ANTSTORE World of Ants

[anquietas]

do ants have a conciessness i would say without a doubt that queens do but its the workers i am posting about do they have a conciessness or are they just drones ment to srev the hole? post your opinions here

personaly i say they do have a conciessness cuz i have seen workers act out like individuals doing there own thing like running in circles and trying to get others to join in and when no one does they go back to foriging

[miszt]

Consciousness is an interesting concept, I dont think they have it the same way we would understand it, for a start, even if you think of the colony as a whole entity, the time delay between each individual neuron (worker) is far greater than between our own neurons, which would dramaticly slow down the processing of information, and therefore the percieved 'sense of self', also we have millions, even more than the largest ant colonies in the wild

However it can be argued, that consciousness is nothing more than highly complex reactions to our enviroment, rather than anything special like a Soul (this is what I believe personally). Because many of the so-called interactions that make humans, humans, can be seen to a greater or lesser extent within 'lower' life form socialization, just watch David Attenbourghs Trials of Life, and you will see many things that will make you think 'wow we do that to, we're not so advanced after all', but human life is a culmination of many many diffrent processes and reactions

[anquietas]

havent seen trials of life, but would love to. but as consciousness as we would think your right and from obsevering not only my ants, but also termites, bees (hornets, wasps, honey bees) and other social animals i have seen a lot of the behivor that most humans think is unique to us. but in fact they seem to have it aiether just as complex or less so and i have even see it were they do things that we do but to greater extent like for example: when a person helps out another person on a small thing they helper expects nothing but a thank you and thats it. but if its a rather large task they expect something in return and when i look at my termites i see them helping oneanother out and as far as i can tell almost always get nothing in return for there severices and they keep on doing it plus with termites not so much so ants, termites tend to have a strong feeling towards keeping echother alive just as much as we do towards echother save for the nutjobs lol. but to give a real life example my termites when i found them were on the loseing side of a war with the ants (got cut off from there colony its a shame o well new pet) and out of there 3 soldiers one of them had only one leg and no antenni and to this day 1.5 months later the soldier is still alive you can see them feeding it even though it cant even move or do anything and yet they still tend to it as thogh it were prefectly fine something we do as well but only expect montary gain for are troubles at sustaining someones life while the humbel termite asks for nothing in return it would seem to me that they know nothing of greed so they may have a more complex conscious they we give them credit for

[The_Paranoid]

Very interesting topic!! There are many different approaches on this topic. Just a quick overview over this topic ... hope this is not getting too deep ...

First of: consciousness has nothing to do with the behaviour you can observe. On example: ALS patients... ALS is a bad motor-desease which renders the patients completly unable of any muscle-activity(breathing included).. the look and act like a coma-patient showing no signs of consciousness because they can't do anything. But they are fully conscious.
The other side is that things can act very intelligent based on very primitive behaviour. As a more theoretical approach there are the Braitenberg vehicles which are based on very simple algorithms. But for a spectator they act like intelligent beings even showing something like emotions. A more practical approach with robots: very simple algorithms like: forward till you hit target, then go right, repeat this all over.... if you do this in a circle-arena with a lot of balls in it, it looks like the robot is collecting the balls and making a big pile out of it. Stupid algorithms can produce intelligent products. Same in ants. In principle they are stupid robots build of organic material instead of metal and silicon. Noone would think of robots as being conscious ... would you?

But we know that we are ... where is it coming from? There are 2 major ideas about consciousness. First one is dualism: something like a soul making us conscious. We have a soul, so we are conscious, maybe ants have one too?
Another thing is strong AI: it's a theory that consciousness is produced as a side-effect by complex algorithms. We, as complex beeings, have this consciousness. Ants as stupid insects would not. But(!) computers can be conscious if they are complex enough. Now we have a problem with collective intelligence ... don't know what strong AI thinks about this... but there's another thing ... the problem of free will ... with dualism you still have a free will. With strong AI, free will is just an illusion. You think you're acting free, but in fact your behaviour is determined by your environment.

I for myself believe in strong AI because there are a lot of things that can be explained with strong AI but not with dualism. At example:
Before you make a decision, there are processes in your brain that start about 500ms before you realize it. Technics like EEG can be used to measure your brain activity and with this one can say how you will decide 500ms before you decide. Supports the fact, that free will is an illusion.

Another example are split-brain patients. These are patients where the "corpus callosum" is cut stopping the communication between the right and the left haft of the brain. Sometimes this is done to cure some people from epileptics. With a cut "corpus callosum" you have 2 seperated hemispheres of your brain which both have an own conscious. Very interesting video is this:
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Now it's getting complicated ... in short: speach is processed in the left hemisphere. stuff from your left visual field goes to the right, from right visual field to left, left hand is controlled by right hemisphere. If you show a split-brain patients two different objects: one on the right side, and one on the left side, he is only conscious of one object. He will tell you the name of the right object, but with the left hand he will draw the picture shown on the left side. Proving that the left hemisphere has a different consciousness than the right side. So we have a different consciousness in one person. Supporting again the theory of strang AI and having problems to be explained with dualism ... or how would you explain that we get another soul by cutting corpus callosum...

.... sorry for all the text ... but it's a really interesting topic

[miszt]

I'm an a Matirialist myself (i think thats what you mean by ai), I see the world as a complex chemical reaction, and our brains as bio-chemical computers, with no interaction from a 'soul', if there is a soul, it is simply the sum of our experiences as a biological computer, which will live on only thru other peoples memories

I do believe that Consciousness can be measured however, if something is aware of itself, its possible do measure this, for eg using a mirror, Apes are fascinated by Mirrors, and stare at themselves for hours, other species like Cats and Dogs usually attack their reflection, this shows some awareness of 'self', and there for consciousness, there are many other ways to, of course they are all subjective and debatable, because we as yet dont understand the mechanism which tells us 'i am'


interestin vid dr Winston did some stuff on it aswell a while ago, i'll try and find it

[anquietas]

interisting very interisting but the strong AI theroy is 2 serpet consciousness' or just 2 different preceptions of one reality like that person who had there corpus callosum cut since his brain is ment to work in tandom he sees one thing but thinks another his language part of his brain sees the one pic while the hand eye cordnation (or part that would make him draw) sees another and since the brain still thinks it is one thing it takes the name of one pic but sees the other one plus if my understanding of the strong AI theroy is correct, all it means is that if you have 100 people and you put them all in 100 sepret but yet identical rooms all 100 people will do exactly the same thing because there braines are simply reacting to there enviroments or if i were to say something like "if you know the candel light is fire, then the dinner was made a long time ago" everyone would always say it means the same thing (personaly i belive that it deals with preception of past present and future) but then again just by reading what i think it means everyone is more likely to say the same thing now but now that i said that everyone is more likely to agree with what i belive the phrase means it is more likely that most wont so the strong AI theroy could still yet be slightly possible but personaly, i dont agree with it

[miszt]

anquietas culd u put some punctuation in please, its almost impossible to understand what your saying, i'm not being picky, it really is very hard to read

[anquietas]

sry i am working on it i just get started and wooooo i am gone :p do you want me to re-type it?

[miszt]

no just put the punctuation in u shuld be able to edit it

[anquietas]

ok i have new info to support thought in ants i have notice my ants playing games. and yes i mean games, i think i have figured out the rules for 2 of them the first one -keep away- one ant picks up a small object bigger than a grain of sand but not to big and once they have it they will tap the head of 4-6 other ants. then proceed to dart off with the other following her and the try to bite or trip the ant with the object and once they do that the one ant passes the object to the one that got then and it starts all over. the second is i have see wrestling matchs between my ants a group of then will gater in a circle around 2 ant that are locked at the mandubles and then when one flips the other over they win and another challenger comes up. now if you havent seen your ants do this it is probly because theres just to much to do around the colony. they only play around if they have nothing to do, or need nothing done. a rare thing in deed i watched my ants for 4 days stright before i saw them playing around you should try it

[antguy]

I think there like the borg off of star trek! They spend there whole lives doing everything for the greater good of the colony. But in there spare time they party hard!

[JimmyVe]

Anquietas what drugs where you one when you seen them playing....

I don not know everything about ants but i never seen them playing.

[miszt]

Anquietas what drugs where you one when you seen them playing....

I don not know everything about ants but i never seen them playing.

indeed, play does not exist in animals that have just a simple action/reaction 'brain', play is not just for fun, its about learning skills to survive and only exists in species that learn from their group or parents, for eg mammals

[SteveUK28]

Anquietas what drugs where you one when you seen them playing....

Roflmao.. now that did make me laugh Jimmy

[mpir]

I think that for conciessness you need a complex nerve sistem and big brains. Bigger animals like cats and dogs have somehow "limited" conciessness. Ants are just simple insects - not much brain power there. So I don't think they have conciessness.

anquietas: you say that the "disabled" worker is still alive after 1.5 month becuase other helped him. I have different experience. One of my ants was trying to tunnel in Ytong and somehow got stuck head first in one of the air bubles. You could see that she is struggeling to free herself but none of the ants helped her. So... no conciessness there.