Sure thing! I think quite a few living beings have consciousness actually :D

The thing is we humans, in our maturation from babies to adulthood, go through a gradual process of mental development where our consciousness seems to progress in little steps from that of lower levels as toddlers to higher levels as adults. Consciousness is not all-or-nothing. It seems to progress along a continuum and that makes it possible that bees and and flies could be conscious.

It could also be that there's a minimum number of neurons you need for consciousness to become manifest.

Our problem is that we want to make our definitions so that they can be defined either that something belongs to the group or not. Either you are conscious / have consciousness or you aren't / don't have it. Everything has to be so clear and measurable, with the ultimate goal being to give the "proof" why this has "x" (be it conscious or anything else) or doesn't have "x". Such logic has obvious problems with something like consciousness.

I think this is the logical error we are making here with consciousness, because for me it's quite obvious that a smart animal can have some levels of consciousness while humans are more conscious. And likely the reason is the ability to learn things. It's not a question of either being conscious or not. Are your either smart or an idiot? Not much use to put humans / animals / whatever to groups either a) smart or b) idiots.

Here and at PF there have been quite a few discussions about consciousness in computers. — Bitter Crank

Regarding consciousness, we do have some definitional problems, so we'd have to explain what we mean. If I swat a bee and it lies there stunned on the ground not moving but then it gets up and flies away, I think it'd be accurate to say that it lost consciousness momentarily but then regained it. It was less than dead, but not quite the same bee we all previously knew and loved when it was lying there, so I think it's correct to describe it in terms of its consciousness.

The sort of consciousness I find interesting which causes serious current limitations in AI is the idea of conceptual awareness. It's clear that computers don't know "about" things or conceptualize them in their CPUs. I'd say the same of bees, I guess, although I've never been a bee, so it's hard to know.

Bees don't 'conceptualize'. They don't think about the problems of beeing. The kind of consciousness they have is probably what you described: when stunned (or chilled, perhaps) they are not 'conscious'--not aware of anything. When they recover their normal condition, they become minimally aware of their activity and maybe their limited goals.

Scout bees fly around looking for flowers. When they come across flowers they fly back to the hive and transmit the distance, direction, and maybe something about the kind-of-flower they found. In order to do that they have to at least sustain a purpose on their own, and once fulfilled, remember the location, distance, direction, and type long enough to get back to the hive and report. That requires a comparatively small amount of consciousness--but it is vastly more than a hunk of fractured concrete has.

Whether the latest chip from Intel has enough complexity to register to itself that it is up and running, I don't know. Does an Intel chip "feel" a surge or lag in the power supply? Don't know. Bees had a long time to develop whatever consciousness it has; An Intel chip has been through maybe a decade or two of development; there are always more transistors per chip and faster operation speeds. I don't think Intel is spending a lot of money on trying to make it's chips conscious of being a part of a computer doing nothing better than visiting philosophy sites.

Some animals apparently have more complex circuitry than human brains possess. Bees aren't big enough to carry a big brain, so they developed denser, more complex circuitry than we have. I'm totally out on a limb here, but my guess is that smart birds like parrots and crows maybe have more complex circuitry than we do as well, since their brains are quite small -- especially for what some of them are able to do. We are big enough to afford the Intel approach -- just keep adding more neurons to keep up with demand.

We seem to be binaries -- smart at times, and idiots at other times.

Considering honeybees have been seen as acting as if they had optimism and pessimism biases, we can at least apply a kind of behaviorist model of mind to them.

Regarding definitions of consciousness, looking in a dictionary and deciding which one you want to talk about might be a good way to avoid simple misunderstandings.

All computers are stupid as a post.

They do exactly what you tell them to.

HAL 9000: "Dr. Chandra, will I dream?"
Dr. Chandra: "I don't know HAL."

We seem to be binaries -- smart at times, and idiots at other times. — Bitter Crank

Lol.

I think the binary system is something very fundamental to us. And perhaps other species too. With it we have made much sense to the World.

But then things that cannot be put into the binary mold are problematic to us. Should be no wonder.

Hi, BC. For a long time now I've just assumed that consciousness "fades in" as nervous systems become more complex. Perhaps self-consciousness is especially human. We can be freaked out that there is a there there, whereas animals are probably just freaked out about what is there -- not that there is a there in the first place.