Ant science

A famous myrmecologist was presenting a paper on new developments in his study of leaf-cutter ants to a large audience at some annual scientific convention:

A few years ago, one of my good friends re-directed my attention toward large colonies of leaf-cutter ants. He had heard that at least one such colony had recently developed a more complex means of chemical communication and wanted to understand exactly what purpose it served. Upon investigation, we discovered that the youngest ants, those just emerging out of larval stage, were apparently being trained by their elders to recognize certain sets of new pheromones and to produce others in return. It was, frankly, as if they were learning some new kind of primitive language. But to what end?

As we started to examine this novel behavior more closely, we noticed the ants were beginning to experiment with various types of leaves for their fungi farms; they were also attempting new architectural forms and even modifying their social structures, etc. It appeared as if they were thinking! Of course, no individual ant was really thinking — or at least that was not the most interesting kind of thinking going on. More importantly, it seemed the colony as a whole had somehow acquired this ability.

We believe three essential ingredients made this new development possible: First, through sheer evolutionary luck the ants had developed a slightly more complex means of communication. Then they systematically inculcated this new “languaging” to their young, forcefully “injecting” the new skill into passive but receptive “brains”. And finally, each individual functioned as a mere gateway, receiving chemical communications from other ants, processing them according to basic formicine logic, and responding as that logic required.

It is important again to recognize that no ant had any control over any of these stages: each individual ant could only “think” in the “language” it had been taught, could only use the “logic” it had assimilated, and could only process whatever information other ants passed on to it. If any ant had felt it was free to think as it wished, it was profoundly mistaken: another intelligence far superior to its own was (merely) “using” this ant to think for itself — admirably and creatively so at that.

Here the scientist paused to reshuffle his papers. He then concluded his talk without further glancing at them:

It is a great pity this new myrmecine intelligence has not yet come to self-awareness. Individual human beings like us might have been able to communicate with it. What feats it would then accomplish! How much more quickly it could evolve! But such a leap would require the colony to start thinking about itself, that is, individual ants would have to become capable of “comprehending” (passively processing) the idea of an infinitely more intelligent and powerful being that nevertheless encompassed them. Sadly, we shall now simply have to wait until some few lucky individuals blindly stumble upon this very idea.

On numerology

The monkey was the smartest of all the animals. One day, dividing up a bunch of bananas amongst es friends, e noticed there were as many bananas as fingers on a hand and as friends around him. And so e counted: one, two, three, four, five…! So enamoured was the monkey with es new ability, that e began counting whatever was at hand: trees, eggs, ants, other monkeys, crocodile teeth (carefully), etc.

When the toucan found a whole bush of berries, the monkey insisted on counting them first before anyone ate them, but there were so many that by the time e was done, the berries were all smushed and rotting. However, such minor setbacks disturbed the monkey not at all.

For the most part, the monkey’s counting prowess was quite welcome and helpful, whether in distributing bananas, counting the number of paces to the next watering hole or playing hide and seek. That the monkey now staunchly refused to do or eat anything that couldn’t be methodically counted was simply dismissed as the whimsical habit of a superior mind.

One day the eagle swooped down from the sky to raise the alarm: a great wind could be seen in the east blowing towards them! Everyone must find a hole to take shelter in! But the proud monkey refused to climb down from the tree top, proclaiming that the wind didn’t really exist because it couldn’t be counted! Sadly, whether the storm was real or not, when the animals finally climbed out from the safety of their holes, none was ever able to find even one monkey.

Short sermon on a mount-like structure

The prophet climbed a few stairs and, turning towards the street, said:

Woe unto you scientists for your blind pride!
__You love knowledge more than life itself.
Woe unto you social activists for seeking but yesterday’s justice:
__You smother the needy with ill-conceived compassion.
Woe unto you democrats in crumbling institutions,
__for you are slaves to old & impotent ideas.
Woe unto you economists,
__for you can think of nothing better than money.

Blessed are you selfish entrepreneurs,
__for you lift up the poor without loving them.
Blessed are those who will not vote,
__for they still have hope!
Blessed are the idle,
__for they value time.
Blessed are you who still believe in some god,
__for you at least know mysteries!

A tiresome argument

Dawkins was vacationing on the seaside with a few friends. They had been arguing about the truth of science all afternoon, one renegade stubbornly maintaining that no matter how correct science proved, it might still be blindly heading in the wrong direction: somehow it might be finding the wrong set of truths. Annoyed, the great scientist plodded out into the water for a swim. As it began to get dark he turned back and made for the shore, but the second leg somehow proved much slower going. Exhausted, he finally made it to shore, but he had drifted far away from where he had set off. His friends ran down to him and asked what had happened. Panting, Dawkins answered: “Some kind of current was pushing me, and no matter how hard i swam against it, i couldn’t break free.”

Kant, Hume and the evolution of morality

There is a long post on the Illusive Mind blog defending an evolutionary morality against Kant. I do not particularly want to defend Kant, but i do want to raise a very sizable caveat: whatever “morality” evolution has given us isn’t by any means necessarily the “right” one!

Here is the synopsis of the article/post:

In this essay I will outline what I regard as the most successful attempt to explain the evolution of altruism. I will then illustrate some of the effects that an evolutionary account of moral behaviour has on cognitivist and noncognitivist theories of ethics. I will argue that evolutionary theory does not undermine Hume’s noncognitivism but supports it and casts doubt on Kantianism.

Where things go horribly wrong is when morality is reduced to “a question of desire” because we then have nothing to ‘get behind desires’ and assess them morally (unless you posit some kind of coherence theory, but that is no the case in this article):

The question of retaining moral judgements then is reduced to a question of desire. Do we want to utilise judgements whose agenda is the ongoing survival of the species (at the level of the gene) through a system of rewarding co-operation and punishing cheating?

In effect the morality we have inherited through evolution is taken to be ‘valid’ – except when we don’t like it. The exception is, in my opinion, befuddled; the first part of the above sentence is, however, very dangerous, committing something akin to an is/ought or natural fallacy.

The only alternative on offer is a purely rational ethics à la Kant, but even this is undercut by more primary evolutionary forces:

The only way to be objectively moral and avoid ‘evolutionary baggage’ from tainting our moral judgements seems to be to devote oneself completely to reason in a Kantian fashion. However, it is not a forgone conclusion that reason is above evolutionary pressures. In The Evolution of Reason, William Cooper argues, “the laws of logic emerge naturally as corollaries of the evolutionary laws” (2003, p.5).

In the end, one gets the impression that we are enslaved to the morality evolution thought up for us and are incapable of stepping out of it to evaluate our own moral intuitions.

Admittedly, evaluating our moral intuitions is no easy task. But what is often forgotten is that we are not alone working at that task. It might be impossibly solipsistic for me to want to morally evaluate my own moral intuitions (where would i stand in order to do so?); but it certainly is not very difficult for someone else, actually many other people, to do so.

The solution will likely be neither Humean nor Kantian. We must both use some moral intuitions to assess other ones but also reason through our moral intuitions and find instances where the intuitions clearly go wrong.

“the evolutionary aspects of non-reproducing humans”

standing on E. O. Wilson’s broad shoulders, Brandon Keim wonders if, like the bees and the ants, humans aren’t a eusocial species, with homosexuality being the pinnacle of our other-oriented (ie non-reproducing) evolution:

So with all necessary caveats against reductionism and misappropriation, we can ask: should human societies conceive of themselves in terms of  group-level selection? Have we already developed aspects of eusociality? And — just to make matters really interesting — could non-reproducing humans, such as (most) gays and lesbians, as well as heterosexuals who choose not to have kids, actually be a manifestation of this emergent eusociality?

from wired.

science meets religion (quantum physics edition)

Some physicist is claiming the universe might be a virtual reality simulation (this is an offshoot of the universe-as-high-school-project-from-alternate-dimension theory). Of course, being a scientist, he thinks this theory can be experimentally verified (read falsified). Not only are the scientists doing Genesis-theorizing, but they’re coming up with even weirder ideas than moses and mohammed ever dreamed up.

from slashdot:

“A New Zealand physicist has written a paper saying that physicists should seriously explore the possibility the universe is a giant virtual reality simulation. He says that the existence of quantum phenomena could be due to the underlying digital nature of the simulation and also claims his VR hypothesis can explain relativity, the big bang and more. It should be possible to perform experiments to prove the hypothesis too. He reasons that if reality was to do something that information processing cannot, then it cannot be virtual.”

the numinously divine mystery … of the laws of physics

The NYT is at it again, wondering about the origins of the laws of physics. They don’t have an answer, or rather offer a whole slew of them, ranging from platonism, firey mathematics (i kid you not), russian doll universes (my favourite), random dynamics, etc.

The basic problem all these solutions are trying (rather unconvincingly) to solve is basically:

that the traditional view of transcendent laws is just 17th-century monotheism without God. “Then God got killed off and the laws just free-floated in a conceptual vacuum but retained their theological properties,”

The theological question of who made the universe, the philosophical question of why is there something instead of nothing, is, in physics, that of why are there laws at all. It seems that physics is getting closer to answering the theological and philosophical questions with a good, solid scientific fact. Indeed, if they can explain to us why the laws of gravity etc. hold, how they appeared, etc. then we will be very close to “god”. And they might be able to modify our view of the world enough that we no longer need to thing in god-terms any longer. But, as any good scientific explanation, this will at best open up an entire new slew of problems.

As we are already seeing with Quantum explanations of the world, the ultimate answer the physicists are going to give us to this question might not help much to solve our more banal curiosity: it is unlikely that they, let alone we, understand the answer, however mathematically sound it will prove to be.

no, i will not post on the scientology story!

I might well be living in Germany where anything approaching unconventional or authoritarian is forcefully frowned upon for historical reasons that go back beyond the middle of the twentieth century no matter what you might have heard; and i might even have been to Berlin, though that was a long time ago. I might even be writing a thesis on the philosophy of religion. I might be running an ethics cum religion blog that even dabbles in science and, more importantly, has too often stooped to posting the least worthwhile junk out there on the internets. And i have never really liked Tom Cruise as an actor (except in Magnolia; his wonderful erstwhile wife, the splendiferous Nicole Kidman, is however an entirely different matter, if only for her most gigantuous performance in The Hours, though Dogville shouldn’t be left unmentioned, of course, however depressing the movie might be) and don’t really care about his religious proclivities. But i don’t know the first thing about scientology, so i’ll put an end to this post that is not about scientology, germany or the latter banning the former, or trying to, or even thinking about it.

ethical ramifications of the fermi paradox

The Fermi paradox—the estimation that extraterrestrial civilizations are common and would naturally expand into space, contradicting the lack of evidence that they exist anywhere—is the subject of fascinating speculation and guesswork. Every possible fate of extraterrestrial intelligence is proposed and explored.

They are probably just avoiding us, for obvious moral reasons. Contamination. Or they’re laughing their assess off and don’t want to disrupt the entertainment. Either way it doesn’t put us in very good light.

Heck, we should just be happy they’ve not landed to force-convert us to the One True Religion of the (Alien) Spaghetti Monster!

Link.