so we all know that the brain is just a collection of individual neurons that communicate through neurotransmitters, but since they are "unified" under central processes it produces consciousness. yet ant colonies are merely a collection of ants which communicate through pheromones and are unified by the colony and the queen. so I propose that in the same way the brain is conscious, an ant colony is conscious, not as many conscious ants, but as one unity created by the ants. I suppose this is what Thales meant by "all things are full of gods". a god is merely the "head" of a thing that unifies it. I suppose this is also what Aristotle meant when he said that soul is the act or form of the body. so I propose to call this theory morphic hylozoism. it would also imply that if you have a group of humans and unite them under a hobbesian leviathan, then that forms a new mind, a new "god" is created which they are all extensions of. but when you remove the general of the army, then the unifying mind is gone. this seems absurd, but it is directly implied by supposing that the brain produces consciousness.
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Define consciousness
also i should say i'm not implying that the queen or general is the god. I think the existence of the queen/general allows the god to be created by the ant colony because she unifies all the ants/armies.
I don't necessarily mean "consciousness" as in human subjective experience, I mean any mind that experiences things and which is unified with itself, so that the experiences can be said to belong to the mind. basically I mean the ant colony is one mind and has experiences that belong not to individual many ants but to the ant colony as a whole.
Imagine there was an undiscovered continent the size of Africa. Imagine the dominant life form was a single, massive ant colony. Imagine the ants have developed agriculture and exterminated all predators on their continent.
How would you prove the colony is sentient? What would you look for?
I would ask who their strongest champion is
By analogy with the brain
Not OP but I define consciousness as self-awareness and the ability to have subjective experiences.
>ability to have subjective experience
Can you turn experience off? Also, self-awareness in what sense?
this is the mind body problem no? friend of mine talked about it like this, imagine there's billions of chinese guys holding flashlights, all pointing them up at the sky, on or off, every chinese guy corresponding to a neuron or whatever, does the chinese mob gain consciousness? is it sentient?
If all the chinese guys are communicating with each other through the flashes, and there were areas where many of their individual flashes got combined to produce an action or another determinate process of flashes, then it would have to be sentient. But they would probably also have to have a body where their flashes actually cause an action to happen in the outside world and where they can actually get data that comes from outside themselves.
>so we all know that the brain is just
kek
Imagine being this moronic.
Let me guess. A literal semi evolved monkey in the 1870s figured out all of "evolution" as well?
>christians think an invisible, ineffable, omniscient, all powerful entity becoming human is less ridiculous than monkeys becoming human
>if you disbelieve a literal semi evolved monkey you are a christian
kek redditors and "science" are hilarious.
By Darwin's own theory he was a literal semi evolved monkey with no access to technology.
And you think he nailed it. kek
What are the odds of that?
Good point
The odds of what genetic darwinists claim happened is so absolutely astronomical that a bearded magic person in the sky starts to sound quite reasonable.
Isn't all this made moot by the existence of things like Conway's game of life? Where irreducible complexity arises from simple initial rules.
>don't dots on a screen explain everything
No.
they dont explain everything, but they can help model some things
>monkeys becoming human
Why do you believe fossils can do something animals today can't do?
Explain dog breeds
They are all dogs. Done.
>Why do you believe fossils can do something animals today can't do?
Because evolution is not an overnight process, you dipshit.
I don't have enough blind faith to believe in a religion like evolutionism, the naturalist creation superstition, that contradicts all observational science and laws of science.
Ok moron
I accept your concession.
It's funny because their theory literally says they are pic related.
And with their dumb monkey brains they then "think" about science and come to a correct conclusion.
lamo
>it takes le BILLIONS OF YEARS
>The BILLIONS OF YEARS means it makes sense!
>>A magical sky man that I can't see made the world in seven days!
Doesn't take much to make you sound like a jackass, either.
Off-topic
>off-topic
This thread is about Aristotle’s citation of Thales saying all things are full of gods
>so we all know that the brain is just a collection of individual neurons that communicate through neurotransmitters
Not really, we don't know it in an experiential sense. Which is the only sense that matters.
>under central processes it produces consciousness
Eh, maybe, maybe not. Not of importance unless it can be experienced. Let's see what's next.
>so I propose that in the same way the brain is conscious, an ant colony is conscious, not as many conscious ants, but as one unity created by the ants.
How does this consciousness differ from human consciousness?
>it is directly implied by supposing that the brain produces consciousness
Consciousness of ants seems to be different in your own explanation, in that it does not come from the brain since ants do not have human brain. Yet they supposedly possess the same consciousness?
This is more of a speculation trip. Pretty enjoyable one at that, but I think it's rubbish as far as reality is concerned.
you experience things as if you were one thing despite being billions of different cells. so to say an ant colony experiences things as if it were one thing is not mere speculation, it is a necessary implication of the fact that you experience things. it doesn't matter that the exact character of those experiences would be extremely different. the experience of a blind person is different to a sighted person as well, but both experience in the same way.
NTA, but you're not making much sense here.
When you say we experience things despite being billions of different cells, you're appealing to some shared common-sense understanding of what experience is. And you're saying it's something we acknowledge as different from the concerted functioning of billions of cells. That's why you say 'despite'.
Likewise when you say blind and sighted people both experience things in the same way, you're appealing to a common-sense understanding of what's fundamental in experience, and it again is something different from the concerted functioning of different cells. People knew that blind and sighted people both had this thing we call 'experience' even before they knew what cells were.
So in both those cases, there's some specific that we generally agree to call experience that goes beyond that large-scale organisation of functional units, beyond the idea of a coordinating central process, beyond the idea of a unifying force.
And you wouldn't be making this post if you, like most people, didn't think that something in experience went beyond ideas of, simply, organizing and coordinating and unifying. It wouldn't be remarkable to call ant colony sentient if sentient purely meant organized, coordinated and unified. So you're trying to smuggle the common-sense meaning of the word into a context where it has no right to be.
If you're saying that (a) 'sentience means simply many parts being functionally coordinated', then it would be trivial and uninteresting to say that an ant colony is sentient.
If you're instead saying that (b) 'sentience means possessing that thing we all know as "experience"', then it doesn't make sense to apply it to an ant colony, because you haven't shown the connection between large-scale functional coordination and 'experience' as commonly understood.
What you're trying to do is to take the tautological simplicity of (a) and invest it with the same importance as if you'd proved (b). But you haven't proved it, dude; you haven't.
I already believe that wherever there is any kind of relation there is a corresponding experience. as far as I am concerned this is also tautological and directly implied by the existence of our own experience. from my perspective all i'm saying is that complexity is unified.
you are getting hung up on the word consciousness. true I used it imprecisely. I'm not implying that ant colonies have any self awareness. I am simply implying they have experiences and that those experiences belong to them. etymologically consciousness means "knowing together," so i use it in the sense of a unified, coherent experience.
>you mean to say that consciousness is the same for blind and for sighted persons?
I mean that what it is like to experience something is the same for both.
>I am simply implying they have experiences and that those experiences belong to them
So, you're simply saying "we have experience; ants have experience"?
>I mean that what it is like to experience something is the same for both
Is it uniquely human, and different for each animal type?
i am saying the ant COLONY has experience. but yes the ants also have experience because they are each a microcolony.
>Is it uniquely human, and different for each animal type?
why would it be uniquely human? the only thing that is different is WHAT is experienced. you can easily see how bizarre experience can get in fever dreams and shit, but all of it still has the same basic character of qualitative experience.
>you experience things as if you were one thing despite being billions of different cells
Okay, so I experience myself as "one", that's true experientially. I have different body parts, yet I see myself as I. More than that, it's not exactly my hand knowing that I have a hand, it's something else - consciousness.
> so to say an ant colony experiences things as if it were one thing is not mere speculation, it is a necessary implication of the fact that you experience things
Me experiencing things doesn't carry over to ants becoming conscious as a group. On top of that, you would have to have a different description of consciousness. One which is out of our body and therefore not dependent on the brain, and one that is out of ants' bodies, and therefore not dependent on their bodies.
>the experience of a blind person is different to a sighted person as well, but both experience in the same way
So, you mean to say that consciousness is the same for blind and for sighted persons? I'd agree if that's what you mean.