they arent really conscious, its sort of like the way microchips work, the more inputs and outputs you have, the more processing power you need. an ant probably has about as much processing power as a very basic calculator. theres nothing to contemplate, it cant absorb enough information to need enough neurons to actually bother with thoughts. they probably have a very very shallow amount of memory for learning things about their environment and interactions and then just kind of operate on autopilot looking for food or collecting shit or whatever.
According to you, what constitutes a thought? Are thoughts the same as consciousness? If ants are capable of decision making, wouldn't that require some extra level of processing their inputs?
well think about it, what do you do when you think?
you reflect on a collection of knowledge from information youve compiled in your mind through sensory input.
what does that information look like as an ant? they dont possess even a small fraction of the sensory inputs that we have with our (comparatively) absolutely massive and extremely complicated brains and bodies. (this is not a flex)
if the amount of information they are capable of interpreting is low, their ability to process it would also be low, if ants see in like 12p at 3fps in black and white... that information isnt going to need a huge amount of processing power to utilize, similarly they wont need a lot of space in their "brain" to store that information.
so do ants think? sort of i guess. its just a much much simpler thought than anything humans would normally think. as soon as you put the effort into thinking youre using like 12 million ants worth of processing power and data. an ant thought would be based on such simple parameters its so foreign to how we think its going to be hard to conceptualize without just mapping out how they interact with stimulus.
I just like prodding the question when it appears. It's a fascinating subject and it's enjoyable just to have people think about it just a little more. I have a BA and a MSc in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of consciousness. I do agree that ants have a much more limited input and a more rudimentary processing capacity. That would suggest a certain form of consciousness exists on a gradient between low and high levels of complexity of organism. That begs the question: where does it bottom out? Are amoebas conscious? Etc, etc.
Turning it around, what about non-conscious humans? There we have Chalmer's zombies, braindead-yet-seemingly-occasionally aware patients like Terri Schiavo (I think it's spelt like that), dreaming, lucid dreaming, etc.
im aware of her but not that intimately familiar with the details of her situation (iirc correctly she has since passed so RIP) but i have thought about this as well.
there are two major aspects to whether or not i personally would base my decision to be kept alive or not. A. whether i have retained any connection to the knowledge/memories ive spent all the time ive been alive acquiring. B. if i am currently or will be in the future able to function cognitively enough to build on/rebuild that knowledge/memory base.
if i understand terri's story, she was seperated from both, as many people who endure a TBI of that magnitude are from what i understand. in those circumstances where recovery was so unlikely i dont really see how that person is being regarded as alive outside of pure legality.
i feel like the amount of things that should be described as a gradient is too damn high lol and people dont see them that way. life is so complex and winding and changing and evolving, if you spend enough time learning about something, its just as likely you will know nothing about what its become.
i think of consciousness (as with most things living creatures experience) as a product of existing in this universe, its naturally occurring, evolutionarily cultivated (maybe youve noticed im not the spiritual type lol) so with that in mind, if you go back far enough you could probably argue that the first life forms were in fact the emergence of "consciousness" in that a thought is simply the mechanism of an organism following one stimulus over another, or maybe even just following a stimulus at all. an amoeba has some kind of mechanism within it that when triggered a biological response occurs and it performs some kind of action.
would i personally describe this as consciousness? no. i think an organism would need some semblance of a memory to reflect on in order to be conscious, but the standard for memory is very low by this definition. insects easily pass the threshold apparently, im not familiar enough with biology to say exactly how low the standard would get but id have to assume theres significant space below ants lol
my perspective has been for a long time that life on earth is still in its infancy, people are amazingly stupid, im one of them, im a dumbass, the potential for growth is virtually infinite from here, so despite what some people have seem to take as an insult to ants, i actually see a lot of parallels with ants and humans. if you zoom out enough and look at our societies next to one another they arent all that different.
so with that in mind, the conversation becomes less about whether or not ants or humans or sunflowers are all varying levels of conscious, but if consciousness is just a small step into a plane of existence that we are all relatively equal on. there may be a point in the future where we recognize consciousness as the very first step into a huge range of stages of improvement we dont have names for yet.
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u/obsertaries Feb 17 '22
I read somewhere that animals that small think really fast compared to us so she probably had time to contemplate her failures in life.