What Can Bees Teach Us About Risk?
When we think about the forces and energies of life, we see how all animals make decisions for preservation, sustaining life (allostasis) and creating equilibrium in risk (homeostasis).
In enactive thinking we see that all movement indicates decision. From Nielsen (2023) Embodied, Embedded, and Enactive Psychopathology, Reimaging Mental Disorder. Page 62.
For example, Bacteria have a tendency to move towards concentrations of sugar (their food source) and away from certain substances that are toxic to them, a process referred to as chemotaxis. This is achieved through a well-understood mechanism by which the motions of their flagella are responsive to the concentrations of sugar and some toxic subtances (Wadhams & Armitage, 2004). Enactivism highlights that, parallel to its mechanistic nature, this is an evaluative process; one by which the bacterium is acting in the interest of its own survival. The claim here is not that simple bacteria are conscious in any way that we would recognize, but that sugar has an embodied meaning for the bacterium as ‘good/food’ and that there is therefore a simple mindedness/concern at play whereby the organism is responsive to the conditions required for its own survival. For the enactivist, this models a dynamic present in, and perhaps definitional of, all life—highlighting that mind is in life (Thompson, 2007).
In SPoR, we understand these ‘drives’, ‘energies’, ‘dispositions’ and ‘orientations’ as decision making. In enactive thinking we understand that all life by mind-body-environment enact into being.
Recently, I saw a great video on the way bees learn and this reminded me of how learning is transferred through bodies through resonances, affordances and embodied memory. You can see the 8 minute video here:
What is remarkable about the bee is how they know what to do through communication that is embodied. Everything from the wiggle of a tail, to communication of danger and cooling down a hive, is signalled semiotically.
In many ways, the way humans automatically gesture is little different (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3308338/). Indeed, most people are not conscious of their gestures even though they are a profound way of communicating with the body.
In SPoR, we would call such automaticity, the functioning of Mind 3. You can read more about the meaning and automaticity of human gestures here: Bodytalk (https://archive.org/details/bodytalkmeaningo00morr). Indeed, so much of what we feel and communicate emotionally is embodied not verbal (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221622054_Recognising_Human_Emotions_from_Body_Movement_and_Gesture_Dynamics). Similarly, it is important to note that such communication is not directed by the brain. It is enacted through muscle memory, sound and embodied feeling. This is how humans mostly respond in ‘flight or flight mode’. In times where automaticity is required, there is simply no time for slow, rational, brain-directed thinking.
We work through this in SPoR through the 1B3M concept.
Gestures are learned like all affordances and are learned in an embodied way. For example, we learn as a child at 3 months what no means by shaking the head side to side, we learn at the same age to point for what we want, to push away what we don’t want and to nod for yes. It will be another 12 months before a child can verbalise such expressions and then another 4 years before a child can write those gestures in text.
Bees learn gestures in a similar way. Which is why, the video suggest that bees learn like humans. This also has huge implications about the assertions that AI ‘learns’, which it does not. AI will never have an ecological/biological body or nervous systems and so, cannot learn.
If bees learn in an enactive way as do humans, then decision making should be understood as embodied, embedded and inter-affected by the environment as well as by ‘mind as life’.
When we move away from the narrow-minded way of understanding thinking as brain-directed, to a holistic understanding, then we can tackle risk in a far more holistic way that better addresses why people do what they do.
Prof. Robert Long
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