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Tuesday, March 08, 2005 → by Danieru
Isn't it strange how things seem to appear in your life as bundles? I have only recently been reading about ants and this article pops up, along with a related series about animal behaviour on BBC Radio 4.
In an ant colony, extremely simple, bottom level behaviour can produce seemingly incredible emergent top most processes and patterns. As this article suggests, ant colonies appear to 'learn' from the past, increasing the speed of secondary repair work if two attacks on the nest occur in quick succession. In a similar way to the processes in an ant colony, could it be the case that top level consciousness simply emerges from the bottom level, seemingly simplistic firing of neurons in the brain? And alternatively, could an ant colony have some degree of consciousness? Many species of ants are skilled in the use of 'tools', cut from individual leaves. By growing certain types of fungus on these leaves and feeding other insect larvae on the fungus they also farm in the production of food.
When I read these things I can never help but wonder why us humans seem to insist we are so special. As Douglas Adams once noted (and I'm paraphrasing here) - "the universe is so mind bogglingly vast, and time so infinitely big that somewhere in the universe every useful thing you can imagine will have already evolved naturally a rather large number of times..." let's hope for our sake that the ants have already figured this out, otherwise we might have an evolutionary rebellion on our hands...
...and moving from the topic of human mental progress (surely impossible), to human technological progress (just highly improbable), it seems nuclear fusion might finally make an appearance. I would love my electricity to be produced from the fusion of atomic nuclei . There is something well sexy about the thought of marmite on nuclear fusion heated toast...
Yon Sama still beckons you.....
In an ant colony, extremely simple, bottom level behaviour can produce seemingly incredible emergent top most processes and patterns. As this article suggests, ant colonies appear to 'learn' from the past, increasing the speed of secondary repair work if two attacks on the nest occur in quick succession. In a similar way to the processes in an ant colony, could it be the case that top level consciousness simply emerges from the bottom level, seemingly simplistic firing of neurons in the brain? And alternatively, could an ant colony have some degree of consciousness? Many species of ants are skilled in the use of 'tools', cut from individual leaves. By growing certain types of fungus on these leaves and feeding other insect larvae on the fungus they also farm in the production of food.
When I read these things I can never help but wonder why us humans seem to insist we are so special. As Douglas Adams once noted (and I'm paraphrasing here) - "the universe is so mind bogglingly vast, and time so infinitely big that somewhere in the universe every useful thing you can imagine will have already evolved naturally a rather large number of times..." let's hope for our sake that the ants have already figured this out, otherwise we might have an evolutionary rebellion on our hands...
...and moving from the topic of human mental progress (surely impossible), to human technological progress (just highly improbable), it seems nuclear fusion might finally make an appearance. I would love my electricity to be produced from the fusion of atomic nuclei . There is something well sexy about the thought of marmite on nuclear fusion heated toast...
Yon Sama still beckons you.....
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