Keith Nagel wrote:
Hi Steve,
One of my clients holds a few patents in brain imaging technology,
and he often asserts "I've looked for that little homunculus far
and wide, but could not find him". I suspect something similar with
the artificial version of consiousness, it's not something that
can be easily put in a box as such. A good example of this is a bee
or ant colony; clearly there is a large scale consiousness at work
here even if the individual bees or ants seem a bit thick headed.
Does the consciousness reside in the bee, or the spaces between the bees?
Maybe the question is being phrased too poorly to provide sufficient space
for an answer.
Or both, for that matter.
They've got the neurotransmitters (in the form of pheromones) that make
some level of coherent "thought", or at least "emotion", possible for
the hive as a whole. The obvious example is what happens when you make
one hornet mad and the whole hive comes after you. The one that you
ticked off to start with released something that got the other ones
going, as a result of which the hive reacted as a single entity.
But there aren't any dendrites, no direct high-bandwidth bug-to-bug
communication; the multiprocessor here seems very loosely coupled.
Furthermore, there's some tantalizing evidence for individual
consciousness, or at least self-interest, in both ants and bees. The
hardest working ants don't live very long, and ants that spend all their
time foraging die rather soon. That isn't especially strange. But what
_is_ strange is that individual ants have been observed showing "lazy"
behavior -- they will appear to go out foraging, but as soon as they get
a few inches from the hill (out of "sight" of their sisters) they stop
and flop, and just hang out for a while. Furthermore, there is evidence
-- at least for small colonies of ants -- that the foragers aren't doing
it voluntarily; they're the ones that got pushed out by the other ants.
The inter-ant behavior seems to indicate that ants "prefer" to stay in
the hill, and only go out foraging if they are forced to do so; this
despite the fact that they all share the same genes and there should be
no benefit for an ant to favor its own good over the hive's good.
Unfortunately I can't provide a reference for this. I read the bit
about "lazy" behavior in a book or article someplace and it's probably
well known, but the claim that foragers only do it under pressure from
their peers came from studies being done at Harvard by someone I knew
slightly and I have no idea whether it's widely known, or if it was even
ever published. The ants in question were some south american variety
which had colonies which were small enough to study in the lab.
Army ants are another interesting one -- I've read that close
observation reveals that the vanguard of the army seems very reluctant
to proceed, and constantly falls back among the other ants. It _looks_
like it's pressure from the rear which keeps the van moving. Why would
the ants in front be reluctant to move forward? Well, maybe it's
because the strong instinct which keeps the army together makes all the
ants want to follow the other ants -- or maybe it's because being in the
vanguard is the riskiest place to be.
With regard to bees, many worker bees, given half a chance, will lay
eggs. They're normally prevented from accomplishing anything with their
eggs by nurses who destroy their eggs rather than let them hatch. I
have the impression that worker's eggs always hatch into workers -- no
drones, no queens -- but I don't recall where I read that.
So it seems to me that one could speculate that the hive is conscious,
but the individual cells may be conscious as well. To bad we have no
way of testing that speculation! :-)
