Ant intelligence; queen does not rule the colony II (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, April 19, 2020, 17:35 (1679 days ago) @ David Turell

QUOTE: We know now that ants do not perform as specialised factory workers. Instead ants switch tasks. […] So what determines which ant does which task, and when ants switch roles?

The answer is given below in precise detail, though with an extraordinary conclusion which David has bolded.

"The colony is not a monarchy. The queen merely lays the eggs. Like many natural systems without central control, ant societies are in fact organised not by division of labour but by a distributed process, in which an ant’s social role is a response to interactions with other ants. (dhw’s bold) In brief encounters, ants use their antennae to smell one another, or to detect a chemical that another ant has recently deposited. Taken in the aggregate, these simple interactions between ants allow colonies to adjust the numbers performing each task and to respond to the changing world. This social coordination occurs without any individual ant making any assessment of what needs to be done.[/b] (David’s bold)

How on earth can anyone possibly know that? Is the author antelepathic? If each decision is made through interaction with other ants, information must have been passed from one to another!

QUOTE: Similar processes are at work in other natural systems without central control. For example, although certain large regions of the brain seem to be involved in particular tasks, at the level of neurons it looks like division of labour is not the rule. The same neurons are involved in different tasks, and the same task can be accomplished by different neurons.(David’s bold)

And I would have bolded the same passage, since I have often used the ant analogy for the way the body and brain work. You could hardly have a more vivid illustration of the manner in which cells and cell communities organize themselves in accordance with whatever is required by the whole structure under varying conditions.

QUOTE: " To envisage how an ant’s task of the moment arises from a pulsing network of brief, meaningless interactions might compel us instead to ponder what really accounts for why each of us has a particular job. (David’s bold)

If you were to see organisms communicating and interacting and then going on to do a particular job at a particular time, wouldn’t you think there was some connection between the procedures? Once more, how the heck can anyone say the interactions are meaningless, when they lead to intelligent behaviour?

DAVID: My key thought is simple and direct: if one is looking for intelligence as a source of organized activity, one will find it depending upon one's disposition, at the individual level or at the programmed level, but it will not be both.

I agree. And since conditions are constantly changing, and ants are known to communicate among one another and then to perform new actions in order to cope with new conditions, I would suggest that their efficient organization is the result of individual intelligences communicating rather than their communicating sweet nothings before some unknown power switches on a programme.

DAVID: The discussion about this type of organization in neurons may help us understand how our brain is organized and performs its thought processes in concert with its soul.

I don’t know if there is a soul, but since the soul gives the instructions, that would be the equivalent of the queen, which our author says does NOT give instructions. It’s a communal process, not a top-down process. So in this case, the intelligent cells organize themselves.