Intelligence not required

There's a story today on physorg about the mental abilities of bees. Here's an excerpt:

The team's findings suggest that bees are able to solve complex routing problems by learning, without needing a sophisticated cognitive representation of space. Dr Lihoreau explained: "Despite having tiny brains, bees effectively used gradual optimisation (comparing several different routes), to solve this famously complex routing problem which still baffles mathematicians 80 years after it was first posed."

A tiny bee brain that we wouldn't assume is capable of very much, and yet it can outpace us in this area. I love that the bees managed to learn and come up with this routing solution without a large brain. That's so cool.

I sometimes wonder if intelligence is the holy grail that we think it is. My favorite kind of sci-fi books are the ones about alternate, alien sorts of intelligence. Peter Watts' "Blindsight" went wild with this notion. If you enjoy the idea of varied concepts of consciousness, pick up a copy. The book even asks whether intelligence requires a self. Could there be another kind of intelligence, almost the opposite of a human's? His answer is fascinating.

Consciousness and intelligence are insanely interesting topics. Remember, folks: we don't even know how our brains create the illusion of "selves" -- or for that matter, what these "selves" are. It's just wild that we know so little about what we are.

We are truly an infant race. Here's hoping we reach adolescence.