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

by dhw, Monday, April 20, 2020, 14:59 (1678 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: "[…] 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)

dhw: 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!

DAVID: The information is monkey-see-monkey-do. Ants have eyes and join the others in an activity.

Which activity, since they are confronted with a choice, and why do they communicate with one another if they have nothing to “say”?

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)

dhw: […] 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.

DAVID: The usual appeal for innate intelligence, when the cells are beautifully programmed to act intelligently.

Are you going back to your God devising programmes 3.8 billion years ago for ants and neurons to change tasks whenever required? How do they know which programme to switch on? Or do you think he does ongoing dabbles when ants and neurons change their tasks?

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)

dhw: 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: As interpreted from outside ant brains. Have you done fMRI's on them???

Have you? And if you had, would you have been able to translate their language?

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.

dhw: 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 3.8-billion-year old programme for ant problem-solving or, just as unlikely, does a dabble to give them the solutions.

DAVID: The author does not believe your mantras about innate intelligence. See, I have compatriots in thought.

Yes of course you do. I have merely pointed out the absurdity of the author’s assumptions.

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Not my theory: the soul has to work with the brain neuronal networks to develop instructions or concepts, the complexity of which depend exactly on the level of complexity of the neuron networks. Do you believe the queen gives minute by minute instructions?

No. I’m happy to accept the author’s view that ant behaviour is the result of communal interaction. The author’s analogy does not mention a soul, in which case his analogy only refers to the materialist view of neurons interacting in order to produce the results.

DAVID: Or are you simply trying to find intelligence where is doesn't exist? If it looks intelligent, doesn't ever mean it is innately intelligent.

Yet again you make your 100% judgement of what, in your moments of enlightenment, you acknowledge is a 50/50 chance. If it looks intelligent, maybe it IS intelligent!