Posted on 04/22/2005 4:21:47 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
If intelligence is the ability to solve problems - then in groups of such creatures as bees, ants and termites - the intelligence itself is a property of the collective. Each individual bee or termite does not have the mental capacity to solve every problem on its own. The same can be said of the molecular machinery within an organism.
Moreover this whole process implies a collective memory which exceeds the mental power of the individual.
This points rather strongly to something beyond the bio/chemistry of the individual ant or molecular machine - most likely, a yet unidentified field.
No one argues that compartmentalized knowledge is a complete image of reality. That is a straw man.
Moreover this whole process implies a collective memory which exceeds the mental power of the individual.
This points rather strongly to something beyond the bio/chemistry of the individual ant or molecular machine - most likely, a yet unidentified field.
Just thought this bears repeating, Alamo-Girl! Beautifully said. Thank you!
Yes, well reproduction is a physical activity, geneology is a physical science, and the methodologies of molecular biology hold up in court, even in capital cases.
When something like variation and selection are observed to happen, it makes no sense to argue from cosmology that they can't happen. If you have evidence that variation, as observed, is not random, please tell me about it.
Why are you ignoring my request to provide evidence.
And tens of millions of people died due to ignorance of medicine. You can have it. You are not horrified by the thought of people as smart as you and I dying by tens of thousands?
And for the ideologically neutral I assert Bohr, Penrose, Tegmark, Barrow, Einstein, Heisenberg, Godel.
Nevertheless, there are many scientists - including many on this forum - who would rather approach each subject in the tile format with edges saying "there be dragons". This, as Nicolo Dallaporta says, is the great problem with modern science.
IMHO, with the giant leaps in knowledge, we need big thinkers now more than ever before to give structure and meaning to what we have accumulated. Otherwise, we'll just have a pile of complex tiles.
Evidence of what?
I would assert that evolution is one of those really big ideas. I have never encountered a critic of it that could give a reasonalbly accurate summary of it. Certainly the criticisms posted here are cartoons.
This opens up a big subject, and I don't know if in this first effort I'll explain myself sufficiently, but I'll try. The ancients, when looking at the world which they didn't comprehend, assigned gods to virtually everything. Humans didn't understand things, but gods did. Humans couldn't affect anything, but gods could. Just about everything had a god. Including trees, which had their dryads.
Clarification note: The Hebrews, by sweeping all that away and positing only one God, made an almost unbelievable intellectual leap. But that's not at all what I'm discussing here, and in rejecting the primitive notion of dryads (as did the Hebrews) we are not rejecting theism.These days we know -- at least we think we know -- that the existence of X doesn't necessarily imply a "god of X." We could describe the worldview of the ancients as a kind of quantum dualism -- a temporary term because at the moment I can't think of another. In the quantum dualist worldview, for each discrete object we observe there is both (1) the physically real thing, plus (2) the inevitable "god associated with that physically real thing."
Another clarification note: No, I'm not describing Platonic forms; I'm attempting to describe a worldview that's far more primitive.Science, in its methodology (and not necessarily in its philosophy) doesn't follow the ancient quantum dualism. Science proceeds to seek answers that do not employ the automatic assumption of quantum dualism. Often they succeed. When they don't, the default conclusion isn't the ancient dualism. If it were, they'd be proclaiming the intellectual equivalent of dryads.
Evidence that there is anything in the behavior of ants and bees that requires an unconventional explanation.
You deserve a wider perspective.
I can point out that ants do more or less random exploration and then leave chemical trails when they find something interesting. Other ants follow these trails, stronger scent, more ants. Variations on this model are also used in computer searches. (Ant colony algorithms.)
Actually all that is needed is a trail of smelly chemicals.
What would be the conventional explanation for, say, a mass return to the hive from all directions of the compass of individual bees who do not seem to be communicating with one another (because "at a distance" from each other and the hive) to "defend" a queen who (for whatever reason) is perceived to be under attack?
It seems that instantaneous, non-local communication is involved here. Do I have "proof" such that you would accept? No. You seem to focus your investigations quite narrowly. I imagine you would like me to "interview" a discrete bee and see what i could get him to cough up. The scientific method really does force a certain focus on the "parts" of things. I think this can lead to distortion of results.
All i would ask is that you simply look at what is (in this matter of the bees), and see whether the conventional explanations really explain anything about what you are observing.
BTW, what would the "conventional explanation" be for this phenomenon, to which any beekeeper can attest?
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
Which, loosely translated by Dave Barry, means "I couldn't be more surprised if I woke up with my head stapled to the floor."
Give me a reference to the phenomenon.
Beesditit placemark
The phenomenon is the real existence of a spontaneous communication having taken place that is "meaningful" to the bees associated with the particular hive/queen, a successful communication that is not contingent on their individual spatial distribution/locations at the time of the communication. The bees are presumed to be not only not in direct contact with each other, but also not directly in contact with the hive/queen. Still, they become able to "know" something. And what they "know" causes them to alter their paths in consequence; i.e., they return to the hive.
This must involve some new and completely unexpected meaning of the word "reference".
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