HONEYBEES & Φ

Honeybees pollinating the galaxy of Goldeneye Sunflowers around the stone hut rush from blossom to blossom, staying at each flower only a second or two before hurrying to the next, never resting, like slaves with a demonic master. Why didn't honeybees evolve so that workers could occasionally rest, letting their bodies recoup?

It's because evolution has "figured out" that in terms of survival of the honeybee species, foraging workers must work exactly as hectically as they do. If workers suffer early deaths from overwork, it's easy to replace them. As always, Nature's interest is in preserving and refining the species, and if that means short, often miserable lives for individual members, so be it.

But, the situation isn't as stark as that. From my monist perspective, in which everything in the Universe seeming to have its own identity is just a manifestation WITHIN the One Thing, defining where the individual being begins and ends can become tricky.

For instance, maybe hurrying honeybees on Goldeneye Sunflowers are more analogous to hemoglobin molecules on my body's red blood cells, than to the whole me. Hemoglobin molecules transport oxygen in circulating blood of vertebrates, just as honeybees transport nectar through air to their hive. Who says that a being's interior agents must function within a single physical body, instead of flying through air on wings? Why can't the whole honeybee colony be analogous to me?

Moreover, since I'm convinced that beings besides humans can think and feel at different levels and in different ways, among honeybees, where is the seat of mentality, of consciousness?

I'd hesitate to ask such questions in public were it not that others much smarter than I are asking the same question.

For instance, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, whose integrated information theory is a major force in the science of consciousness, has invented a unit called phi, Φ, for measuring the consciousness of entities. The word "entities" is used because maybe not only living things but even devices like thermostats may manifest at least glimmers of consciousness, of subjective selves.

Standing among honey-smelling Goldeneye Sunflowers, I sense all around me a vast symphony of entities glimmering and gushing consciousness and subjective selves utterly entangling with one another, and I sense many forms and levels of mentality and feeling nested within one another. There's the lone honeybee nested within the hive, the hive nested within the blossoming forest, the forest within Gaia the living Earth, and Gaia nested within the Solar System, which is nested in a galaxy nested in the Universe, and the Universe itself is nested as one expression of the One Thing...

In a Universe composed of 90-99% Black Matter undetectable by humans and their instruments, but recognized by human mentality paying attention to distances separating paired galaxies circling one another -- among other indications -- what's to prevent human mentality from sensing that it's possible, if not probable, that the whole shebang, from the One Thing down to this field of Goldeneye Sunflowers alive and emotional in terms of honeybees and me with my hemoglobin molecules -- at all levels and in all dimensions -- is majestically supercharged and supersaturated with singing, dancing, honey-smelling Φ?