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There is no evidence that intelligence runs on neurons. Yes, there are neurons in brains, but there's also lots of other stuff in there too. And there are creat

There is no evidence that intelligence runs on neurons. Yes, there are neurons in brains, but there's also lots of other stuff in there too. And there are creatures that exhibit intelligent properties even though they have hardly any neurons at all. (An individual ant has only something like 250000 neurons, and yet they're the only creatures beside humans that managed to create a civilization.)

account-5 3y ago
In what way a civilization?
- jxf 3y ago
  I'll repost a comment via Reddit that I think makes this case [0]: Ants have developed architecture, with plumbing, ventilation, nurseries for rearing the young, and paved thoroughfares. Ants practice agriculture, including animal husbandry. Ants have social stratification that differs from but is comparable to that of human cultures, with division of labor into worker, soldier, and other specialties that do not have a clear human analogy. Ants enslave other ants. Ants interactively teach other ants, something few other animals do, among them humans. Ants have built "supercolonies" dwarfing any human city, stretching over 5,000 km in one place. And ants too have a complex culture of sorts, including rich languages based on pheromones. Despite the radically different nature of our two civilizations, it is undeniable from an objective standpoint that this level of society has been achieved by ants. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/t2h1vs/ants_have_achieved_civilization/ https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/t2h1vs/an...
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    To be honest, this description is leaning heavily on the associations we have with individual words used. Ant "architecture" isn't like our architecture. Ant "plumbing" and "ventilation" have little in common with the kind of plumbing and ventilation we use in buildings. "Nurseries", "rearing the young", that's just stretching the analogy to the point of breaking. "Agriculture", "animal husbandry" - I don't even know how to comment on that. "Social stratification" is literally a chemical feedback loop - ant larvae can be influenced by certain pheromones to develop into different types of ants, which happen to emit pheromones suppressing development of larvae into more ants of that type. Etc. I could go on and on. Point being, analogies are fun and sometimes illuminating, but they're just that. There's a vast difference in complexity between what ants do, and what humans do.
    - mandmandam 3y ago
      Nobody is saying that an ant might be the next Frank Lloyd Wright. They're saying they accomplish incredible things for the size of their brain, which is absolutely and unequivocally true. "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise".
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        What I'm saying is that, Bible parables notwithstanding, it's not the individual ant that achieves these incredible things. The bulk of computational/cognitive work is done by the colony as a system. This means that there's little sense in comparing brainpower of an ant with that of a human. A more informative comparison is that between an ant colony and human society - here, humans may come out badly, but that's arguably because our societies are overcomplicated in order to compensate for individual humans having too much brainpower :).
    - ASalazarMX 3y ago
      > There's a vast difference in complexity between what ants do, and what humans do. Interesting parallell with intelligence/sentience/sapience. Despite the means, isn't the end result what you have to judge? The end result looks like a rudimentary civilization. How much back in time would we have to go back to find more sophistication in ant societies than humans?
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        > Despite the means, isn't the end result what you have to judge? The end result looks like a rudimentary civilization. I'm indeed talking about the ends. The operative phrase here is "it looks like". It looks like a civilization, there are even some structural similarities to be found - but it is not a civilization, anymore than a Lego brick with a computer sticker on it is a PC. This is not to deny that ants are awesome and very much worth studying - my point is to avoid following flawed analogies too far. "Ant colonies look like rudimentary civilization, and civilization is/does X, therefore..." is going to be a nonsense statements for most of possible values of X.
    - 3y ago
  - est31 3y ago
    I think you can call ant societies civilizations, but the same time you can call a multi cellular organism a civilization, too. Usually, those also come from the same genetic seed similar to (most) ant colonies. But more importantly, you have various types of cooperation and specialization in multi cellular life. Airways are "ventillation", chitin using or keratinated tissues are "architecture", and there is even "animal husbandry" in the form of bacterial colonies living in organs.
  - account-5 3y ago
    Do termites count as well then? Bees? I'm not being facetious, but these insects seem similar.
    - jwestbury 3y ago
      Perhaps an important point here is that ants pass the mirror test, which, to my knowledge, no other insects (that we know of) do.
int_19h 3y ago
If you really want to present ants as a civilization, I don't think a single ant is a meaningful unit of that civilization comparable to a single human. A colony, perhaps - but then that's a lot more neurons, just distributed.
- hypertele-Xii 3y ago
  A single human will die permanently, alone, miserable, and unproductive. The comparison is apt.
  - int_19h 3y ago
    A single human can survive on their own; there are many historical examples of that. A detached body part, on the other hand, cannot; but it also cannot feel miserable etc. A single ant is more like a body part of the colony in that sense.
    - hypertele-Xii 3y ago
      If by "survive" you mean "age and die leaving nothing behind", then sure. But the same is true for an ant.
      - int_19h 3y ago
        No, it is not true for an ant. A solitary worker ant will not die from old age. Many species will literally starve to death within a few days because they cannot properly digest their food without trophallaxis.
        hypertele-Xii 3y ago
        You're right, it seems ants need each other to digest food, though scientists don't yet know why exactly. From the New Yorker [1]: > The researchers aren’t yet sure exactly what causes the digestive slowdown. Maybe it’s stress. Maybe the fluid that ants exchange when they share food stimulates digestion. Maybe they die still looking for a relative to break bread with. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/lonely-ant https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/lonely-a...
rmorey 3y ago
This is not a good take. Yes there is a lot more going on in brains than just neuronal activity, we don’t understand most of it. But understanding neurons and their connections is necessary (but not sufficient) to understanding what we consider intelligence. Also, 250k is a lot of neurons! Individual ants, as well as fruit flies which have even fewer neurons, show behavior we may consider intelligent. Source: I am not a scientist, but I work in neuroscience research
- srcreigh 3y ago
  What's the argument that understanding neurons is necessary? Perhaps intelligence is like a black box input to our bodies (call it the "soul", even though this isn't testable and therefore not a hypothesis). The mind therefore wouldn't play any more of a role in intelligence than the eye. And I'm not sure people would say the eye is necessary for understanding intelligence. Now, I'm not really in a position to argue for such a thing, even if I believe it, but I'm curious what argument you might have against it.
  - benlivengood 3y ago
    Brain damage by physical trauma, disease, oxygen deprivation, etc. has dramatic and often permanent effects on the mind. The effect of drugs (including alcohol) on the mind. Of note is anesthesia which can reliably and reversibly stop internal experience in the mind. For a non-physical soul to hold our mind we would expect significant divergence from the above. Out of body experiences and similar are indistinguishable from dreams/hallucinations when tested against external reality (remote viewing and the like).
    - mensetmanusman 3y ago
      “For a non-physical soul to hold our mind we would expect significant divergence from the above.” This sounds like it assumes a physical mind could access a non-physical soul. All we probably know is that we have to be using an intact mind to use free will.
    - chimprich 3y ago
burnished 3y ago
What else would intelligence run on?
- resource0x 3y ago
  Every cell in our body, and every bacterium living in a body (e.g. gut flora), contribute to our intelligence. It looks plausible (to me) that there's one "top cell" among them that represents the "person", others just contributing via layered signals, but whether this "top cell" is a neuron or another kind of cell is unknown.
  - burnished 3y ago
    Ah, so you're not studied in neuroscience with some revolutionary theory. A shame.
holoduke 3y ago
Maybe the neurons are the hardware layer. The software is represented by the electronic activity. There is a good video https://youtu.be/XheAMrS8Q1c https://youtu.be/XheAMrS8Q1c about this topic.
mr_toad 3y ago
> There is no evidence that intelligence runs on neurons. 1. Neurons connect all our senses and all our muscles. 2. Neurons are the definitive difference between the brain and the rest of the body. There is “other stuff” in the brain, but it’s not so different from the “other stuff” that’s in your rear end. Don’t underestimate what a neuron can do. A single artificial neuron can fit a logistic regression model. A quarter of a million is on then scale of some our our largest AI, and biological neurons are far more connected than ANN. An ant quite likely has a more powerful brain than GPT-4.
- jwestbury 3y ago
  > 2. Neurons are the definitive difference between the brain and the rest of the body. There is “other stuff” in the brain, but it’s not so different from the “other stuff” that’s in your rear end. Our digestive systems appear to be important to our behaviour, though. Some recent work in mice showed that if colonised with bacteria from faeces of humans with autism, the mice would begin to show autistic behaviours. So, not sure your argument here is especially strong.
  - hanspeter 3y ago
    The role that digestive systems potentially play for our behavior is via neurotransmitters, so in the end it is the neurons, that are responsible. If the study you mention show something else, I would actually be very interested in a source.

account-5 3y ago

In what way a civilization?

jxf 3y ago
I'll repost a comment via Reddit that I think makes this case [0]: Ants have developed architecture, with plumbing, ventilation, nurseries for rearing the young, and paved thoroughfares. Ants practice agriculture, including animal husbandry. Ants have social stratification that differs from but is comparable to that of human cultures, with division of labor into worker, soldier, and other specialties that do not have a clear human analogy. Ants enslave other ants. Ants interactively teach other ants, something few other animals do, among them humans. Ants have built "supercolonies" dwarfing any human city, stretching over 5,000 km in one place. And ants too have a complex culture of sorts, including rich languages based on pheromones. Despite the radically different nature of our two civilizations, it is undeniable from an objective standpoint that this level of society has been achieved by ants. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/t2h1vs/ants_have_achieved_civilization/ https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/t2h1vs/an...
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  To be honest, this description is leaning heavily on the associations we have with individual words used. Ant "architecture" isn't like our architecture. Ant "plumbing" and "ventilation" have little in common with the kind of plumbing and ventilation we use in buildings. "Nurseries", "rearing the young", that's just stretching the analogy to the point of breaking. "Agriculture", "animal husbandry" - I don't even know how to comment on that. "Social stratification" is literally a chemical feedback loop - ant larvae can be influenced by certain pheromones to develop into different types of ants, which happen to emit pheromones suppressing development of larvae into more ants of that type. Etc. I could go on and on. Point being, analogies are fun and sometimes illuminating, but they're just that. There's a vast difference in complexity between what ants do, and what humans do.
  - mandmandam 3y ago
    Nobody is saying that an ant might be the next Frank Lloyd Wright. They're saying they accomplish incredible things for the size of their brain, which is absolutely and unequivocally true. "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise".
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      What I'm saying is that, Bible parables notwithstanding, it's not the individual ant that achieves these incredible things. The bulk of computational/cognitive work is done by the colony as a system. This means that there's little sense in comparing brainpower of an ant with that of a human. A more informative comparison is that between an ant colony and human society - here, humans may come out badly, but that's arguably because our societies are overcomplicated in order to compensate for individual humans having too much brainpower :).
  - ASalazarMX 3y ago
    > There's a vast difference in complexity between what ants do, and what humans do. Interesting parallell with intelligence/sentience/sapience. Despite the means, isn't the end result what you have to judge? The end result looks like a rudimentary civilization. How much back in time would we have to go back to find more sophistication in ant societies than humans?
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      > Despite the means, isn't the end result what you have to judge? The end result looks like a rudimentary civilization. I'm indeed talking about the ends. The operative phrase here is "it looks like". It looks like a civilization, there are even some structural similarities to be found - but it is not a civilization, anymore than a Lego brick with a computer sticker on it is a PC. This is not to deny that ants are awesome and very much worth studying - my point is to avoid following flawed analogies too far. "Ant colonies look like rudimentary civilization, and civilization is/does X, therefore..." is going to be a nonsense statements for most of possible values of X.
  - 3y ago
- est31 3y ago
  I think you can call ant societies civilizations, but the same time you can call a multi cellular organism a civilization, too. Usually, those also come from the same genetic seed similar to (most) ant colonies. But more importantly, you have various types of cooperation and specialization in multi cellular life. Airways are "ventillation", chitin using or keratinated tissues are "architecture", and there is even "animal husbandry" in the form of bacterial colonies living in organs.
- account-5 3y ago
  Do termites count as well then? Bees? I'm not being facetious, but these insects seem similar.
  - jwestbury 3y ago
    Perhaps an important point here is that ants pass the mirror test, which, to my knowledge, no other insects (that we know of) do.

int_19h 3y ago

If you really want to present ants as a civilization, I don't think a single ant is a meaningful unit of that civilization comparable to a single human. A colony, perhaps - but then that's a lot more neurons, just distributed.

hypertele-Xii 3y ago
A single human will die permanently, alone, miserable, and unproductive. The comparison is apt.
- int_19h 3y ago
  A single human can survive on their own; there are many historical examples of that. A detached body part, on the other hand, cannot; but it also cannot feel miserable etc. A single ant is more like a body part of the colony in that sense.
  - hypertele-Xii 3y ago
    If by "survive" you mean "age and die leaving nothing behind", then sure. But the same is true for an ant.
    - int_19h 3y ago
      No, it is not true for an ant. A solitary worker ant will not die from old age. Many species will literally starve to death within a few days because they cannot properly digest their food without trophallaxis.
      - hypertele-Xii 3y ago
        You're right, it seems ants need each other to digest food, though scientists don't yet know why exactly. From the New Yorker [1]: > The researchers aren’t yet sure exactly what causes the digestive slowdown. Maybe it’s stress. Maybe the fluid that ants exchange when they share food stimulates digestion. Maybe they die still looking for a relative to break bread with. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/lonely-ant https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/lonely-a...

rmorey 3y ago

This is not a good take. Yes there is a lot more going on in brains than just neuronal activity, we don’t understand most of it. But understanding neurons and their connections is necessary (but not sufficient) to understanding what we consider intelligence. Also, 250k is a lot of neurons! Individual ants, as well as fruit flies which have even fewer neurons, show behavior we may consider intelligent. Source: I am not a scientist, but I work in neuroscience research

srcreigh 3y ago
What's the argument that understanding neurons is necessary? Perhaps intelligence is like a black box input to our bodies (call it the "soul", even though this isn't testable and therefore not a hypothesis). The mind therefore wouldn't play any more of a role in intelligence than the eye. And I'm not sure people would say the eye is necessary for understanding intelligence. Now, I'm not really in a position to argue for such a thing, even if I believe it, but I'm curious what argument you might have against it.
- benlivengood 3y ago
  Brain damage by physical trauma, disease, oxygen deprivation, etc. has dramatic and often permanent effects on the mind. The effect of drugs (including alcohol) on the mind. Of note is anesthesia which can reliably and reversibly stop internal experience in the mind. For a non-physical soul to hold our mind we would expect significant divergence from the above. Out of body experiences and similar are indistinguishable from dreams/hallucinations when tested against external reality (remote viewing and the like).
  - mensetmanusman 3y ago
    “For a non-physical soul to hold our mind we would expect significant divergence from the above.” This sounds like it assumes a physical mind could access a non-physical soul. All we probably know is that we have to be using an intact mind to use free will.
  - chimprich 3y ago

burnished 3y ago

What else would intelligence run on?

resource0x 3y ago
Every cell in our body, and every bacterium living in a body (e.g. gut flora), contribute to our intelligence. It looks plausible (to me) that there's one "top cell" among them that represents the "person", others just contributing via layered signals, but whether this "top cell" is a neuron or another kind of cell is unknown.
- burnished 3y ago
  Ah, so you're not studied in neuroscience with some revolutionary theory. A shame.

holoduke 3y ago

Maybe the neurons are the hardware layer. The software is represented by the electronic activity. There is a good video https://youtu.be/XheAMrS8Q1c https://youtu.be/XheAMrS8Q1c about this topic.

mr_toad 3y ago

> There is no evidence that intelligence runs on neurons. 1. Neurons connect all our senses and all our muscles. 2. Neurons are the definitive difference between the brain and the rest of the body. There is “other stuff” in the brain, but it’s not so different from the “other stuff” that’s in your rear end. Don’t underestimate what a neuron can do. A single artificial neuron can fit a logistic regression model. A quarter of a million is on then scale of some our our largest AI, and biological neurons are far more connected than ANN. An ant quite likely has a more powerful brain than GPT-4.

jwestbury 3y ago
> 2. Neurons are the definitive difference between the brain and the rest of the body. There is “other stuff” in the brain, but it’s not so different from the “other stuff” that’s in your rear end. Our digestive systems appear to be important to our behaviour, though. Some recent work in mice showed that if colonised with bacteria from faeces of humans with autism, the mice would begin to show autistic behaviours. So, not sure your argument here is especially strong.
- hanspeter 3y ago
  The role that digestive systems potentially play for our behavior is via neurotransmitters, so in the end it is the neurons, that are responsible. If the study you mention show something else, I would actually be very interested in a source.