
An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019) - maxbaines
https://aeon.co/ideas/an-ant-colony-has-memories-that-its-individual-members-dont-have
======
peter_retief
We are all colonies of creatures, really interesting book written 100 years
ago called the "Soul of the Ant" by
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Marais](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Marais)

------
SupplyChainGuy
Working in Industrial Automation has given me alot of respect to ants. While I
was interning at Tesla a few years back, it amazed me how 'no one person'
understood the massive operations of building the model 3, but together (along
with our 1000's of suppliers) we were able to make extremely advanced
technology.

Essentially, humans are just a more advanced version of ants. No one
understands the vast amount of knowledge we've gathered, but this knowledge
has allowed us to be able to sustain our vastly growing population numbers.
Without this 'specialization of knowledge' or given some apocalyptic scenario,
our ability to sustain our numbers would drastically decrease.

------
ckastner
> _Foraging in a harvester ant colony requires some individual ant memory. The
> ants search for scattered seeds and do not use pheromone signals [...]_

This was surprising to me. Until now, I was under the impression that all ants
used pheromones, which leads to coordination not with each other but through
the environment [1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy)

------
linhchi
More impressive is the slime molds, since they are not even animated as ants

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brainless-
slime-m...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brainless-slime-molds/)

------
phil9987
This reminds me a lot of multi agent systems in computer science. A very
exciting concept which is aiming to provide a framework for distributed
artificial intelligence:

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/chemical-
engineering/mu...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/chemical-
engineering/multi-agent-systems)

------
Vagantem
Kurzgesagt has a couple of amazing short videos on ants:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_e0CA_nhaE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_e0CA_nhaE)

------
phyzome
« Colonies live for 20-30 years, the lifetime of the single queen who produces
all the ants, but individual ants live at most a year. »

Individual ants... except for the queen. How likely is it that the _queen_ is
acting as the memory of the colony?

(I don't think this is actually the answer—I agree that it's more likely that
the memories are being held in the collective—but it has to be ruled out
somehow.)

------
fermenflo
> It searches until it finds a seed, then goes back to the trail, maybe using
> the angle of the sunlight as a guide, to return to the nest, following the
> stream of outgoing foragers.

I remember reading that ants counted steps to find their way home. Perhaps I'm
remembering incorrectly or maybe it was false?

Either way, cool article. Emergence is a cool property that shows up
everywhere!

------
awinter-py
see also this 2014 article on consciousness in 'rather dumb group entities'
including 'antheads'

[https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious...](https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-140721.pdf)

------
_0ffh
Another nail in the coffin of the Chinese Room. I hope we can finally bury
that misconceived argument soon.

------
antsoul
Eugène N. Marais - The Soul of the White Ant (1937)
[http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/Marais1/whiteantToC...](http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/Marais1/whiteantToC.html)

------
bayesian_horse
For a few years now I am wondering if ant colonies do something like portfolio
optimizing, as in how many ants to send to which food location, depending on
risk and reward. I'd guess they do. But I haven't figured out a way to
prove/show that yet.

------
shusson
I wonder if individual members ever make decisions against the ant colony. For
example if the ant colony as a whole discriminates a certain group of ants,
will those ants simply obey? Basically are there rebel ants?

~~~
Pigo
An interesting aspect to me is that a collective intelligence can easily
create a diffusion of responsibility. It's a lot easier to kill or give into
base impulses when the blame is shared by the whole. Bees and ants don't
tolerate nonconformity, they'll kill a queen if she's not filling her role.

I didn't enjoy To Kill a Mockingbird, but I think it's good for kids to read
it.

------
mmrezaie
Comparing this to ant colony algorithms and considering ant colony as a
network of actors; Can we analytically measure how much more information the
network has compared to the aggregation of the individual entities in the
network?

------
ThomPete
Just like your individual neurons dont understand Chinese :)

------
chaoticmass
I feel like this is tangentially related:
[https://wiki.c2.com/?TheFiveMonkeys](https://wiki.c2.com/?TheFiveMonkeys)

------
yayr
The novel "Children of time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky imho greatly picks up this
notion among others, highly recommended read

------
avodonosov
probably the same analogies can be drawn for human society

------
superMayo
But are ants Turing complete ?

~~~
samcodes
A simplified model of ants are Turing complete (the colony, not the ants)
[https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-59496-5_343](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-59496-5_343)

------
dondawest
The title is extremely sensationalistic, Occam’s razor points to
undetectable(by humans) scent trails that lead the ants to the same harvesting
locations every year.

There are no revelations about memory or collective consciousness to be found
in this article. Every Occam in the world would infer human-undetectable scent
trails from the evidence presented here, not some cosmic revelation about “how
memory works” like the title and first paragraphs of the article heavily
imply.

@pg @dang this title and article in general is outrageously misleading.

~~~
jhedwards
This reminds me of some conversations I've been having with a friend of mine
who is skeptical of "emergence" (or at least the way it is often described).
After going over the problem with him for a while I eventually was convinced
that emergence is not "more than" the sum of the parts, emergence is
_precisely_ the sum of its parts.

Ants produce these higher level patterns not because there's some magical
thing that "emerges", but because they are precisely evolved to coordinate
with each other to create those patterns.

------
jriddle567
the internet has paths that its individual routers don't understand ;-)

------
asplake
For a sci-fi take on this, Children of Time and Children of Ruin, Adrian
Tchaikovsky

~~~
fho
Just to elaborate (mild spoilers):

At some point in the _Children of Time_ book, ant colonies become domesticated
and are cultivated into general computation "devices".

I definitely recommend the first book, but have yet to finish the second one.

~~~
shostack
Second one has a different vibe, but I also enjoyed it. The author has a great
way of helping you understand the different senses and intelligence of the
different species.

------
gowld
wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algorithms

------
arnoooooo
I recommend looking up Donald Hoffman's theory of conscious agents.

He proposes that all sentient beings are networks of conscious agents, the
simplest conscious agent being binary (it has a world, and can only act in two
ways).

Any composition of conscious agents is itself a conscious agent.

Interestingly, "the world" of each conscious agent might be only other
conscious agents.

~~~
htwerwe34234
This notion of the 'self' is "standard" in Dharmic traditions, and has been
for over two millennia.

Then again it remains very fashionable to steal ancient ideas from East and
market them as "brand new" genius inventions of Westerners. The amount of
uncited plagiarism that occurs in this manner is quite simply astonishing.

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
The tone and the emotional message of your post though is not at all in the
spirit of Dharmic traditions.

What is "stealing" in a world where everything is one and the conscious
universe is trying to understand itself in the best way? Why would it assign
negative connotation to copying information, if that information is in fact
truthful!?

------
ggm
Doesn't Hofstadter have a rap about ant colony consciousness?

------
nathias
read GEB

------
tobinfricke
Reminds me of the "Tradition is smarter than you are" article that was posted
here a few days ago.

[http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/08/tradition-is-
smar...](http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/08/tradition-is-smarter-than-
you-are.html)

~~~
wsc981
Both this article and the one you linked reminded me also of what Nassim
Nicholas Taleb described in "The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the
Small Minority" [0].

 _> The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in way
not predicted by the components. The interactions matter more than the nature
of the units. Studying individual ants will never (one can safely say never
for most such situations), never give us an idea on how the ant colony
operates. For that, one needs to understand an ant colony as an ant colony, no
less, no more, not a collection of ants. This is called an “emergent” property
of the whole, by which parts and whole differ because what matters is the
interactions between such parts. And interactions can obey very simple rules.
The rule we discuss in this chapter is the minority rule._

 _> The best example I know that gives insights into the functioning of a
complex system is with the following situation. It suffices for an
intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a
minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for
the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an
optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer
would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of
the majority. If it seems absurd, it is because our scientific intuitions
aren’t calibrated for that (fughedabout scientific and academic intuitions and
snap judgments; they don’t work and your standard intellectualization fails
with complex systems, though not your grandmothers’ wisdom)._

Of course in this context the grandmothers' wisdom is tradition in some way,
as this is passed down by generations. Same as many practices in religion,
some of which that might have been useful at some time (like not eating pig
meat, because one would get sick quicker as pigs might eat anything they would
find).

I live in Thailand and my girlfriend is Buddhist. Often I just go with the
flow with regards to Buddhist practices, even as a non-believer, cause there
might be some real use for these practices that I don't understand as a non-
believer. At the very least it will make the Thai people in our village accept
me more whenever they see me doing the same actions as my girlfriend at our
local temple (burn incense, "pray" to some statue, etc...).

\---

[0]: [https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-
dict...](https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-
of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15)

~~~
Psyladine
>The interactions matter more than the nature of the units. Studying
individual ants will never (one can safely say never for most such
situations), never give us an idea on how the ant colony operates. For that,
one needs to understand an ant colony as an ant colony, no less, no more, not
a collection of ants. This is called an “emergent” property of the whole, by
which parts and whole differ because what matters is the interactions between
such parts. And interactions can obey very simple rules.

I wish Taleb would give more on identifying & learning on a systems wide
approach. For abstractions and "less than obvious" spheres this becomes
difficult to separate the forest from the tree, or is the forest the system,
or the genera of the plant in question, or its bordering systems, etc...
behaviors and patterns which are emergent only at the individual level make
'10,000 foot views' harder to perceive, let alone examine and extrapolate from
"obey very simple rules"

~~~
K0SM0S
I really appreciate Taleb's ideas in general, but this one strikes me as
emotionally-driven, vastly more "intuitive" than substantiated.

It's a like a world chess master or NBA player telling others "play _better!
"_ — what Taleb means here, imho, is that too many scientists fail to propose
models that fits his mathematical perception, his world view, but if it were
that simple, he'd have a book called "system thinking".

He touches a lot on how he views things, so you can infer a lot of his mental
framework from reading e.g. the Black Swan or Antifragile — both great in
their own respect. But simple rules on this topic, that would/will be
groundbreaking.

I honestly pride myself as a "transdisciplinary" mind (which comes with a lot
of "imposter-of-all-trades" syndrom, but meh, it's also humbling to realize
the path to knowledge may not be the most rewarding short-term path). Taleb is
one of those relatively "wide" minds, he's able to speak with substance on a
lot of domains, but like many abstract thinkers I think he displays a lot of
the casualness towards the difficulty of actual implementation.

It's great to talk about systems but the reality is often about refactoring
horrible codebases and if it works you'd rather spend more money on the actual
mission that making things and concepts prettier. Even, especially at the
edge.

My 2 cts obviously. TL;DR, I wouldn't look much into it. It's one of those
things we only hear because who says it is famous, not because there's so much
velocity to the idea.

------
zzo38computer
I think something similar has been suggested in the book called
Godel,Escher,Bach.

~~~
ragebol
Was thinking the same thing, that is the character 'Aunt Hillary', which is an
ant hill. In the Dutch translation (which I read years ago) she's called 'Myra
Hoop'. Funny how those translation still make sense, same as in the Harry
Potter universe where the names even have to be anagrams.

~~~
tgvaughan
It's not an accident: Hofstadter and the translators put a lot of work into
preserving the wordplay across translations.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach#Tra...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach#Translation)

------
hachibu
I wonder if this could be used as an argument for Panpsychism?

~~~
uoaei
I'm trying to figure out a way to incorporate this notion of hierarchical life
into panpsychism and the "global brain" hypothesis. (Disclaimer: I'm already
sold on and a proponent of the theory of panpsychism.)

It seems more and more to me like this hierarchy goes all the way up (to the
single superorganism that is the universe) and all the way down (to the
presence or absence of fermions in particular states, inducing a duality and
thus a basis of computation via the Pauli exclusion principle). If this
hierarchy is consistent across all scales, then we can conclude that if
consciousness exists at one level then it exists at all levels.
Sentience/awareness is a different question, mind you, and "memories" are
associated with awareness of past events.

I'm also starting to believe that "consciousness" in terms of directed will
doesn't truly exist, and that only "experience" exists. The rest (wants,
desires, opinions, will) are electrochemical reactions which respond to local
changes in the environment, although we experience them as much more than that
for ultimately self- (and macrosystem-)serving reasons. These electrochemical
reactions are present because they have over time become more important in the
processes necessary for the propagation of whatever they're supporting. This
is all very vague and hand-wavy but this article on the thermodynamic theory
of life might be clearer [1].

In the discussion yesterday about this topic on HN I brought up the example of
ant colonies [2] in an attempt to spur discussion in this direction.

[1] [https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-
theory-o...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-
the-origin-of-life-20140122)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22047653](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22047653)

~~~
hachibu
Oh wow, thanks for the great reply. I didn't think anyone would respond. I'm
going to dig into the links.

Do you have any other suggested reading?

~~~
uoaei
I'd suggest, if you're already receptive to these concepts, to delve into
Buddhist/Zen Buddhist/Taoist literature in addition to the more cerebral
(pun?!) stuff out there. They're basically saying the same thing, albeit with
much different language and framing. In particular the notions of
interdependence, sunyata (my personal favorite idea/concept ever), and
duality(ies).

Beyond that, unfortunately most of my exposure to the ideas related to
panpsychism come in fits and bursts, and usually pieces which aren't about
panpsychism inspire my ponderance more. Subjects include: animal
consciousness/experience; the apparent intelligence of complex systems,
whether man-made or independently-arising; autonomic, pre-conscious behavior
in humans; computational theory, especially in physical systems; emergence and
complexity writ large; complex adaptive systems in general.

Unfortunately I haven't done a lot of seeking out books on this topic.
Nautilus and Aeon magazines (the latter is linked in OP) have thought-
provoking stuff which touch on these topics more often than you'd think.

------
lopmotr
The safe existence of corporations suggests to me that the popular fear of AGI
taking over and destroying humans is unrealistic. Corporations are like giant
powerful AGI machines with the single purpose of making money for their
shareholders no matter the consequences. They do become a dangerous threat to
humans if left unchecked but we've developed systems to keep them under
control.

~~~
salawat
>Corporations are like giant powerful AGI machines with the single purpose of
making money for their shareholders no matter the consequences.

That is patently wrong. A corporation exists to distribute risk, and
acommplish a task, ideally in a way that creates value for backers, but it is
not a given that all profit creating avenues of behavior are desired or worth
the egregious cost in negative externalities, or even that a corporation
_must_ generate profit.

And unfortunately those control mechanisms you mention seem to be failing with
alarming regularity due to regulatory capture.

~~~
simiones
> it is not a given that [...] a corporation must generate profit

I think that you are technically right, in that there can exist not-for-profit
corporations. But for-profit corporations, which is what most people think
about when they say "corporation" are generally legally required to put profit
above any other value, assuming they are operating legally.

I completely agree with you that this is not a necessary way of organizing
human society, and we are seeing more and more that the current for-profit
system is disastrous for the environment and for society in general -
especially given the inefficiency of regulation that you also mention.

~~~
notahacker
> But for-profit corporations, which is what most people think about when they
> say "corporation" are generally legally required to put profit above any
> other value, assuming they are operating legally.

No they aren't. They do have a fiduciary duty to act in the interests of
shareholders, which means not taking actions which are unexpected and
obviously harmful to other shareholders like paying all the company's revenues
to another company wholly owned by the CEO. But that duty to shareholders
actually even _obligates_ them to take into account factors other than profit,
whether that's mitigating risks or abiding by a shareholder resolution to
follow a 'socially responsible' business practice that costs them a lot of
profit, and management absolutely also has enough discretion to choose to
design and follow its own 'socially responsible' business practices or decline
to enter a profitable sector they don't want to involve themselves in. No
executive has ever been penalised for not putting profit above any other
value.

Companies pursuit of profit is much less driven by legal obligation and much
more driven by the fact that greater profitability tends to generate greater
returns to the management as well as the shareholders.

------
mFixman
Yesterday there was a link in HN regarding artificial intelligence, and a user
raised an interesting question: if a ML algorithm can be considered conscious,
could a group of people doing the equivalent calculations by hand be the same?

I think that ant example answers that question with a strong "yes".

~~~
jbotz
Here is an even more interesting question: if an ML algorithm can be
considered conscious, do you even need to "run" it (whether on a computer or
by a "group of people doing calculations by hand") for that consciousness to
exist? An algorithm is fully deterministic... it will always produce the same
result, always "think the same thoughts" given the same input. So where is the
consciousness, in the execution, or in the algorithm?

Think of Conway's Game of Life, which has been shown to be turing-complete.
The various "creatures" that exist in its worlds exist even without the
program being run. We run the program only to observe them... the execution is
for the external observer's benefit, the creatures exist in the "mathematical
space" of the cellular automaton, not on the computer where the simulation is
run. If an algorithm can be conscious, then so can one of this game's
creatures, and its consciousness will be observing and interacting with the
Game's mathematical reality, which will seem quite physical to that creature
even without ever being simulated on any "physical" (to us) hardware.

Maybe all of existence is like that, no? There are people who say that maybe
our Universe is a simulation. I say sure, but it doesn't need to be "running"
on anything... it just exists because the rules it follows exist
mathematically. It does get simulated, to an approximation however... inside
our conscious observation of it! The Universe "exists" mathematically, but a
subset of it "runs" in the brains of the observers to which it gives rise...
it is the ultimate strange loop, forever eating its own tail.

~~~
visarga
> An algorithm is fully deterministic... it will always produce the same
> result, always "think the same thoughts" given the same input.

Well, these are not just algorithms, they are actual agents. So they are
embodied and embedded in the environment. Each action or movement can change
the information that this algorithm learns from. So different previous
experiences mean different agents. Also, the learning process is reliant on
noise, and this can cause different outcomes. You would have to reproduce the
whole environment in order to get to a situation that an agent will produce
the same results given the same input.

Also, laws of physics are like a fixed algorithm our brains run on.

> So where is the consciousness, in the execution, or in the algorithm?

Consciousness is in the triad formed of environment, agent and reward signals.
It's a continuous loop of perception, judgement and action, followed by
observing the reward signals. The purpose of this loop, for biological agents,
is self reproduction - so it is a self reliant ultimate purpose, it needs no
external purpose except this one.

------
anonytrary
> Ants use the rate at which they meet and smell other ants, or the chemicals
> deposited by other ants, to decide what to do next. A neuron uses the rate
> at which it is stimulated by other neurons to decide whether to fire. In
> both cases, memory arises from changes in how ants or neurons connect and
> stimulate each other.

Main takeaway, very interesting analogy. Ant colonies are great examples of
complex systems with emergent large-scale behavior. Indeed the same could be
said about networks of neurons. Interesting to think of an ant colony as the
sum of oscillations of signals.

> Every morning, the shape of the colony’s foraging area changes, like an
> amoeba that expands and contracts.

Sounds like an emergent macroscopic "heartbeat" of the colony.

> In an older, larger colony, each ant has more ants to meet than in a
> younger, smaller one, and the outcome is a more stable dynamic.

It makes sense that small perturbations would temporarily morph the heartbeat,
but would probably snap back into the default oscillation pretty quickly. It
would be interesting to see if a small colony is equally resilient to small
perturbations as a large colony is to large perturbations, keeping some
adjusted ratio of the perturbationSize/colonySize constant.

> individual ants live at most a year.

This comes as a surprise to me.

~~~
hansbo
> Main takeaway, very interesting analogy. Ant colonies are great examples of
> complex systems with emergent large-scale behavior. Indeed the same could be
> said about networks of neurons. Interesting to think of an ant colony as the
> sum of oscillations of signals.

Indeed. I've long thought that an ant colony should be seen as a single
individual, rather than a group. One part which can procreate, like the
reproductive system. Another which can fight off invaders, like white blood
cells, or perhaps muscles. The anthill, in turn, is like a body; constructed
by the cells and neurons, and protecting the system as a whole.

~~~
koonsolo
I was going to say you can also look at a country like this, with roads as
veins, military as white blood cells, scientists/universities for brains, etc.

But my theory falls apart with the reproduction system. We don't really
reproduce other 'countries'. While with ant colonies, a single entity produces
all the "cells", and also all the "embryos" to start their own ant colonies.

In that sense an ant colony uses asexual reproduction if looked at as a whole.

Thanks for the new insights! :)

~~~
dragonwriter
> But my theory falls apart with the reproduction system. We don't really
> reproduce other 'countries'.

Sure we do. The UK has a whole lot of offspring, for instance.

~~~
yesbabyyes
Offspring, perhaps. But kidnapping is not reproduction.

~~~
dibujaron
I'd say it's reproduction, it's just not voluntary reproduction. Every time a
culture invades another, you can think of it as creating a new culture that
has the "genes" of the previous two. Examples include the influence of the
moors on Spain, the changes to the English language due to the Norman
conquest, and the modern unique Afrikaner culture of South Africa.

~~~
hutzlibu
I'd say it is a mix.

Partly reproduction, partly conquering. As usual the place is not empty.

