Philosophy Now Forum

Ants are the most common insect in the world.do you reacon they think.they have consciousness and a brain so may be they do.do they automaticaly know with out thinking knowing doesnt take time where as thinking does.what do ya reacon.

jackles wrote:Ants are the most common insect in the world.do you reacon they think.they have consciousness and a brain so may be they do.do they automaticaly know with out thinking knowing doesnt take time where as thinking does.what do ya reacon.

Some people talk about an ant colony having collective consciousness. However there may be ways to describe that happens without using that concept, maybe.

The interesting thing is that their brains are very, very tiny, and therefore it seems unlikely that any single ant could come up with the strategies, systems and architecture of the ant colony as a whole. And yet it exists.

However, they could probably say the same thing about us and our cities.

Maybe we should just regard them as a society of highly specialised individuals, each doing what they know best?

RickLewis wrote: Maybe we should just regard them as a society of highly specialised individuals, each doing what they know best?

Isn't that what scientists are doing now?

jackles wrote:Ants are the most common insect in the world.do you reacon they think.they have consciousness and a brain so may be they do.do they automaticaly know with out thinking knowing doesnt take time where as thinking does.what do ya reacon.

As far as animal consciousness is concerned it would be very difficult to gain some type of agreement on the subject. Most people would probably agree that my dog is conscious, but what about the flea on his back?

Thomas Nagel, in his famous paper, "What is it like to be a Bat?" invites us to imagine what it is like to be a bat, but defies us to know what it is actually like to be a bat. Nagel assumes there is something that it is like to be a bat (hanging upside-down in a cave) so he suggests that if there is something it is like to be that organism then we can say the organism is conscious.

His argument is based on what it is like to have an experience. In other words,there is something that it is like to be me in exactly the same way there is something that it is like to be you. Personal experiences have a unique subjective character about them.

On this basis it is possible to say there is something it is like to be my dog because my dog has experiences. As far as we know ants experience the world in an non epistemic way so there is nothing it is like to be an ant. Ants react to the world, but they don't have epistemic experiences. Their reactions to stimuli are closer to automata.

This is an interesting way of approaching the topic of animal consciousness. One of a number of contentious approaches.

It has been already proven beyond cognizance that ants do apply motor skills as well they are able to acquire memories which help them digitize the internal representation of the familiar routes.

Ants are capable of learning and memorizing which acts as their guiding mechanism that controls their behavior. This has been confirmed by studies related to route following within natural and controlled habitat which also highlights the fact that some ants are more successful than others in establishing route idiosyncrasies (Sommer, et al, 2007).

Which perhaps explains, if you try to divert a solitary ant, it will time and time again go around the object, rather than turn away and travel in another direction.

What about animals other than ants? What about great apes, crows or dogs? What about reptiles and fish?

Before we take on animals in general, we need to agree on vocabulary.

Consciousness: the state of being aware of one's self or one's environment; mindfullness.

Thinking: the process of interpreting stimuli, either sensual or verbal, and of formulating a response.

OK so far?