How Would It Be to Be a Bee?
Word Helper
Ponder: To think about something carefully and deeply. It’s like when you sit quietly and really focus on an idea or question, trying to understand it or figure it out.
To dare: To try something that might be difficult or scary.
To fare: How well you would do in a certain situation.
Raw: Uncooked
Obscure: Something that is not clear or hard to understand.
About the writing of this book
The beginning of the poem came to me as I was sitting on a bench watching some bees buzz around on flowers at Spirit Rock during a two month retreat. It sat in a journal for years until I started doing coaching with Michelle Akin to try to get out of a creative rut. While racking my brain to figure out what I wanted to devote my energies to, this poem came back to me in a flash and I instantly set to work to finish it. The amtrak train I was on when I remembered it proved to be a perfect environment for gettting it done. Perhaps it helped that I was on my way to see my nephews and neices. For the images I used either chatGPT or midjourney. Unfortuntely I don’t remember which.
At some point I would like to work with an artist to do hand painted images for a new edition of the book. I would also like to actually physically publish it but I can’t seem to get past the hump of having to deal with formatting, ISBN numbers, and all the other minutiae of self-publishing 😅. If you are an artist or publisher interested in collaborating on a new edition please reach out!
Parent Guide
This book is loosely based on questions raised by Thomas Nagel in his philosophy paper called What Is It Like to Be a Bat?. In the paper Nagel discusses what is often referred to as the “mind-body problem.” namely that science has thus far failed to explain how conscious experience arises, and in fact may never do so due to the subjective character of experience. A materialist may be inclined to think that it obviously arises from the nervous system, supported by the fact that physical or energetic manipulation of brain matter can lead to self-reported changes in conscious experience. However, there are those who believe that we are like an antenna, receiving conscious experience from the outside. Messing with the antenna would, of course, affect the signal.
To my knowledge, up to this point, subjective conscious experience has never been measured in any way except in the recording of first-hand accounts of those who claim to have conscious experience. This is not exactly the most scientifically rigorous means of measuring something. Conscious experience remains a directly observable phenomenon only to the one for whom the conscious experience is emerging. Thus, it remains reasonable to question not only our own understanding of any other being’s conscious experience, but also whether things that we wouldn’t normally consider conscious, e.g. plants, may in fact be experiencing the world, albeit in a way that is incomprehensible to us.
This book was written to introduce in children an appropriate amount of doubt about their ability to understand the conscious experience of others. Typically when we imagine the lived experience of another being we are actually imagining what it would be like for us to be different in some way. It is outside of our ability to imagine what it is like for them to be that way. So in the book when the child is encouraged to imagine what it is like to be able to fly, for example, it is more likely than not they imagine themselves with wings. This may not always be the case. For precocious children they may actually try to imagine what it is like to be a bee, and for the especially astute they may find that their ability to imagine that is limited and insufficient to actually say what that lived experience would be like.
Why would we want to induce that doubt in children? First off, certainty is the death of curiosity. From a position of doubt the child will seek out more information and dwell upon the question. My hope is that one of the children who read this book may be so inspired by the question as to go on to further our understanding of conscious experience. The second reason is that it is important for their relationships that they don’t assume that they know what it is like to be another person based on their own lived experiences. It is pro-social for them to ask questions to others about their inner world rather than guess or assume.
In philosophy, the area that deals with what we can know, and how we can say we know it, is called epistemology. The habit of doubting that the book seeks to introduce relates to a trait called “epistemic humility.” It is doubting the reasoning behind what one thinks they know. Frequently asking questions like “Do I really know that?” and “How could I know that?” are indicative of epistemic humility. While it is an extremely useful tool, it is not without risks. Namely one can spin out into a state of unknowing and face a crippling crisis of knowledge, e.g. “How can I know anything?” While I don’t think that is a likely risk for children having read this book, it is important to confirm that there are things that can be known, and that this question is one of the foundational questions of philosophy and not something to worry about but is something to be explored.
Conversation Starters
“When you imagine being a bat, do you think you’re imagining what it’s really like for the bat? Or what it would be like for you to be a bat?”
“If you could ask a bee, bat, or bear one question about their life, what would it be?”
“Do you think a bee knows what it’s like to be a bear? Why or why not?”
“What do you think it means to ‘feel’ something as a bee or a bat? Do you think their feelings are like ours?”
“Do you think bees, bats, and bears can think? What might they think about?”
“If we can’t be sure what it’s like to be a bat or a bee, what else might we not fully understand?”
“How do you think someone else might feel differently than you in the same situation? How could you find out what they’re feeling?”
“What’s a question you could ask a friend to better understand what they’re feeling or thinking?”
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