Inevitability Minds

This has to be one of the most interesting, and mind-blowing (pun intended), articles I have ever read. The author is obviously an expert in the field and can explain complexities fairly simply. WOW! And because cut-and-pasting the whole article would be a violation of fair use laws, you must read the whole thing for yourself. It has the taint of evolutionary leaning, obvious due to the subject matter. But the information is impressive enough to be able to respond to the wisdom of the Creator regardless. Here are some good excerpts, to get you curious. [Question for Jeremy: Are you smarter than a rock ant?"]

"The rock ant is tiny, even for an ant. Individually each ant is the size of comma on this page. Their colonies are small too. Numbering about 100 workers, plus one queen, they normally nest between slivers of crumbling rock, hence their common name. Their entire society can fit into the glass case of a watch, or between the one-inch covers of a microscope slide, which is where they are usually bred in laboratories. The brain of a rock ant contains less than 100,000 neurons and is so small as to be invisible. Yet a rock ant mind can perform an amazing feat of calculation. To assess the potential of a new nesting site, rock ants will measure the dimensions of the room in total darkness and then calculate – and that is the proper word – the volume and desirability of it. For many millions of years, rock ants have used a mathematical trick that was only discovered by humans in 1733. Rock ants can estimate the volume of a space, even an irregular shaped one, by randomly laying a scent trail across the floor of the space, "recording" the length of that line, and then counting the number of times it encounters that scented line during additional diagonal runs across the floor. The calculated area is inversely proportional to the frequency of intersections times length. In other words, the ants discovered an approximate value for Π derived by intersecting diagonals. Headroom is measured by the ants with their bodies and then "multiplied" with the area to give an approximate volume of their hole.

But these incredible tiny ant minds do more. They measure the width and number of entrances, the amount of light, the proximity of neighbors, and the degree of hygiene for the room. Then they tally these variables and calculate a desirability score for the potential nest by a process that resembles a "weighted additive" fuzzy logic formula in computer science. All in 100,000 neurons....

Asked what he could infer about nature's Creator, biologist J. B. S. Haldane reputedly concluded that He must have "an inordinate fondness for beetles." But far more than beetles, nature displays an inordinate fondness for minds. Since every species of insect, and every animal, yields a mind, however limited, there are more minds, and more varieties of minds than beetles. Nature has a fundamental affinity, if not fondness, for intelligence.

Plants, too, posses a decentralized type of intelligence. As Anthony Trewavas argues in his remarkable paper, "Aspects of Plant Intelligence," plants demonstrate a slow version of problem solving that fit most of our definitions of animal intelligence. They perceive their environment in great detail, they assess threats and competition, then they take action to either adapt or remedy the problems, and anticipate future states. Time-lapse motion pictures that speed up the action of vine tendrils probing their neighborhood make it clear that plants are closer to animals in their behavior than our fast lives permit us to see....

Remarkably a plant mind also contains a memory. There are numerous examples of plants remembering signals for days, and even years. A memory is a way to move information from the past into the present. Plants can also move information from the present into future, or anticipate, which is a true mark of the most primitive intelligence....

Measured by their intelligence, crows, ravens and parrots are the "primates" of birds. The size of their forebrain is as relatively large as non-human apes, and the ratio of their brain weight to body weight is in the same line as apes. Like primates, crows live long and in complex social groups. New Caledonian crows, like chimpanzees, craft tiny spears to fish for grubs in crevices. Sometimes they save the manufactured spears and carry them around. In experiments with scrub-jays, researchers discovered that that jays would rehide their food later if another bird was watching them when they first hid it, but only if the jays had been robbed before. Naturalist David Quammen suggests that crow and raven behavior is so clever and peculiar that they should be evaluated "not by an ornithologist but by a psychiatrist." The famous African grey parrot Alex was taught to name colors, size, and shapes, and to put together simple spoken phrases. When questioned about novel objects he had not seen before, he could give correct answers about 80% of the time. He could also count to six....

...animal minds also vary by species to fit that animal's livelihood. There are hundreds of types of learning in the animal kingdom. Rats excel at the expert spatial intelligence they need to navigate a maze, while their cousins the guinea pigs fail in that department. Humming birds excel at timing, primates in social intelligence. If we knew enough about animal minds a good biologist could identify an animal solely from its species of intelligence....

Technology is anything a mind makes. Built by minds, the technium is primed to make more minds. These mind children will be small, dim, and dumb at first, but tiny minds keep getting better. And more abundant. Last year there were 1 billion electronic brains etched into silicon. Many contained a billion transistors each but the smallest had a minimum of 100,000 transistors, about as many neurons as the brain of the rock ant. They, too, can do surprising feats. Tiny synthetic ant-minds know where on earth they are (GPS), and how to get back to your home, and remember the names of your friends, and translate foreign languages. These dim minds are finding their way into everything: shoes, door knobs, books, lamps, pets, beds, clothes, cars, light switches, kitchen appliances and toys...."