see also this 2014 article on consciousness in 'rather dumb group entities' including 'antheads'
https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious...
An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)
111–120 of 159 posts
Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yes - the system (you + the book) know Chinese. Or the system knows how to translate from English to Chinese. Human language isn't simply about following translation rules, though. It's also about communication and expressing thought. Or participating in language games. > Let me ask you another question - when I throw a ball at you your subconcious brain has to solve a differential equation to know how to use muscl…
> Why suppose the neural network needs to solve differential equations? Is that the only way to learn to catch a ball? Yes. You need to decide where to put your hand, how to orient it, etc in reaction to the ball movement. The answer is a solution to the differential equations, and you cannot consistently get a good answer to an equation if you don't solve it. The solution probably isn't symbolic but numeric, but tha…
> You could completely automate it, remove the human and nothing would change from the outside.
Right, but my point is that following a bunch of translation rules from one language to another is not the same thing as understanding a language. That's not what humans are doing when they use language.
> The solution probably isn't symbolic but numeric, but that hardly changes anything - you still need a lot of math to consciously solve such an equation numerically.
This is assuming the brain is doing math. Even deeper than that, it's assuming that math is something more than a specialized human language. That math exists in nature to be harnessed by neurons.
Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)
#113The title is extremely sensationalistic, Occam’s razor points to undetectable(by humans) scent trails that lead the ants to the same harvesting locations every year. There are no revelations about memory or collective consciousness to be found in this article. Every Occam in the world would infer human-undetectable scent trails from the evidence presented here, not some cosmic revelation about “how memory works” like…
This reminds me of some conversations I've been having with a friend of mine who is skeptical of "emergence" (or at least the way it is often described). After going over the problem with him for a while I eventually was convinced that emergence is not "more than" the sum of the parts, emergence is _precisely_ the sum of its parts.
Ants produce these higher level patterns not because there's some magical thing that "emerges", but because they are precisely evolved to coordinate with each other to create those patterns.
Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)
#114> Ants use the rate at which they meet and smell other ants, or the chemicals deposited by other ants, to decide what to do next. A neuron uses the rate at which it is stimulated by other neurons to decide whether to fire. In both cases, memory arises from changes in how ants or neurons connect and stimulate each other. Main takeaway, very interesting analogy. Ant colonies are great examples of complex systems with e…
> Main takeaway, very interesting analogy. Ant colonies are great examples of complex systems with emergent large-scale behavior. Indeed the same could be said about networks of neurons. Interesting to think of an ant colony as the sum of oscillations of signals. Indeed. I've long thought that an ant colony should be seen as a single individual, rather than a group. One part which can procreate, like the reproductive…
Ants in one colony are 75% genetically identical.
I think this is the main argument for looking at a colony as a distributed individual organism.
Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
In large scale human projects someone, or at least a small group of leaders, will know almost every detail and delegate. Ant colonies have no clear leadership, just a pheromone voting and decision system.
My last job was probably more ant colony like than most. We had jobs, someone quoted them, someone measured them, someone put them in the schedule, several of us did the jobs, the finished jobs were delivered and installed. All without anyone really delegating. We just followed the schedule and the paperwork. Even the boss didn't always know the details of the schedule or what we did. It all flowed pretty smoothly mo…
That works from what I've observed at my company for jobs on a timetable Once you start getting into 5 phase, 2.5 year long projects it helps having a dedicated PM overseeing every detail and coordinating between the engineer/owners/superintendents.
Heaven forbid you get into a government contract where now you have 10x the paperwork/submittals and RFI's compared to a private job, which it really does help to have one person pretty much memorize the spec book and know where to find everything when needed.
Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)
#116Yesterday there was a link in HN regarding artificial intelligence, and a user raised an interesting question: if a ML algorithm can be considered conscious, could a group of people doing the equivalent calculations by hand be the same? I think that ant example answers that question with a strong "yes".
The comparison is apt and, yes, both contexts are similar. But the observation still doesn't answer whether either a group of humans, a digital neural network or an ant colony actually is conscious. "conscious" is a language construct that defines an abstract concept that is only vaguely defined. Why? Because we haven't found a falsifiable theory that allows us to objectively state "x or y are conscious or not consci…
> "conscious" is a language construct that defines an abstract concept that is only vaguely defined. Why? Because we haven't found a falsifiable theory that allows us to objectively state "x or y are conscious or not conscious"
I lean on defining the concept based on adaptation to the environment - consciousness is the function that adapts an agent to its environment. Its purpose is to safeguard the agent against external perturbations and achieve its own goals.
For example, how would we get food without consciousness. How would reproduction work? Consciousness has a vital role here. Evolution works at a slow pace, consciousness is required for quick adaptation, otherwise the penalty is death.
I think consciousness is being made into something transcendent, or unfalsifiable, or essentially different than physical processes because we like to make ourselves feel special in comparison to the world.
Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
The comparison is apt and, yes, both contexts are similar. But the observation still doesn't answer whether either a group of humans, a digital neural network or an ant colony actually is conscious. "conscious" is a language construct that defines an abstract concept that is only vaguely defined. Why? Because we haven't found a falsifiable theory that allows us to objectively state "x or y are conscious or not consci…
> Such as whether we are unique and special, or that we may also be deterministic automatons and free will doesn't exist. That's only scratching the surface of the implications. The real question arises when we have to decide what moral rights consciousness proffers. A lot of arguments for and against vegetarianism, for instance, focus on whether animals suffer in a way that we would understand as suffering. A lot of…
Don't worry, if it is conscious it will fight back and have a will of its own. It won't be hard to tell.
But we could quickly settle this question if we checked some things first: does it need anything (have necessities)? does it learn? can it act on its environment? Can it evolve? Is it part of a group or alone? If no, then it's probably not conscious.
All the conscious agents I know have one and the same ultimate goal - to exist and reproduce themselves. All their other goals are just subgoals.
By my definition a virus and AlphaGo which was trained as a population of interacting agents with a winner survives rule are both conscious of their environment, which is just a board for AG.
Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)
#118wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algorithms
Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)
#119I wonder if this could be used as an argument for Panpsychism?
I'm trying to figure out a way to incorporate this notion of hierarchical life into panpsychism and the "global brain" hypothesis. (Disclaimer: I'm already sold on and a proponent of the theory of panpsychism.)
It seems more and more to me like this hierarchy goes all the way up (to the single superorganism that is the universe) and all the way down (to the presence or absence of fermions in particular states, inducing a duality and thus a basis of computation via the Pauli exclusion principle). If this hierarchy is consistent across all scales, then we can conclude that if consciousness exists at one level then it exists at all levels. Sentience/awareness is a different question, mind you, and "memories" are associated with awareness of past events.
I'm also starting to believe that "consciousness" in terms of directed will doesn't truly exist, and that only "experience" exists. The rest (wants, desires, opinions, will) are electrochemical reactions which respond to local changes in the environment, although we experience them as much more than that for ultimately self- (and macrosystem-)serving reasons. These electrochemical reactions are present because they have over time become more important in the processes necessary for the propagation of whatever they're supporting. This is all very vague and hand-wavy but this article on the thermodynamic theory of life might be clearer [1].
In the discussion yesterday about this topic on HN I brought up the example of ant colonies [2] in an attempt to spur discussion in this direction.
[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...
Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)
#120Yesterday there was a link in HN regarding artificial intelligence, and a user raised an interesting question: if a ML algorithm can be considered conscious, could a group of people doing the equivalent calculations by hand be the same? I think that ant example answers that question with a strong "yes".
This reminds me of the Chinese Room argument. Basically, it goes like that: I never took any Chinese lesson. However, suppose I obtain a huge instruction manual that tells me exactly which sequence of Chinese characters I should use to reply to any sequence of Chinese characters you (a native Chinese speaker) give me. Do I "know/understand" Chinese?
The Chinese Room sounds to me like a language model
> that tells me exactly which sequence of Chinese characters I should use to reply to any sequence of Chinese characters you give me
Then the question becomes - can a language model understand the meaning of the text it generates? Or does it assign its own meaning to the data?