Natures wonders: insect migration (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, December 07, 2021, 07:15 (1080 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The issue is the proposed algorithm's contents. The author implies as they watch the dance they automatically know what it means.

dhw: They don’t. According to the author, “Honey bees are able to interpret the dance after about one week.” A worker bee born in the summer will live for 6-7 weeks, so the period of learning would be our equivalent of about 10 years. Please stop hiding behind the author’s vague terms. How can the bee possibly know the meaning of the dance if it knows nothing about flowers, distances and directions?

DAVID: Yes how? If you sat in a classroom and were given these vague dances about things you know nothing about, how would you know what to do? But the new bee does, because his brain has an automatic program of interpretation, the author's not so vague point.

You have asked the right question. The bee has to know about flowers, distances and directions before it can interpret the dance. So what is this vague “program of interpretation”? The bee comes with the ABILITY to interpret, and it uses that ability to collate, understand, and memorize all the information which is presented to it, and to translate the information into the appropriate action. How does this differ – other than in time and scale – from the process which drives our own actions?

Ant bridge algorithm
DAVID: All animals are built to note danger. The first ant at a stream will automatically stop as he spots the danger. The rest with the same reaction pile on to go over.

dhw: All ants forage for food, so why don’t all species of ant automatically stop and build bridges when they come to gaps? Are you saying that your God specially chose eciton hamatum for his algorithm, because without one species of ant building bridges he could never have designed humans and their food (his one and only purpose)?

DAVID: I would assume, as you should, the Army ants special travels in their special environment required the development of bridge-building skills.

I’m happy with that explanation. Different life forms develop different skills to cope with different conditions. I find this much more convincing than your proposal that either the ants come equipped with a 3.8-billion-year-old programme for bridge-building, or your God pops in to give these particular ants bridge-building courses. Furthermore, I suggest that the ability of one species of ant to build bridges has nothing to do with the design of H. sapiens and his foods, which you believe to have been your God’s only purpose.

dhw: Once again: Intelligence requires cognition, sentience, purposefulness with sensory, communication, information-processing and decision-making capabilities. All these attributes of intelligence are required for ant bridges, farms, nurseries, cities, strategies for defence and attack. Leaving aside your fixed belief, please explain why – apart from time required and scale of building etc – these obvious attributes are different from those we observe in humans.

DAVID: Outward appearance still gives a 50/50 probability.

dhw: Once more: 50/50, but you go for 100% no, and still you refuse to explain why all the manifested features of intelligence exhibited by insects and bacteria and cells in general are different from those exhibited by humans, apart from time and scale.

DAVID: Fully explained as above by instinctual behaviour and algorithms. I have the right to interpret my 50%, while you doggedly stick to your ubiquitous brilliant consciousness everywhere partially in an attempt to reduce human specialness, diminishing God's special creation.

You do not “interpret” your 50%. You merely insist that you are right, and you totally ignore my bolded and repeated request for your explanation of the difference between their manifestations of intelligence and ours, apart from time and scale. This has nothing whatsoever to do with human specialness (which I always acknowledge), and there is no diminishing of God in any way if we credit him with the astonishing invention of life and autonomous intelligence at different levels, ranging from bacteria to humans.