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Comment by openasocket | Hacker News Reader

I had another thought which might be even more terrifying. I couldn't find anything suggesting the fungus cuts off or disrupts the ant's actual nerve endings, and from video you can see towards the end that the ant moves in an unnatural, jerky way, not like a normal ant. This could be just because a fungus is bad at acting like an ant, but what if it's also because the ant is actively trying to fight it?!

I don't think this is especially likely, the fungus requires use of the ant's nervous system and sensory processing to figure out where a high up place is, so it definitely needs to have some significant control over the ant's brain, so it could suppress motor neuron function in the central nervous system. But still a very terrifying idea, to have some control over your muscles but the fungus is just overpowering you!

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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 queen organ, for your hundred(s of) pound(s of) tissue. We know that the surface ants support the colony, which supports the queen, and overall, the biomass of the ant colony is less than any single mammal, and we know that any signaling is provoked by scent, based on attack behaviors at a minimum.

Meaning that reaction to scent wafts through colonies quickly, engaging behavior as quickly as it is noticed. Ants seem to drop everything, and move, unanimously, when a signal is given. The signals must be pretty complex, with pointers hooked into fixed physical actions on some level. The ants probably don't think very much about what they should do next, as much as constantly listen or smell for a prevailing vote on what to do. Attack, forage, assemble into a formation, wait for further instructions, and so on.

In ant studies, an ant colony is segmented into chambers, each having odors, the most conspicuous being the colony's waste dump, so you have to figure that the colony survives, and expects the surface soldiers to go permanently missing once in a while, when scent signaling is disrupted.

These fungal organisms probably interact with a degree of equilibrium, when exposed to healthy ant colonies. Usually a parasitic relationship with a host is balanced to not completely destroy the host population, according to an almost intuitive self-preservation instinct among parasites. So the fungus probably only disrupts soldiers at the periphery of the colony, without destroying the core of the hill.

You can get a sense of this, based on the fact that the affected ants are driven away from the hill, toward environments more opportunistic to the fungus. If a version of the fungus were to grow opportunistically within the colony, it might invade and drive the ants to extinction, which might turn out to be, in effect, suicidal for the fungus too, and not just the ant.

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.

This fungus probably is basically "numbing" the arm, but the wild part of seeing your arm suddenly behave with a mind of its own, would be an observation from the perspective of the queen, and is probably more or less like seeing a junkie or crackhead stumble around like a zombie, as far as the colony-as-organism is concerned.

So, if the ant is "fighting" the "will" of the fungus, it's probably more likely that the ant is receiving strong scent signals compelling it to act a certain way, and the sauce that the fungus is producing as an override to the biological signals in the ant's circulatory system (remembering that insect circulatory systems are primitive, and probably easily hackable fluid systems) might be weak, or the infectious load might be light, resulting in a noisy, conflicted signal at the neurological level. Maybe like a junkie, not completely ruined by dope.

tl;dr soldier ants follow their nose without a whole lot of agency, because they are born to serve the colony, selflessly. Thus they likely are unconcerned by a "loss of self," and perhaps might be more emotionally invested in failing the colony, if soldier ants have emotions.

> 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 Chinese emperor (until Pu Yi) she is completely manipulated by her attendants.

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 level of recognition and internal modelling, on a per-organism basis is a clue to self awareness and emotional involvement in individual perception and experience. With all ants, maybe this quality is low, and mostly instinctual, embedded in gene expression.

Which cell of your brain is the seat of sentience? I know little about ants and maybe that analogy sucks, but it seems like it could easily not be anything more specific than the colony as a whole.

Well, we have clues that it exists above the chemical layer, and above the cellular layer, since any individual person is capable of sensory processing at a fidelity measurable to auditory sample rates beyond tens of thousands of cycles per second, and visual frame rates above 30 before we notice flicker. That tells you that a continuous signal is captured and integrated across the organ (the brain) in real time.

> That tells you that a continuous signal is captured and integrated across the organ (the brain) in real time.

Not only does it not tell you any such thing but there is pretty good evidence that that is not what's happening. Look at the amount of data collected via the fovea during a single saccade and tell me one collects "frame" data in any way comparable to one's conception of what is happening in front of your body at that time.

You misinterpret my reference to "frame rate." And you're cherry picking.

In the sense that flicker is detectable, when we view a movie in a dark room, we know there are frames in a film reel, if the shutter speed of the projector mechanism operates below a certain frame rate, as an artifact of the media. I'm not claiming that any sort of digital recording occurs, only that the stream of sensory stimulation has a degree of fidelity.

That stream of stimulation affecting the chemical sensitivity of our eyes produces a continuous signal, and go ahead and try to tell anyone that a human brain cannot resolve the visual signal carried by the optic nerve. No one will argue with you but only because it's simply not a conversation worth having.

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 "seat of organizational sentience" is rather obsolete.

As for sentience itself...it's pretty clear (even from timing data alone) that we end up confabulating most of what we consider perception of reality, so perhaps consciousness and sentience are just convenient mechanisms to characterize the order of events?

  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.

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?

Your comment echoes my own experience debating the idea of agency / sentience / existence.

No one who makes these types of arguments can justify why they continue to defend their side of the argument if nothing they do matters.

If you truly believe that you do not exist, explain it to me in a way that does not assume your existence. Most of these arguments start with the two words that the most famous argument for existence does, "I think therefore I am".

> 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 tells you no such thing. In a distributed system if you take out the main ethernet switch (interconnect) you can bring the whole system to a halt, but that doesn't mean the computation happens there.

Now, no kidding: there's a massively parallel (80 G neurons x 10^ fanout) machine with a ~ 100 Hz clock inside your skull, but there's a lot of computation going on elsewhere. Look at what I said about all the neurotransmitters in your gut, not to mention the rest of your reticulated nervous system. And people do plenty of things all the time (e.g. hit a baseball) that require a response and feedback faster than the nervous system can transmit from the big bag o' neurons to the wrist.

I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm saying there's far, far from enough evidence in contemporary neuroscience to support the level of confidence you exhibit in your theory of mind.

I dunno. We’ve seen lots of (well maybe a number of famous) cases where an entire hemisphere gets taken out by stroke or trauma, and the sense of self manages to recover.

The brain is extremely sensitive to status across the rest of the body, but based on amputations and circumstances involving life support, viral pathology and hypoxia, there’s strong evidence that time keeping and concept of self sit just above the floor of the brain pan, near the optic nerve’s main cross-over, between the ears. (give or take and inch or two)

We have a hell of a lot of evidence that learning, planning, processing sensory input, sending out signals to move muscles etc. are all happening in the brain.

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

If that's the case, it's pretty subtle. People with an artificial art don't act much differently than those with a normal heart; compare that with people who've had frontal lobotomies.

> But you seem awfully sure there is consciousness. Perhaps there is no such thing and you only think there is?

This line of argument generally rapidly devolves into semantics and quibbling over definitions. Giving a formal definition of consciousness is difficult. You either end up with a definition like "that phenomena where people think and consider themselves a single entity", in which case it's trivially true that human beings have consciousness; or you define it as something vague and metaphysical like "having a soul" in which case it's unprovable whether humans are conscious or not.

I like this passage from the Macmillan Dictionary of Psychology:

"Consciousness - The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness. The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means ... Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it has evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it."

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.

Which is to conclude, either all ants are sentient, or no ants are sentient (but a variety of degrees of sentience is not expected), and the emergent behavior of a colony is its own phenomenon.

> 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, consuming resources and processing information that is given to you to process.

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.

"the fungus requires use of the ant's nervous system and sensory processing to figure out where a high up place is" How do you know this?

I’d suspect, and offer, with zero proof, that the fungus has hooked into temperature regulation channels, and ants tend to seek warm/bright, high and dry areas in cold rain, to camp out until they can dead-reckon their way back home if they can’t smell their colony.

Maybe the ant is simply reacting to sensations of cold temperature, and maybe it goes blind, setting off reactions to wander away from the ground, search for bright areas to warm up when in dark unfamiliar tunnels.

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