ARMY ANTS, ELEPHANT EARS, & PHI


Biking down the narrow trail from the hut to the tool shed, on my way to Ek Balam, my shoulder brushed against a seven-ft-tall (2m) Elephant Ears plant, and immediately began burning with pinprick ant bites. The Elephant Ears had been crawling with foraging army ants, and when I stopped the bike to brush them off, there I was standing in the middle of the advancing wave of them, biting ants ascending my hairy legs like diffuse ink stains. Especially before big rains you can run into army ants several times a day. You just can't predict where they'll be, and if you move around at all you're bound to cross paths with them.

De-anted, I continued my ride to town, thinking about ants and other colonial invertebrates. Despite their biting me, I'd felt bad about stepping on them when I escaped. I don't like killing anything if I can avoid it, not even weeds, but Life on Earth is designed so that all things that move around and eat must take the lives of other beings.

Maybe to make myself feel better, I remembered the idea being expressed by some that it's more appropriate to think of the entire colony of a colonial species -- such as ants, termites, wasps, honeybees and such -- as the actual "being," while the individual ant or bee out doing her job for the nest is more like a red blood cell in a body's circulatory system, than what we think of as an independent being. Why must a living thing's circulatory agent flow through veins and absorb nutrients through membranes instead of moving about on legs and feeding itself with a mouth? And why must awareness be limited to animals with nervous systems like ours? Octopuses display enough intelligence that some restaurants have stopped serving them as dishes, though all cephalopods have nervous systems radically different from us vertebrates. Thinking like this, maybe I'd only slightly weakened the actual army ant "being" by taking some of its roving circulatory agents out of circulation.

Actually, a lot of people are asking similar questions, especially in the form of "What is consciousness and where is it centered?" and the same for intelligence. The issues involved are enormous, and the answers, or even hints of answers, would not only usher in a new age of computer science and robotics, but also put a lot of humans out of their brain-using jobs, and change our concepts of what we humans are. If some of our top scientists are right, there's really no reason why eventually we won't construct something much smarter, more aware, more artistic and creative than any human.

My friend Eric in Mérida sends me links to articles with titles like "Consciousness: The Mind Messing With the Mind," "The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence," "The Case for Panpsychism,"and "Artificial intelligence: ‘We’re like children playing with a bomb’." That last essay is subtitled, "Sentient machines are a greater threat to humanity than climate change, according to Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom." Probably you can Google these titles and read them, or if they've been removed, the key words in the titles will summon thousands of similar works.

Nowadays mostly scientists and philosophers are trying to organize their thoughts about these issues, because with consciousness and general intelligence it's hard to conduct the usual kind of experiments. For example, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, whose integrated information theory is a major force in the science of consciousness, has invented a unit, called phi, Φ, for measuring how conscious an entity is. The word "entity" is used because the assumption is that other animals besides humans, as well as plants -- maybe even devices as simple as thermostats -- may have at least glimmers of consciousness, a subjective self.

As for my army ants. I see no reason for ant awareness -- the ant "soul" -- to be centered either in the whole colony, or the individual ant. It can be diffuse, so that as I ran my way out of the ant wave I was intelligence/awareness running through intelligence/awareness... intelligence and awareness like curds in cottage cheese, each curd more or less expressing its own identity and presence, but still only a diffuse lump in the whole carton of cottage cheese...

And, it needn't stop there. I "feel in my bones" that the Earth and all its interacting living and non-living things -- Gaia -- has Her phi, and our Galaxy, and the whole Universe with all its dimensions may turn out to be nothing but Dr. Tononi's phi in its pure, complete state. In fact, maybe I'm actually talking about the "One Thing" often mentioned here, maybe that exactly.