> > Obviously, they aren't making the "best" of any situation since they do not
> > make decisions.
> >
>
> 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.
No, I'm just talking about Mormon Crickets.
> 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."
What I'm talking about is cooperation in fact. I can't really divine anything about insect intent, so I have to assume there is none.
When bees dance, they are conveying information. Bee dancing may, for all I know, have evolved from bee fighting. In a thousand years the cannibalistic behaviors of Mormon Crickets may have evolved into cooperative information sharing. Cooperation comes when resources are shared without regard to the immediate benefit of the individual doing the sharing. The act is "altruistic" only because it has no immediate benefit. It has nothing to do with intent, necessarily.
Your point about decision making is well-taken. Decision-making can be an overt process, or it can be the result of many small and even somewhat random choice-and-tendency combinations which, over time, create larger, social "decisions". It's like when people say that fiat money isn't "real". Well, it is real, so long as we act as though it is. So long as the probability is very low that someone is going to act on the belief that a dollar is just a worthless piece of paper, a dollar is a dollar.
In fact, I would say that the key to engineering social change is trying to combine intended benefit with self-reinforcing behaviors.
boddi
> 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
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>