurious, as well as its positive reception, is not something I intend to become part of the fictional world of the W. and I trilogy. Harvey Pekar, in the originalAmerican Splendour comics, is wonderful on the effects their publication had on his life. But even if my novel is, as I said elsewhere, ‘an autobiography written as it’s happening’ – a phrase I borrowed from Pekar – it is only a partial one. Lars, the character, will not have written Spurious in the sequels.

What does the real W. think of the novel? I think he is amused, which he always was by the posts on the blog. As for colleagues and students, I don’t know of anyone who’s read it. Academics tend not to read each others’ work; students have other things to do with their time. 

 What direction is your academic work going in? Is it influenced by writing the book much? Kafka, Cioran, Rosenzweig, Cohen – do these figure as much in the academic work as they do in the book?

My academic work, such as it is, continues in the same direction it always has. I specialise in the thought of various figures within so-called continental philosophy, writing and publishing on the thought of Maurice Blanchot in particular. As a lecturer, I have always taught a wide variety of things. But Cioran, Rosenzweig, Cohen and other figures are not thinkers on whose work I have published or taught, and Kafka I have approached only indirectly, in writing about Blanchot.

What these figures have in common is that they are totemic; their names convey the ambience of a vanished world, in which philosophy, writing, formed a much greater cultural role. It was a world of disaffected writer-heroes, flouting conventions of taste and resisting the temptations of the market – a world of intransigence and opposition in which intellectuals like Kafka and Rosenzweig mattered. Spurious laughs blackly at how removed such figures seem from our world.

Literature has a kind of prestige today, it is true, but it is a fading one. The big books of our day are a kind of kitsch, and the pose of authors – serious authors – is laughable. The game’s up! The party’s over! Literature is like an ox-bow lake silting up in the sun. The river of culture has meandered elsewhere. But that’s not to say that there may not be another kind of writing, a post-literature literature, full of black laughter and a sense of its own posthumousness …

I would not say the same of philosophy. Its case is more complex. On the one hand, the discipline has become specialized over the last few decades, retreating to the academy. On the other, many philosophers – most notably, of the ‘continental’ tradition – have become extremely influential, such that any humanities student is likely to come into contact with their ideas. With the vast expansion of higher education in the UK, the ideas in question have been distributed very widely. 

 Was writing the novel a good way of doing philosophy – or is it something totally different? What’s the use of novels – and what’s the use of works of philosophy?

I don’t regard writing the novel as a way of doing philosophy at all. Spurious only toys with certain philosophical ideas. As with the blog on which the novel was based, it was a relief to depart from the norms of academic writing. As with the blog, I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing, pushing myself, as it were, from the riverbank of academic security without knowing if any channel might catch me.

The use of novels? I rather like what Ferdinand says in Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou: ‘I’ve found an idea for a novel. No longer to write about people’s lives … but only about life, life itself. What goes on between people, in space … like sound and colours. That would be something worthwhile. Joyce tried, but one must be able, ought to be able, to do better.’

Life itself, as Ferdinand sums it up, I think of as the inconsequential, the incidental, as the froth of popping bubbles left by waves on a beach. I think of friendships again – of the play of conversation, of banter. I think of the dead time in which friends say nothing in particular. I think of fruitless journeys and failed encounters. I think of every kind of disappointment.

The novel is elastic enough a form to let such ‘sound and colours’ speak. To remember ‘what goes on between people’. And it is, by virtue of its length, its open-endedness, peculiarly suited for doing so.

I should add that Spurious and its sequels have a valedictory feel. W. and Lars live in a world threatened by financial and climatic collapse, and utterly indifferent to the ideas that are precious to them. Their comic exchanges take place within a context that cannot even be called tragic; it’s beyond that. These are the end of times, the last days… The use of the novel might be to bear witness to ‘life, life itself’, as it approaches the condition of its end.

What is the use of philosophy? Magicians distract our attention by indirection, to accomplish their tricks. Capitalism does the same, as does our liberal democracy. Philosophy should redirect our attention and show us the trick, recalling us to what matters most.

The release of Within and Without is significant in that it is one of only a handful of albums of the chillwave genre to be released on a major indie label (Sub Pop) and not sold via artist-to-fan websites such as Bandcamp or as a limited pressing. Within and Without sees Ernest Greene (creator of Washed Out) emerging from his bedroom, leaving behind the DIY ethos of EPs Life of Leisure and High Times, both released in 2009, and moving to a more orchestral and cinematic scale of sound whilst still retaining the synths and simple lyrical repetitions which are characteristic of chillwave. The result is a cohesive album which soars richly from moments of extreme simplicity like the title track, which features only a vocal line and a beat, to moments of thickly layered instrumentation such as on the album’s opener ‘Eyes Be Closed’, which builds up a soundscape based upon its overlaid synth lines.

The potential problem with the chillwave genre is that it can often drift by the listener without making a lasting impact. It is very easy for the gently lilting music and reverberating lyrics to fall into the pit that is background music. Happily, however, Within and Without mostly avoids this fate by virtue of its melodic strength and non-indulgent song length (only a couple straying over the five minute mark), revealing instead its pop foundations that sustain the listener’s interest throughout. The best moments occur on songs such as ‘Amor Fati’ and ‘You and I’, where Greene’s lyrics break through the haze of synths and assert themselves and their melody at the forefront of the track. Moments like these are fleeting in the album and, whilst Within and Without is a step forward for Greene, it is more of a stepping-stone than a final destination.

I must confess: I had planned on politely refusing to write this review. I saw The Tree of Life two days ago and left the cinema electrocuted, carrying away an array of contradictory reactions, thinking I had finally discovered the unreviewable film. I still think that is probably the case, but I’ve decided to try to say something worthwhile anyway. The reason? With every passing hour, this out of this world, visionary piece of cinema is growing and growing on me. It touches a nerve, and it would be a sin not to try to explain why.

A second confession: I very nearly walked out. About half an hour into the film, by which stage it has already done its best to liberate us from convention through a minimal use of dialogue, countless shots of nature, and the introduction of an unexplained but pivotal event, it takes an even more daring turn. What follows is what must have been at least 20 minutes of prehistoric visuals, whereby director Terrence Malick dishes out carefully crafted footage taking us from the Big Bang to the dinosaurs. It plays out like a very special and serene episode of Planet Earth in slow motion, filmed by a true artist, and with the help of a masterful touch of music it becomes the most oddly moving of experiences. It’s the vision of Kubrick’s 2001 with the beauty barometer at bursting point.

Yet I nevertheless nearly left at this point, because at the time, when the sequence begins, it’s like you’ve been dropped into a Black Hole, completely lost and spinning in this void of seemingly random sounds and images, however stunning they are. And having experimented with Palme d’Or pretentiousness last year with the utterly stupid Uncle Boonmee, it was a significant struggle to let myself be taken in. I didn’t know if I could hack another 2 hours of indecipherable art house claptrap, which is exactly the scent The Tree of Life seemed to be giving off.

To get out of this attitude, and to see the film properly (and if you can do this in advance rather than during your first viewing, as I had to, you’ll be the better for it), the best preparation available is to watch that extremely intriguing trailer a few times, and to realise just how representative of the film it turns out to be. This is no ordinary storytelling. It’s more like a sprawling, effortlessly smooth and calm series of scenes, and you can only appreciate the greatness of it once you understand this is how the whole film is going to be, and when you accept it isn’t going to live up to the term ‘film’ in any sense. The style of the project is so indescribably unique and eventually moving that it creates a new category of art. For this to be shown in rooms next door to the likes of Bridesmaids up and down the country is hilariously absurd.

The film’s metaphysics, and subsequent imagery, is deeply Christian and pantheist. The early sequence I mentioned may be loaded with acceptance of science, but the startlingly normal family we end up focusing on for the rest of the film makes clear Malick’s religious roots, paving the way for a finale as spiritual and aesthetically profound as I can recall. Sean Penn barely says a word in his fifteen minutes of screen time, and it speaks volumes that this most established of actors is willing to play such a minor role in Malick’s masterpiece. He just walks around wearing that characteristically deep-looking expression, complimenting, and often constituting, the stunning visuals.

I need to see this again, and probably a few more times after that too. You need to see it for the first time, and then join me in multiple repeat screenings. For to try to evaluate the extent of this film’s genius after one viewing would be hugely disrespectful to its ambitions. It really is, quite simply, something else.

A recurring image in Haegue Yang’s first major UK show is the strangely humanlike figure of a clothes-horse: with protruding ‘arms’ outstretched, it crops up as contorting, childlike, and even maternal. Yet it would be misleading to view Yang’s work merely as an attempt to vivify her materials. The knitted coverings worn by various tin cans in Can Cosies may hint at the foods they contain, just as the objects hung off yet more clotheshorses in Non-Indépliables suggest differing personalities. But focusing on these superficial features masks Yang’s more complex efforts to make her sculptures seem both knowable and unfamiliar.

The sculptures exhibited in ‘Teacher of Dance’ often work best when approached obliquely, treating them as part of the fabric of the building itself. Suddenly, initially inscrutable works come to life – Manteuffelstrasse 112 benefits particularly, a series of lightbulb-filled boxes covered by Venetian blinds (both recurrent materials). Modelled on the radiators in Yang’s Berlin apartment, these prove largely unremarkable when considered individually. Yet when seen out of the corner of the eye (just where ‘real’ radiators would be expected), their bounded play of light, shade, lines and shapes combine, blooming satisfyingly on the wall. A newly commissioned Venetian-blind installation for the Piper Gallery is similarly transformed against the gallery skylight, changing from stark and unwieldy to an enveloping, even graceful object when viewed on the move from directly below.

If the show’s ‘white box’ environment feels a less fertile setting for Yang’s work than the site-specific environments she has used previously, her film Doubles and Halves goes some way towards redressing this. Shot mainly in the run-down Seoul suburb of Ahyun-Dong, the film is accompanied by a repeated monologue meditating abstractedly on the lives of its inhabitants. Given the unoriginal premise and uninflected, observational tone, Yang distinguishes herself in varying the film’s imagery just enough to ensure it remains compelling. A number of the objects Yang dwells on elsewhere – lightbulbs, structures covered in incongruous sheeting – are also prominent here, and afterwards it’s hard not to picture Ahyun-Dong’s seemingly depopulated buildings when examining Yang’s Venetian blinds. The result is that the film almost becomes an internalised backdrop to the rest of the show, operating, like its own monologue, as a set of preoccupations cumulatively playing off the images at hand.

The importance of movement – across the gallery or, shot by shot, across Ahyun-Dong – to achieving a transient moment of illumination (a pregnant term given Yang’s liking of lightbulbs) in turn reflects the ideas of the Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, the ‘teacher of dance’ of the show’s title. This is perhaps encountered most explicitly in the companion pieces to the Piper Gallery installation. Also employing Venetian blinds, these can be entered into and wheeled around, forming an unexpectedly light and mobile exoskeleton on the edge of vision. Standing beside the structures the effect is a hostile one, the blinds suggesting windows looking neither inside nor out. Yet within the structures this paradox is overcome, imbuing a feeling of resolution.

Such resolution is, however, hard to come by across the show as a whole: overall, Yang’s concerns are abstract ones which remain difficult to bring out in sculpture and engender variable results. Her visions of Ahyun-Dong in turn cast a long shadow, perhaps as the film’s (albeit elusive) internal logic is still starkly presented. Yet it’s also refreshing that Yang avoids overtheorising, preferring her sculptures to shoulder the burden of communication despite their economy. Take the time, and it’s possible to be won over by her quiet, unhurried and understated approach in addressing difficult and unusual concerns.

‘Teacher of Dance’ is showing at Modern Art Oxford until 4th September

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Brandenburg Gate.

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Holocaust Museum: Concrete Temple Mount.

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Inquisitive. 

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Rejuvenation.

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Into the distance: Gleis 17, Grunevald, where 50,000 Jews were herded onto trains to begin their journey to Auschwitz and Theresienstadt during WWII.  

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Blanked Wall. 

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Meditation. 

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Trainers. 

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Skateboarding in East Berlin. 

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Bubbles. 

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Bursting. 

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Wet shock. 

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Stalker. 

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Love or lust?

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Rudeboy and the Romantics. 

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Ew!

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Love and pretzels.