The thing is, even the cells in our body can’t describe a color to our brain, all they can do is send it a different signal, in a different part of the brain, and leave it up to the brain to interpret.
And I believe it’s not fair to dismiss an example of collective intelligence as invalid because the organisms are too small, but if you want it that way, so be it,
What about city’s, or governments, or even companies, they are large entities entirely made of living beings with their own intelligence, beliefs, and thoughts, governments and companies have goals and move and grow, and can do more things at once than a single man, they can feel their surroundings and snuff out competition, those are my examples of collective intelligence, and ant colonies exhibit most of these properties, so don’t try and say that only an intelligent species can form collective intelligence, even bacteria do it.
Technically the brain is a hive mind when you really think about it
Persona.Non.Grata
(God is not on our side, because he hates idiots!)
16
I feel like we are shooting at different things here.
I am not denying the existence of collective intelligence. I am stating that, while it greatly enhances the capablities of a species overall, it is not magic. Simple as that. I believe that ants (or any micro animal, depending on how loose we use the definition) have limits individually, which then sets limits on what they can achieve even collectively. Does that mean that they cannot do anything together? No, I gave examples of things ants can and regularly do with great efficiency. But that doesn’t mean that they can develop an industrial society, let alone space travel. That’s one big jump and I don’t see a way. Which is why I asked what is the way you see.
I don’t know, it actually seems plausible for ants to do metalworking. At least more plausible than underwater metalworking.
Also, in Children of Time (which is a speculative evolution novel), ants develop accidentally develop metalworking, which they use to make weapons attached to their mandibles.
Then intelligent jumping spiders domesticate them for manual labor, but not after the ants almost wipe them out.
True, although ants have existed for millions, if not tens of millions of years. WAY more than humans have. Yet: They havnt developed metalworking, while humans have.
as you can see, there is a large intelligence gap, no matter the colony size.
Actually i know exactly why ant don’t have metalworking!
The reasons are 1. ants do not have long arms with 3-5 digits with one of them being an opposable thumb
2. ants are afraid of fire because it makes the water boil out of their bodies (and it makes it sound like a very small human screaming at the top of their lungs) so they do not know that they can heat up strong shiny rocks to make them glow and be bendable
3. ants do not learn as quickly as humans due to individuals being stupid and the colony having to communicate via pheromones causing them to learn about as quickly as a tree would if it had eyes
4. ants are not big enough to deal with the heat as well as bigger animals do
if even one ant became intelligent and passed on the genes allowing it to be intelligent some ants would likely make a structure called an “ants man” which is just a humanoid made of ants(if there were humans around it) and if there were several intelligent ants that communicated via bioluminescence in the head you could have an ant brain (brain made of ants not brain of an ant) and you could have all non sensory ants be able to use their senses but not able to send light signals this would allow ant creatures(ex: ants man) to exist and a large enough ants being would specialize some ants for sight, some for feeling things, some for hearing, and some for smelling amd if left near a blacksmith start metalworking out of curiosity (the ant creatures would likely be hives of ants and stay out of the rain at all costs and have several queen ants)
but bees are much better for metalworking as if a bee hive made a lung out of bees with their wings pointed inwards they could heat up the air to high enough temperatures to kill absolutely anything it can slow down and get some metals to glow red