(June 6, 2015 at 10:43 pm)bennyboy Wrote:

(June 6, 2015 at 6:08 pm)IATIA Wrote: A one-celled animal can 'choose' between food or poison.  I think our 'free will' is no more advanced than that, only more complex.

The presumed difference is that a one-celled animal doesn't have the ability to imagine.

Can bats "imagine"?  Can birds "imagine"?  Can cats "imagine"?  Can dogs "imagine"?  Can apes "imagine"?  Where do you draw the line?  As I stated, there is no line, only increased complexity due to increased input from increased cell count.

A colony of ants 'acts' as an animal separate from the individual ant where the colony can be considered the 'brain' and the ant a 'neuron'.  When a colony forages for food, there is an algorithm that they demonstrate. This algorithm is being used to study the working of the human brain.  So, are ants smart or is life just a product of what works, at all levels.

The example of ant is a powerful one.  I don't know if anyone ever sat around (maybe as a kid) and wondered who was directing all that work.  Who, or what, whatever.  That;s just above ground...down below they build discomfortingly structured colonies.  They are consistent, there is a "standard model" colony.  They bury their dead away from their young, and away from their main living and storage quarters.  Their colonies show a sense of perspective and planning which would be a POV that no individual ant -could possibly have-.  Their chemical language is simple (relative to the complexity of language in the general)

 - and yet.....look at what they can do...look at those behaviors, which, when we see others doing them, we attribute to mind. I wonder if/how many ants (and I wonder in the general, lol)...if there even -is- a number of ants, it would take to approximate a human mind? At what point would the behaviors observed seem to us, sufficient to conclude that the colony is thinking, does have mind, does plan? Not that they do this in " the conscious human fashion" that we -think- we do this in...but that this co-operative information sharing process is how that's -done-, our experience is a misapprehension of fact directly attributable to the system we use to participate in this exchange of information .

(June 7, 2015 at 3:00 pm)Rhythm Wrote: The example of ant is a powerful one.  I don't know if anyone ever sat around (maybe as a kid) and wondered who was directing all that work.

I still do. Saturday and Sunday mornings, weather permitting, I am on the porch drinking my coffee and smoking my cigs all the while watching the cutter ants. It really is fascinating. Cutter ants forage for food for their farm. Not only do they do everything any ant colony does, but they are farmers too.

(June 7, 2015 at 9:14 am)IATIA Wrote:

(June 6, 2015 at 10:43 pm)bennyboy Wrote: The presumed difference is that a one-celled animal doesn't have the ability to imagine.

Can bats "imagine"?  Can birds "imagine"?  Can cats "imagine"?  Can dogs "imagine"?  Can apes "imagine"?  Where do you draw the line?

I think this thread has repeatedly come down to a single issue: psychology vs. psychogony, by which I mean the relative quality of different kinds of minds vs. the existence of mind at all.  My contention is that there is a minimal system which can be said to have mind, and that any simpler system cannot be said to have mind.  I've defined "mind" as the ability to sustain a subjective perspective-- and either something has that capacity or it does not.

The same goes for imagination.  I'd define imagination as the capacity to experience recalled information, and either an organism can or cannot recall some information and re-experience it in some form.  All the animals you mentioned definitely seem to meet that definition; for example, they all (as far as I know) have the capacity to dream.

As for ants, that is a very interesting case indeed.  In the case of a single organism's brain, the mind seems to arise from the coordination of many parts.  The same applies to ants-- they are highly coordinated parts-- so I do wonder if an ant colony actually has a literal "hive mind," i.e. that it really is a single organism with many parts rather than just a community of individual members.

Quote:that it really is a single organism with many parts rather than just a community of individual members.

-these two things may not be mutually exclusive.  I've often felt like a bit of a community of my past and present selves. How about you?

(June 7, 2015 at 5:59 pm)Rhythm Wrote:

Quote:that it really is a single organism with many parts rather than just a community of individual members.

-these two things may not be mutually exclusive.  I've often felt like a bit of a community of my past and present selves.  How about you?

I agree that the feeling of human agency, which is individual, is very much a whirlwind of different ideas, memories and feelings, none of which I have much awareness over.  And yet there seems to be somthing uniting all these parts into a single whole.

If an ant colony has a "supermind," I wonder then whether humans could as well.  Does humanity, as a whole, have a kind of supermind, which is composed of the individual human parts but is itself above and beyond them?

We don't seem to comport ourselves as ants do.  Their behavior is predicate upon the system they use to achieve it.  A kind of supermind...I don't know, I think that if we really explored the notion we might find that even if we did, it wouldn't be all that super...and we might not think it was very mindful.  I do think that human beings have some things going for them that ants don't (and conversely that ants have things going for them that humans don't) so while the ants may achieve the task in a certain way.....I don't think that implies that we also have that ability.

(June 7, 2015 at 7:06 pm)Rhythm Wrote: Their behavior is predicate upon the system they use to achieve it.

As I mentioned briefly when I started the ant thing, the algorithm they use is believed to be similar to the same algorithm in the human brain. The big difference is the sensory input, but the algorithm may be identical.

Yeah, good luck digging an algorithm out of someones head though, particularly one that would satisfy all interested parties.  We'd have to show how that algorithm was implemented biologically, definitively, in action...in a human brain.

Once the proper algorithm is pinned down, it would be a simple matter to apply it to a computer A.I. (or perhaps the internet itself) and there will be a lot of dissatisfied people.