This seems confused to me. I don't see how bees playing, octopuses reacting to harmful stimuli, and cuttlefish remembering things is evidence of consciousness, and the article seems to confuse those things with bees having fun, octopuses feeling pain, and cuttlefish having reflective inner lives. But those are different things! Those are what <i>we</i> would experience doing those things, but it doesn't follow at all the other beings will just because they perform these activities.<p>A thought exercise is to imagine programming a little robot. It can play with balls because you program it to stimulate objects in its environment, and it has a heuristic called "interesting" that controls what it plays with. It can detect when it is damaged and avoid places where the damage happened (you can even call the variable where you store the quantity of damage "pain" if you want). It can remember places or objects by encoding characteristics about them and storing on the onboard flash drive. While none of that is at all easy, those are all things you could imagine programming without some great conceptual breakthrough. But you would probably not suspect your robot is conscious.<p>That's not an argument that bees are <i>not</i> conscious, and as far I understand it, there's no conceivable way to really know, and we don't even really have a great definition of consciousness to begin with. We have only guesses, and usually those guesses are something like "well, it seems like something that must emerge from a sufficiently complex brain, and mammals and birds have big complex brains, so they probably do, and mollusks don't, so probably they don't", etc.<p>A related thought exercise is to imagine an alien that is very smart but is not conscious, and doesn't understand us when we ask it about the experience of being itself.