Animal Minds; termite automatic class recognition (Animals)

by dhw, Monday, August 13, 2018, 09:12 (2293 days ago) @ xeno6696

DAVID: So when the hot stove burns your finger, you think before you remove it? Really?

dhw: You have missed the point. You always focus on the chemical processes by which organisms perceive things, but it is behaviour that denotes intelligence. Termites, like ants, can solve all sorts of problems. They build whole cities which are so complex that you – with your eagle eye for design – could not possibly attribute them to anything but intelligence. But they are tiny creatures compared to ourselves, and your “large organisms chauvinism”(Shapiro) dictates that tiny creatures can’t be intelligent, so God has to give them “guidelines” (i.e. preprogramme them or do a dabble). And yet at the same time you say that one can’t tell from the outside whether these living creatures are robots or thinking beings. I wonder what size they need to be before you give them the benefit of the doubt!

Matt: You didn’t take it far enough dhw!

If ants and termites don’t express intelligence, then the only explanation left is that they evolved that ability by chance.

Termite mounds specifically are a marvel in regards to their design. The cooling system alone is a feat of wonder!

Agreed as to wonder.

The other explanation is that they were intelligently programmed.

They were. Soley by the direction of (hundreds?) of thousands of automata.

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Very quickly: I'm not quite sure who said what here, but only David would have claimed that the ants were intelligently programmed (i.e. by his God) to build their cities. My proposal is that ants are intelligent enough collectively (i.e. through combining their individual intelligences) to design their own cities. This is part of a much broader theory involving the role of cellular intelligence in evolution, extending as far as the human brain. Maybe we were already discussing this when you last popped in - in which case, not much has changed!