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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

> they live in socially stratified societies

This is gross anthropomorphism. Ants don't have societies any more than the cells in our body have societies.

An ant colony is an organism. Each individual ant has just enough neurons to do the one task that ant does. The overall organism is quite capable, true, but it's not intelligent. It doesn't learn novel things, it doesn't purposely invent, it doesn't 'know' anything.

Ants may take over the world some day, but they won't know it.

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Ants pass the mirror test, which is something very few animals are capable of.

Wait really? Do you have a source for this, I'd love to learn more.

No source, but iirc the scientists applied a colored dot on the ants head. When they saw themselves in the mirror the started trying to remove it from their heads.

There are parasitic mites that attach themselves to ants and they look like a colored dot (usually red). I think the ant “thinking” that the dot was a mite is a much more plausible explanation than the that the ant is some how conscious with its cluster of like 3 and a half neurons

So the ant (allegedly -- I'm eagerly awaiting that source!) saw a dot on the ant in the mirror, and tried to remove the dot on its own forehead. The key point: that looks an awful lot like the identification of the self with the reflected image.

The issue you brought up about the mite is a bit orthogonal to this point. I can give you that the ant was concerned about the possibility of having a mite, and the point still remains that the ant thought it was on its own head only on basis of a reflected image of itself. (Compare to the alternative behavior: the ant tries to get the mite off the reflected image, never making any attempt to remove it from itself.)

it was on hn a while back. the link is dead now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14146776

it’s on wikipedia, with the same dead source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test?wprov=sfti1

EDIT: Working link to the paper (in some journal of science): https://www.udocz.com/read/are-ants-capable-of-self-recognit...

http://difusion.ulb.ac.be/vufind/Record/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot....

Seems like the point was the mirror caused the response

Can ants form a boltzmann brain?

They basically are one.

I think you are fighting a metaphor with another metaphor. Saying that ants form a society indeed implies assigning them human characteristics (anthropomorphism) but saying that they are neurons basically suggests that there are common models to represent an ant colony as well as a neural system. Frankly, I am not sure that the latter approach is more helpful.

Such absolute statements are a reflection of your personality as much as your world view. I'd take the opposite view of all of this. That your body is a society, and society is an organism. You think the gp is anthropomorphizing. I think you're exhibiting species chauvinism, setting prejudiced goalposts.

You're right actually. There were a lot of absolute statements being made, most of them contrary to what the actual evidence is. Ants pass the mirror test with flying colors -- 30 out of 30 scratched a colored dot off their heads when presented with a mirror, but did not if the dot was the color of their skin. The ants didn't do this when presented with a clear pane of glass with other painted ants behind it. The ants are able to pass the test a few days after birth, but not in infancy.

From what I understand, the current thinking is that the ratio of brain mass to overall body size is much more predictive of intelligence than brain mass by itself. And there are odd cases too in humans like an individual with a severe case of hydrocephaly, with 95% percent of his cranial cavity filled with fluid pushing his brain matter to the sides of his skull, and this individual exhibited very high intelligence and majored in mathematics. There is a lot not known about the brain and animal intelligence, and I would not be surprised if we continue to find out amazing things about ants. I recommend an older book called "Ants at Work" by Deborah Gordon to get an idea of the complexity of ant behavior.

There was a case of a French man who suffered from extreme hydrocephaly. He lived a normal life, despite an IQ of 75, was married with two children, and held a career as a civil servant.

“It is hard for me [to say] exactly the percentage of reduction of the brain, since we did not use software to measure its volume. But visually, it is more than a 50 to 75 per cent reduction,” says Lionel Feuillet, a neurologist at the Mediterranean University in Marseille, France.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12301-man-with-tiny-b...

Bruce Sterling’s story Swarm has a brilliant take on the collective that doesn’t have intelligence. Won’t spoil it by saying more but your comment brought it instantly to mind...

If it doesn't invent / learn novel things, how did it learn the one task that it does today? Where does the leap from nothing to knowledge of that one task come in?

Mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, selection. The forces of evolution.

Oh and lots of time and a huge amount of luck (not even ants can exist on Venus or Mars), but "luck" is just another word for selection bias, or looking backwards in time.

> Where does the leap from nothing to knowledge of that one task come in?

There is no sudden leap, only a huuuuuuuge number of tiny steps and lots of complexity of interactions.

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