How do you know they don't make decisions?
boddi satva wrote:
> these insects
> are not acting as truly social animals. There is no cooperation here,
> as such
>
>
And boddi, do you mean "these" particular insects or all insects? If you have a special human-only notion of "cooperative" behavior, I think you are wrong.
As far as animal's and their minds are concerned, and whether they can be said to make "decisions," or cooperate, I would recommend, _Minds of Their Own: Thinking and Awareness in Animals_; Marc Hauser's _Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think_ and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's _Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection_. I am convinced that animals can be said to "think," make "decisions," and cooperate. These are phenomena are not exclusive properties of homo sapiens or even of primates. The problem is that we really don't know what the phenomena of "decision making" or "social cooperation" is except in a very general everyday manner. In other words we lack certain knowledge, as we do with most phenomena in the world, except for a very thin layer of "reality."
For Bitch: I just read Deborah Gordon's _Ants at Work: How An Insect Society is Organized_ and what is abundantly clear is that in so many ways we simply don't know how these societies work. Or to take a small example, how the regulation of "worker" ants is maintained so that when more "forager" ants are needed, somehow, just the right number of ants shift from nest maintenance to foraging. As Gordon puts the title of a chapter subsection puts it "Each Ant Decides Whether to Go Out and Work." She can do statistical analysis of why so many ants forage on one day and not another, but the actual nest wide "decision making" process is simply unknown. The thing is that she has no other word or phrase for what ants do except in some sense it is a decision making process. I have no deep philosophical reason to reject her conclusion.
It was actually studying these matters of how ant and bee colonies work that led me to my skepticism about theories of human decision making processes, human choices, and human societies. We don't even have good theories of simple animal societies or what can be called the simplest kinds of choices, like why an ant forages or not. And yet nobody questions whether there is such a thing as an ant-nature or not. We just assume it and get on with our work. Ditto, it should be with humans.
Jerry Monaco