[extropy-chat] RE: Re: Intelligent Designand IrriducibleComplexity

[Hara Ra]

I have read "The Ants" by EO Wilson and it is clear that an ant colony 
adapts to its environment only in modifying the timing of the various roles 
an individual ant selects ("Assigned to" is overly telelogical and ant 
colonies run on scent.) and the ratios of the castes which except for the 
sexual forms are determined by how the larvae are fed by the workers. The 
worker's stages are, once in adult form:

         1. Nursery - feeding and cleaning larvae, moving pupae
         2. Queen feeding and egg removal (usually mixed in with Nursery)
         3. General nest - building passages, tending fungi if leaf cutters,
                         weaving leaves if weaver ants, removing trash,
                         cutting up incoming prey
         4. Foraging.

Foraging is last because it is very hazardous, in some species the daily 
attrit rate runs 30% for foragers. Experiments have done, and no evidence 
of a group "mind" or the like has ever been found. Interactions such as 
trails or similar to fish schools or bird flocks 'emergent behaviour' are 
present.

>True, but you may want to consider ants for a moment.
Um, the number is 200 billion for a human brain. Each cell connects with 
abount 1000 others. I don't know about ant brains, but I suspect the 
connectivity is much less, perhaps 100. The inter-ant bandwidth is very 
slow, 100 bits/sec at best. The inter-ant signal delay is tens of 
milliseconds. The ants moving about prevents the detailed specialization 
which is found in all parts of the brain. (An indirect argument against any 
homogenous form of 'computronium')

Ant colonies with multiple queens wiht populations running 6 million do exist.

>Another thought on ants: An ant brain has about 250,000 brain cells. A human
>brain has about 10,000 million. So a colony of 40,000 ants has a collective
>brain roughly the size of a human. (Can't remember the source)
>
>From: "Eliezer Yudkowsky" <sentience at pobox.com>

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=   Hara Ra (aka Gregory Yob)    =
=     harara at sbcglobal.net       =
=   Alcor North Cryomanagement   =
=   Alcor Advisor to Board       =
=       831 429 8637             =
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