myrmepropagandist
Flint knapping does something to people. Everyone I know who has learned this skill (to understand prehistoric humans) becomes oddly obsessed with it. They do it waaay more than is strictly needed to understand the archeology. And they become ... evangelical about the whole thing. "You have to try this!" knappers can be very pushy.
I have no doubt they are correct, it must be a kind of time travel through synchronicity.
But, I also wonder if they have awoken something in themselves.
myrmepropagandist
Of course, pheromones play an important role in regulating these very different ways of reacting to their environment. The ants, as a colony, are roughly in synch with each other in terms of level of excitement. You can watch a state of alarm spread from one ant to the next when something upsets just one of them.
But, if the upsetting stimulus fails to persist the ants will start grooming, and that spreads too across the group. Once the grooming is done the ants resume their calm collecting.
myrmepropagandist
Emotional states, moods, are an important part of a nervous system. States such as fear, exhaustion, etc. allow the choices an animal makes to incorporate the sum of feedback gathered from their senses.
When ants are "upset" they start attacking everything new and unfamiliar. They will bite your finger, the tweezers, the water feeder, other insects (but never their sisters.)
When ants are calm they will explore these same objects, they will notice they can collect water from the feeder.
myrmepropagandist
So you have this very simple creature, an ant, using grooming to regulate levels of excitement. But we also know humans, cats, birds, many much larger animals do the same thing. Did the first bilaterian do this? Or is it just a natural consequence of the bilaterian nervous system?
I'm not saying that ants are going "breathe, Myrmecia,... count to ten, get ahold of yourself." ... but I do think that there is some common thread there.
myrmepropagandist
From my observations of ants I'm convinced that they groom as "excitement regulation."
Grooming seems to calm them down and if they can complete grooming without anything else scary happening it's a pretty good sign that the danger has passed and it's OK to stop biting everything.
I've seen two dozen ants all grooming simultaneously after opening then closing the lid to their terrarium (which causes them to panic and start biting everything that isn't a sister)
myrmepropagandist
I'll give another example of an instinct: grooming. The impulse to clean, organize, wash, scrape skin and hair.
Instincts play some role in grooming rituals but the exact expression is influenced by culture and personal choice.
Now consider that many insects groom themselves. Could there be some common element in all of the types of animal grooming and the impulse to self-groom (and to groom others?)
Think about THAT next time you toss a salt packet in the bathtub or braid your hair!
myrmepropagandist
There is a theory and neolithic hand-axes are a bit like bird nests. When a bird builds a nest it's driven by deep instincts and by active choices and real-thinking from the bird.
The idea is that humans made hand-axes in a similar way ... not that it was "just all instinct" but that there is something automatic buried there.
And were that true why would it be totally gone?
Albert ARIBAUD ✎
The the Prisoner's episode "The General" -- not with an AI per she, but with a computer which, at the time, was quite the analog of AI, and clearly not as clever as it was given credit for.
Pimentoad
@futurebird I've been thinking a lot about how in fiction AIs are often depicted as more sapient than the humans around them give them credit for but rarely depicted as less.
I suppose the urge to assign minds to things is just too strong? Maybe "people think this is alive but it isn't" just isn't a compelling story? There's some alien mind or incomprehensible AI stories, but that's different.
Anyway, it sure would be nice to have a popular piece of fiction to point some of these tech guys to.
myrmepropagandist
There is no reason we can't attempt to model these things. But with LLMs people react to the content generated by them as if all of this structure that's normally behind a human-written paragraph exists.
We infer and project the emotions, the goals, the logic and the ability to categorize. But none of these things are present and it results in deeply strange errors that not even an ant would ever make.
myrmepropagandist
That associative LLM systems don't have:
1. moods/emotions
2. goals that can change
Is the other side of what makes these text and texture generators so limited. All they can do is put things that "should go together" together. This can be very powerful when operating on multiple levels but the system is ultimately unmoored and directionless.
The absence of any kind of logic or ability to subtize, quantify and categorize is also a huge and more obvious deficiency.
myrmepropagandist
A lateral concern to this:
I do not think that you can make general AI without incorporating some model of emotional states or moods.
When I bring this up people think about human emotions and complex moods, perhaps in the context of a chatbot. But I'm talking about something much more basic. If you want to model the intelligence of an ant, so it can solve a maze or whatever, you need to have some model for moods if you want to really capture what an ant is doing IMO.
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.