Hacker News Reader

Comment by amatecha | Hacker News Reader

I mean, I feel like the wording "retain memories" might imply a greater degree of consciousness/agency than what was actually observed. The "memory" appears to be some completely tangible phenomenon, as per their comparison of trees "retaining memory" in the form of a tree growing bark around where a branch broke off. "Ants use the rate at which they meet and smell other ants, or the chemicals deposited by other ants, to decide what to do next." , etc. That said, it's still pretty interesting, and I think we can make some comparisons about how humans share knowledge/experience and what kind of tangible markers we use as cues for our own behaviour.

View on HN

The concept of memory isn't related to consciousness; after all, we talk about computers having memory all the time.

Rather than say everything short of humans doesn't really "remember", I find it much more interesting to think how similar our concept of remembering (reinforced neural connections) is to phenomena we don't think of as alive like rivers or pheromone trails.

I'm not sure if I'm countering your point or supporting it, but I think a better example than trees is to point out how human cultures bear (and arguably, exist as different entities because of) after effects of events beyond the lifespans of those impacted.

Example: the American trend of "you must finish all the food on your plate" has long outlived its origins, and has been continued on not because people consciously choose to continue so much as they dont consciously choose to STOP passing it on. Any number of social events that are not universal (tipping, suburbs vs downtown as being prosperous, etc) can be examined this way, and our reasonable but unthinking reactions to events help define our cultures. If we arent being conscious of these choices, how is this memory any different than the ants?

I think the wrong comparison is being made - humans to ants. The memory in this case doesn't belong to the ant but to the colony, which could be considered an organism in its own right. Similar to how large companies have "memory" (and behaviour) that outlast the term of employment of individual employees.

In certain traffic conditions, bottlenecks can persist for hours without any apparent cause (i.e., there is no crash or stopped car blocking the road). Even though the cars entering and exiting the region are changing all the time, the bottleneck persists. You could say that traffic has "memory". Ant colonies can exhibit "memory" in a similar way.

The traffic example would work better if the bottlenecks persisted even after an extended period when all cars were removed from the highway.

They can! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_wave

The "memory" of the ant colony doesn't persist when all ants are removed, either. You can't have memory without having some substrate.

The article seems to be making the point that the concept of memory lies on a spectrum, with the tree having a memory of having had a branch is at one end of the spectrum. The ant colony stuff is somewhere in between. In many senses what they are speaking of is what we refer to as "culture," as in things that are learned and passed down. When a memory of a path to a food source is passed down, it is simply because the senior ant walked the path while another followed. The senior ant wasn't consciously "teaching" the younger one so much. Regardless, all of these things lie along a spectrum.

tl;dr - ants can be compared to neurons (they even use similar mechanisms) and ant colonies can be compared to consciousness (although they lack human-recognizable self-awareness). I think it's not useful to compare humans with ants and human culture with ant colonies (it's on another scale, although there are some similarities, too).

- - -

This type of memory can be compared to the building blocks of our memory when we look into our brains. Each neuron is basically an agent that acts on its own (comparable to an ant) - if you look into neuron behaviour, there are some pretty interesting things (e.g. they try to get to the locations where most of the activity is happening to get more energy and weaken connections based on activity - synaptic plasticity). The algorithms both employ are comparable - I see similarities between ant colonies and human brains.

The human consciousness emerges from this phenomenon - the biggest difference is that all our neurons work together to create a consciousness that is self-aware (actually, it's only a small part of the brain that creates "me"). Understanding ant colonies can be beneficial for understanding human consciousness.

https://youtu.be/TTFoJQSd48c (I don't care about the computer analogies, but the concept of individual agents acting together in the brain gets across)

Human memories are a tangible physical phenomenon as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com