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Comment by mock-possum | Hacker News Reader

Really fascinating and terrifying how much your entire way of life can hinge on the expression of one bit of DNA like this. I wonder what this would look like if ants had free will and could choose how to live for themselves - would there be ants that would choose not to follow that deviant parasitic strategy, and instead try to integrate / conform?

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You're asking questions which have more to do with our own higher cognition instincts and how our mind factors social behavior, rather than how an ants sees it. So maybe the examples should move towards how society deals with parasites who lack critical social features like empathy, morality, honesty. And if studies are correct, it seems we let them rise to the top.

> So maybe the examples should move towards how society deals with parasites who lack critical social features like empathy, morality, honesty. And if studies are correct, it seems we let them rise to the top.

Some of them, at least. Society has some defenses that shunts most of such cases to mental facilities, prisons, or just plain obscurity. The ones able to avoid those defenses, however, achieve tremendous success at the cost of everyone else.

So just like with parasites in the animal world.

But if we're walking up and down the ladder of abstraction, what about higher-level parasites? I'd call the advertising industry a successful one.

It's hardly one bit. The "single mutation" was a complete chromosome duplication.

Think this is what we are doing. Few of our 'decision' are free, most are genetic. Genetic being, i was born with some propensity for some particular hormone, which leads to some particular decisions. It is completely beyond our ability to choose, because all of those pre-cursors already chose for us and it feels free. Of course we have free will, we just don't have free will to choose what we will. Schopenhauer had it right.

> I wonder what this would look like if ants had free will and could choose how to live for themselves

What makes you think we have free will and ants don't? I can understand thinking there's no such thing as free will, I can understand thinking that all animals have free will, but how would you argue we have it and ants don't?

Free will is probably just nature’s version of ChatGPT temperature.

Roughly 2 bits per base pair. 3 base pairs codon, but the third base pair has some slop.

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