Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [150]
THE FOURTH WAY: THE ANT COLONY AS A MIND
A superorganism is able to gather and use information. Like a computer, which uses segments of code to handle chunks of data, and brains, which use neurons, the colony assigns information processing to subunits, the workers. In each case the subunits are simple and redundant, which allows the whole to function even with sloppiness and local failure. The ability to process information, however, is not the same as consciousness. Neither computers nor ant colonies need consciousness to make smart choices. We have seen, for example, that individually ignorant workers are able, as a group, to select the closest or richest source of food, without any individual knowing a choice was made. In a way, the group as a whole could be said to be thinking. Cognition, of course, is hard to assess, even in big-brained vertebrates.23 Still, it seems likely that an ant colony is more like a human mind than may at first be evident. Brains consist of neurons that, like ants, interact without direction from a central authority; thoughts emerge from these interactions in what consciousness expert Marvin Minsky describes as “a society of mind.”24
But while the neuron occupies a fixed position and is capable only of simple responses—it functions like an on/off switch in a machine—each individual ant processes a lot of information, communicates with coworkers using an assortment of signals, performs labor, may specialize, and moves around. Does mobility give a collection of ants an advantage over the neurons in a brain? We have seen that engineers have had success with swarm-bots, groups of simple robots that self-organize like ants do to solve complex problems, such as recruiting to resources.25 But for processing data, such mobility can be a drawback. The all-but-hardwired communication channels between neurons in the brain allow simple messages to convey complex meanings. A worker ant, if we consider her as a subunit of the collective mind, has to convey more generic information to be understood by the ever-changing workers around her.
Even accounting for their body size, ant workers have small brains when compared to mammals.26 Still, a large nest has no shortage of processing power. The nerve cells of an army ant colony, distributed among a million or more bodies, easily outnumber those in the human cerebral cortex. However, while the superorganism may deploy a kind of swarm intelligence, with workers responding quickly to conditions at a local level, the flow of information through a whole system of roaming bodies can be slow and imprecise.27 It’s no wonder ant colonies have never been able to invent calculus or write a symphony.
Of course, humans can function extraordinarily well both individually and collectively, so our species can produce both Beethoven and the San Francisco Symphony. There can be elements of the “emergent brain” in the synergy between musicians playing a sonata. When we brainstorm with others, we are engaging in the same kind of activity that ants do when they collectively decide to focus on the closest or richest food source, and in some cases a group reaches a viable solution to a problem that no individual would have dreamed up.28
UNITY AND DESTINY
Despite their refined ability to work together, ants do not always live in harmony. There