Seeing Through The Eyes of A Bee

What can we really know about perception? And have we lost ways of knowing that are our birthright as humans?

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I was intrigued by a video on Facebook about how a bee “sees” humans. See below…

According to the video, the Liverpool Museum allows visitors to experience what it feels like to be a bee.

Bees have five eyes and experience us as patterns of tiny fragments, apparently similar to how they may see flowers.

An Darach, a website that encourages readers to connect with nature, has an article on “How (and What) a Bee Sees.”  The piece states that:

“Bees are also thought to be trichromatic, but that they cannot see red because they don’t have a photoreceptor for it. However, they can see the Ultraviolet (UV) end of the light spectrum and so they make colour combinations from blue, green and ultraviolet.”

Our receptors can see red so we make color combinations from Red, Green and Blue – the “RGB” values in our computer screens.  Unlike bees, we need instruments to read the ultraviolet part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

What Is Real?

So who is “right”?  Or a more accurate perceiver of “reality”?

It reminds me of the famous statement:

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” ― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

And while, as Blake says, it is man who has closed himself limiting his knowledge of reality, as in the famous allegory of Plato’s cave, we need to also consider that the narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum of our eyes is a small sliver of human experience.

There has been much written and studied on how if one becomes blind, for example, the other senses become more active and help to create a more accurate version of reality for that human’s experience. 

As we perceive, the brain makes guesses as to how accurate the information is – the more frequent patterns of perception would seem to increase accuracy.  But the brain can easily be mistaken.

We Don’t Really Understand How Experience Happens

This leads to the notion of “qualia” – the one aspect of consciousness that science has been unable to connect to purely physical phenomena – the actual “personal” experience we have.

Qualia might be sensing something to be hot or cold, or calm or disturbing.

Qualia are what makes consciousness "hard" to explain in scientific or materialist terms. They are the subjective, first-person experiences that don't seem to be fully captured by third-person descriptions of brain activity or behavior.

When we consider what we know about the bees, and also factor in other parts of the animal kingdom, we know that bats don’t see but use hearing or sonar to navigate their world.  To the extent that something exists beyond their own bodies, they interact with it mostly using sound.

Similarly, dolphins augment their other senses with sonar, and along with whales seem to have other ways of communicating their “subjective experiences” with other cetaceans.

There is also anecdotal evidence that some plants have awareness of some kind; we know that trees communicate with other trees through their roots, and some plants seem to even respond to human emotions.

All of these various sensory capacities serve to create each creature's “experience” of the universe within its unique world.

All Known Sensory Capacities are Expressions of DNA

We now know that there is a single organic operating system; DNA is very similar to our own computer code, and seems to be present in almost every known life form (except viruses).

So the question is, what if humanity began to understand that each individual person’s unique experience is a function of their own biological and genetic identity, how might that impact our society?

Remember how it was Tesla who said that when science delves into the nonmaterial realm, it will advance at great speed?

Whatever these nonmaterial energies may be, that create a life form’s experience, they would seem to be universal among life forms – at least on our own planet.

These Ubiquitous Energies are a Common Bond Among Life Forms

Along the lines of ecology, or what we now call epigenetics, what if it was taught in schools that no creature is separate from the totality of existence, or its environment?

Could we begin to fathom that the individual experiences of members of one race, for example, are mirrored in the private worlds of all other races – since they share similar brains, nervous systems and genetics?

Perhaps this would begin to raise the awareness of all humans that along with other creatures sharing this planet we are all part of an immense, mysterious matrix of collective experience.

Joe Martino has asked how we might imagine a world in which humanity has experienced a “shift” in consciousness that might bring more peace and harmony.

Starting with the bees, and continuing through other known life forms, humanity might begin to drop its hubris of separation and “specialness.”

The article on the bees concludes: 

“In summary, while both bees and humans use vision for navigation and identifying objects in their environment, the specifics of their visual systems are adapted to their respective needs and environments. Bees excel in tasks related to flower detection, motion perception, and polarization vision, whereas humans have a higher acuity and sensitivity to a broader range of colours in the visible spectrum.”

Science Has Confirmed the Limitations of Our Senses

We now know, with our scientific instruments – especially microscopes and telescopes – that the world of our visible spectrum is myopic and woefully incomplete – just like the universe apparently experienced by bees with their vision of masses of particles.

Telescopes launched into space, in particular, have provided a mind blowing sense of the potential vastness of what is “out there.”  Photos taken of Earth from the Voyager spacecraft have provided an eerie understanding of how tiny our planet is compared to stars, galaxies and now clusters of galaxies.

All of this apparent information is gleaned only one way – through Awareness – a nonmaterial knowing shared by all living creatures.  Animals may not even have brains or advanced nervous systems like ours, but what is happening during their lives is an exchange of information with their own environment.

Maybe this can finally open us to a broader sense of “scientific” truth that encompasses the deep understanding that subjectivity – or consciousness – is ubiquitous and primary in the universe?

I believe this could be achieved if we educated humans, as the indigenous people did, to sense their connection with the universe through their inner body, rather than only through an intellect that works only through comparison and division. 

That would probably create more mystics, like William Blake along with humans that experience their existence in an entirely new way.

And it might actually begin to bring a peace that “passeth all understanding.”