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'Zombie ant' brains left intact by fungal parasite

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Re: 'Zombie ant' brains left intact by fungal parasite

#71

Post by pavement »

gumby wrote: post #64
pavement wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One, then, is left to wonder where the seat of organizational sentience really resides, if it resides in any of the independent organisms at all. Ants surely seem sentient, even if still lower-order animals. Is it just an emergent detail of aggregate reflexive behavior across all members? How (and why) would soldiers know to build a bridge with their bodies, to cross a water barrier, seemingly from birth? Maybe the l…

Why can't it be an emergent phenomenon? "You" are just a huge collection of independent organisms, a large subset of which share the same genetic material. But given the degree to which your various symbiotes and parasites (in your gut, in the biofilms in your sinuses, etc) excrete hormones, and the huge quantities of neurotransmitters emitted and received wholly inside your gut, it seems a Victorian concept like "se…

  it seems a Victorian concept like "seat of 
  organizational sentience" is rather obsolete.
Ha! So you’re telling me that you exist in more than one place simultaneously? (!!!)

Last time I checked, here I am. One person, one voice, one field of vision. If I were to use my fingers to point to where I, myself, am, then it’d be somewhere between my ears and my eyes.

But I suppose that person is somehow... quaint?

Re: 'Zombie ant' brains left intact by fungal parasite

#72

Post by kobeya »

wcoenen wrote: post #26
zaarn wrote: post #2

>"Normally in animals, behavior is controlled by the brain sending signals to the muscles, but our results suggest that the parasite is controlling host behavior peripherally," Hughes said. "Almost like a puppeteer pulls the strings to make a marionette move, the fungus controls the ant's muscles to manipulate the host's legs and mandibles." Probably the most "And I Must Scream" moment in mother nature. Imagine a hum…

> Imagine a human gets infected Relevant SMBC comic: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/fungus

That was the old idea of how these parasites worked.

Re: 'Zombie ant' brains left intact by fungal parasite

#73

Post by kobeya »

AndrewOMartin wrote: post #12
zaarn wrote: post #2

>"Normally in animals, behavior is controlled by the brain sending signals to the muscles, but our results suggest that the parasite is controlling host behavior peripherally," Hughes said. "Almost like a puppeteer pulls the strings to make a marionette move, the fungus controls the ant's muscles to manipulate the host's legs and mandibles." Probably the most "And I Must Scream" moment in mother nature. Imagine a hum…

Ask an addict. Even simpler, put some chocolate biscuits on a plate in view of where you sit and attempt to avoid the action of indulging.

That’s not what’s going on here.

Re: 'Zombie ant' brains left intact by fungal parasite

#74

Post by pavement »

titzer wrote: post #70
pavement wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One conceptual reality to consider is that the ants on the surface of any hill are not quite as sentient as the queen. The survival of a queen that produces viable progeny is paramount to the survival of the species and, at a more granular level, the bloodline of the individual colony. The queen is dependent on the drones being as obedient as your fingers and tongue might be to your brain, with your brain being the q…

> The colony is really the organism, and the soldiers serve it, abiding by prevailing odors, likely without very much free will. Or at least as much free will as your arm has, to reflexively recoil from a burn, or lash out at some unassessed threat when reacting in fear. Yep. And now go up a level. What are _you_ in the organism that is humanity? That concept is worth a lifetime of thought as you go about your job, c…

But the “organism of humanity” lacks biological drivers and hallmarks for differentiation of classes within the same species within a reproductive familial chain of ancestry.

All class divisions and duties are contrived, and artificially forced by what amounts to oral tradition and other communicative habitual norms like handwriting, long after invention of the wheel and mastery of fire by prehistoric humans. It is artifice, that can be wiped away if we fail to learn the craft of language by adolescence.

Liken this to hunting patterns among cetaceans, which we’ve only recently noticed with intensive study. Few animals are capable of language, but that emergent detail alone, remains an extremely ephemeral quality of social organization, capable of being destroyed by large-scale disagreements resulting in what we call war. Refugees can be reduced to orphanage and stone age civilization in a conflict severe enough.

Ants and other eusocial insects are not quite so vulnerable to having their classified reproductive divisions destroyed in less than a generation, simply because a small number of them have rationalized and chosen to dispose of a way of life. Forces of nature and other outside actors would have to opportunistically disrupt their biological qualities which seem baked in once hatched.

Re: 'Zombie ant' brains left intact by fungal parasite

#75

Post by leggomylibro »

Grangar wrote: post #5

Look at this picture of the final stage, after the 'stalk' sprouts from the ants head. Pretty haunting. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Ophiocor...

Yeah, but insects in nature die terribly in all kinds of awful ways.

Like pitcher plants? Or spiders? Yikes!

But then you see what a determined column of army ants can do to a frickin' horse, and you feel less bad about mother nature's ruthless biowarfare striving to keep them in check.

No wonder insects and swarms are the inspiration for so much horror-y sci-fi

Re: 'Zombie ant' brains left intact by fungal parasite

#76

Post by kdmoyers »

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #63
macdust wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specific directives (to find a suitable place to anchor itself) require awareness of the terrain and object-recognition. Either a) the fungus has stumbled upon the signals to accomplish this singular feat or b) the fungus can read the ant's perceptions and can navigate. Finding the signal seems more likely because it is much less complex an achievement.

Or the fungus "stumbled" across an effect on the ants' nervous system that was beneficial to it, so it thrived. Emergent properties don't require sophistication. They arise despite the lack of sophistication or the ability for specific intent. That's the definition of "emergent".

Yes, like what if there is an existing chemical signal for "climb up." the fungus might emit that signal and then just ride along, without any understanding of how that happens. Because it works, those fungus do better than ones that gave a different signal. After a while, it gives the "bite" signal and hopefully, the ant has already climbed up. Voila, the ant has served the fungus. So maybe some pretty simple steps result in an effect that appears carefully planned?

Re: 'Zombie ant' brains left intact by fungal parasite

#77

Post by gumby »

pavement wrote: post #71
gumby wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't it be an emergent phenomenon? "You" are just a huge collection of independent organisms, a large subset of which share the same genetic material. But given the degree to which your various symbiotes and parasites (in your gut, in the biofilms in your sinuses, etc) excrete hormones, and the huge quantities of neurotransmitters emitted and received wholly inside your gut, it seems a Victorian concept like "se…

it seems a Victorian concept like "seat of organizational sentience" is rather obsolete. Ha! So you’re telling me that you exist in more than one place simultaneously? ( !!! ) Last time I checked, here I am. One person, one voice, one field of vision. If I were to use my fingers to point to where I , myself, am , then it’d be somewhere between my ears and my eyes. But I suppose that person is somehow... quaint?

Yes, I believe you believe in such an "I", as do I and I assume everyone on the planet. But I also (to quote Dennett) say things like "the thermostat wants to keep the temperature between 20 and 22 degrees". It has no wont or desire but it's a handy fiction.

You only point to your head due to modern science; Aristotle thought the brain was for cooling the blood as the ancient Greeks thought the soul was in the liver, hence Prometheus' punishment (although ψυχή was literally "breath" -- cf "atman"). Plenty of cultures thought it in the heart, as do we talk of the heart or gut or generative organs making decisions -- certainly we feel the tough decisions there.

Could it be those with extensive amputations of gut and an articial heart could be "less human" in a broader sense than just mass?

But you seem awfully sure there is consciousness. Perhaps there is no such thing and you only think there is? It seems like a handy mechanism for your genes to use to propagate themselves.

The homunculus model, while popular, isn't particularly insightful and is, recursively, useless.

Re: 'Zombie ant' brains left intact by fungal parasite

#78

Post by red75prime »

pavement wrote: post #58
gumby wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One conceptual reality to consider is that the ants on the surface of any hill are not quite as sentient as the queen... The term "queen" is a misnomer. She is the ovulation organ of the hive, nothing more. Yes, she has many solicitous "attendants" but then again I too am more attentive to my own generative organs than I am to my other ones. In fact she has less will than any of the mobile ants and bees. Like the C…

One, then, is left to wonder where the seat of organizational sentience really resides, if it resides in any of the independent organisms at all. Ants surely seem sentient, even if still lower-order animals. Is it just an emergent detail of aggregate reflexive behavior across all members? How (and why) would soldiers know to build a bridge with their bodies, to cross a water barrier, seemingly from birth? Maybe the l…

If there's no sequential bottleneck in information processing, where one piece of information is made available to almost all subsystems, then there's probably no consciousness. If it is the case, we cannot say that the system as a whole is aware of something, because there's no common 'something' available to all subsystems.

Returning to ants, the anthill as a whole could probably be aware of a coarse assessment of its own wellbeing without any details.

Re: 'Zombie ant' brains left intact by fungal parasite

#80

Post by pavement »

gumby wrote: post #77
pavement wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it seems a Victorian concept like "seat of organizational sentience" is rather obsolete. Ha! So you’re telling me that you exist in more than one place simultaneously? ( !!! ) Last time I checked, here I am. One person, one voice, one field of vision. If I were to use my fingers to point to where I , myself, am , then it’d be somewhere between my ears and my eyes. But I suppose that person is somehow... quaint?

Yes, I believe you believe in such an " I ", as do I and I assume everyone on the planet. But I also (to quote Dennett) say things like "the thermostat wants to keep the temperature between 20 and 22 degrees". It has no wont or desire but it's a handy fiction. You only point to your head due to modern science; Aristotle thought the brain was for cooling the blood as the ancient Greeks thought the soul was in the live…

No way, dude. There's clinical evidence that such a location in/on the human body represents the true effective residence of human sentience, since snipers target precisely that location to take out their targets, before they have a chance to (even reflexively) react to their wounds.

It doesn’t mean a little person reclines in a hammock there, but I’d wager that there’s a resonant, sensation-event-sensitive waveform, that has a primary focal node looping through a region very close to the pituitary gland in normal, living human beings (with similar analogs in all other mammals, and also many other vertebrates), also hinted at by the pituitary’s role in endocrine governance.

But furthermore, you deny your own agency, if you refute me. I suppose maybe you are simply a bot on the internet, then. In which case, I'm deeply disturbed to find entities on the internet telling me I'm not sentient. Maybe having humans inform me of the same poorly rationalized fallacy is worse?

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