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I understand what you're saying but that's not what in getting at. It is a little hard to articulate exactly what I'm curious about. So in the insect species',

I understand what you're saying but that's not what in getting at. It is a little hard to articulate exactly what I'm curious about. So in the insect species', the eusocial behavior is genetic. Worker ants are more closely related to their sisters than they would be to their daughters, the enforcement mechanisms in their systems are done by chemical communication, the pheromones are coded by DNA and can even differ slightly in different colonies. It is very very complex. You get behaviors in colonies that are very interesting, such as farming fungus in leafcutter ants (different species farm different species of fungus and use different plant material, and in many cases the fungus species only exist within the ant colonies). It is like the genetics of the colony itself is some sort of intelligent mechanism. This cannot really be called "intelligence". But we intuitively see a similarity with intelligence when we look at it that we cannot quite nail down. A brain of another animal does intelligent things, but with human beings we do something more that we consider the defining feature of our intelligence: we create things, synthesize things, go into space, all sorts of things. This behavior cannot be definitively chocked up to increased complexity of neurons. What is the commonality with all this stuff? Is there some connection between the mechanics of amino acids and intelligence? What fundamentally about the universe makes it so that intelligence occurs inside it? It's all really interesting stuff.

chrisco255 6y ago
It is interesting stuff, but humans are only more intelligent by degrees. All animals and organisms must exert some sort of adaptability to their environment or they are DOA. Our brains are certainly fantastic developments, but we also see this sort of emergent intelligence in AI, so it doesn't necessarily depend on amino acids. There, we see electronic neural nets achieving much of the same behavior. To me, intelligence is a system. It can be a network of neurons embodied in an individual, a colony of ants, or a group of programmers working on a startup. The system itself has inputs and outputs and needs to be viewed at that level. We can view ant colonies as a coherent system. We can view individual organisms as a coherent system. The main difference between ants and humans is that each node in a human social system is more powerful and the bandwidth of information shared between each node is much richer. A lot of people point out that man can send a rocket to the moon, but really, only a civilization can do that. A tribe couldn't do it in a million years. They would lack the industry and the science and the labor and resources and technology to pull it off. Those systems can be viewed as having a sort of emergent, even if ephemeral, intelligence that requires massive amounts of cooperation and coordination to pull off.
Scarblac 6y ago
Only very few humans actually invent things. A few humans went to space, but it took a huge amount of people working together over a long time to make that possible. We have language, as well as writing. And opposable thumbs. Language allows us to teach each other things, writing multiplies that immensely and keeps knowledge over time. (And now audio, video recordings... But that's extremely recent) And we have hands that are very useful for using tools. I don't think we're necessarily that much more intelligent than other animals.

chrisco255 6y ago

It is interesting stuff, but humans are only more intelligent by degrees. All animals and organisms must exert some sort of adaptability to their environment or they are DOA. Our brains are certainly fantastic developments, but we also see this sort of emergent intelligence in AI, so it doesn't necessarily depend on amino acids. There, we see electronic neural nets achieving much of the same behavior. To me, intelligence is a system. It can be a network of neurons embodied in an individual, a colony of ants, or a group of programmers working on a startup. The system itself has inputs and outputs and needs to be viewed at that level. We can view ant colonies as a coherent system. We can view individual organisms as a coherent system. The main difference between ants and humans is that each node in a human social system is more powerful and the bandwidth of information shared between each node is much richer. A lot of people point out that man can send a rocket to the moon, but really, only a civilization can do that. A tribe couldn't do it in a million years. They would lack the industry and the science and the labor and resources and technology to pull it off. Those systems can be viewed as having a sort of emergent, even if ephemeral, intelligence that requires massive amounts of cooperation and coordination to pull off.

Scarblac 6y ago

Only very few humans actually invent things. A few humans went to space, but it took a huge amount of people working together over a long time to make that possible. We have language, as well as writing. And opposable thumbs. Language allows us to teach each other things, writing multiplies that immensely and keeps knowledge over time. (And now audio, video recordings... But that's extremely recent) And we have hands that are very useful for using tools. I don't think we're necessarily that much more intelligent than other animals.