Insect memories may not survive metamorphosis
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
https://www.wired.com/2008/03/butterflies-rem/
The article is odd because it's written as if this hasn't been tested and it has, or I thought it had.
Towards the end they acknowledge butterflies might be different, but don't mention any of the prior research at all.
The whole article is structured very strangely given the existing literature.
Off the top of my head, monarch butterflies taking multiple generations to travel up and down the west coast to and from Mexico each year implies if not conscious memory as we think of it, some sort of genetic imprint of how and where to travel that is mind blowing to me.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=npr+talk+monarch+butterflies&atb=v...
But one thing thats reall interesting is that we have been decimating their only foodsource and breeding grounds ; milkweed.
We treat milkweed, as a weed and its decimated by RoundUp (monsatan)
https://www.nwf.org/Garden-For-Wildlife/About/Native-Plants/...
but its really interesting that there is a really large hippocampus in birds, and some insects - which allows for them to have a really spacial/geographic memory - they recall where they find food.
But the interesting thing about monarchs is that this information has some ability to encode over skipped generations...
But because we monsatan the "weeds" we are FN the monarchs up.
When I wasa child, in Lake Tahoe Monarchs were on the migration path and we would have entire pine trees covered in them
https://imgur.com/gallery/acxne3V
This was a regular for me in elemetary school...
The pupa internally "gestates" the adult as a parthenogenetic clone-child; the adult being gestated, absorbs the pupal parent's entire body for nutrients — and, crucially, the pupal parent's body allows this absorption of its entire body, producing no immune response to it, because they have the same DNA. As with a cyclic parasite, you get two different complete lifecycles, that are each born, live, and die from the same genetic program, given a different epigenetic kickstart, in a back-and-forth cycle.
The possession of wings in the later stage created a very different environmental situation, so the selective pressures on the winged stage are very different from those in the pre winged stage. These cause a split in the evolutionary environment of pre and post winged stages, causing selection for further divergent trait acquisition in the transitional stage during wing development.
Not an entomologist though, so if anyone has a better understanding I’d be grateful.
Which shouldn’t feel so alien to us because human childhoods are a period of much slower growth than you see in other animals. Not a pause but still. IIRC it’s speculated that slowed growth is to give time for the brain to mature and to learn but either way it’s interesting to think about. If we grew the way dogs and cows do we’d be fully grown by around 10 years old.
Vertebrates go through several stages in their development while in the egg (or placental sack, which stands in for the egg). The develop a head, spine, and tail initially. Then they add front limbs and finally rear limbs. Frogs hatch from their eggs prior to the limb development stage and retain that neotenous legless form while tadpoles. They are essentially hatched as embryos and don’t assume their adult form until later.
The obvious advantage of this process is you can regenerate a body if your current one is no longer suitable, due to disease, degeneration, or even dysphoria.
It isn’t really suicide because your consciousness isn’t extinguished, you just end up unconscious for a bit while you restructure.
We only miss the memory, that which makes us individual human beings. I wonder where the hell does it go. That's is marvelous to me. Where does the memory go?
A river is like a memory: water generally flows the same way down them, some days stronger some days drier, and the more they are used, the more they shift their course.
Memory is just a word for the human experience of localized state. There is a universal state that we experience a small piece of as we live. Though our experience of it ceases when we die, the state of the universe continues its natural course, with no loss of continuity, just a phase shift.
The experience of human life is like a river. At first we are small mountain trickles, barely aware of our existence. As we make our way through the middle of our lives, we are self-important rivers, providing an ecosystem to those around us, sometimes with others flowing their experience into ours, and sometimes as we give our experience to others; some amount evaporating to who knows where and some amount being replenished by rains, growing ever larger.
Towards the end, we either become stuck in lakes, or we are like large idle bays, full of experience, most of us moving now with less fundamental "purpose." Lake or bay, eventually we disperse back to the ocean of existence.
There are those cool liquefaction burial places though that will dissolve you in a strong acid (or base?). Your family is left with some you juice that they can flush down the toilet (or drink in a cocktail, I suppose).
Maybe the Tibetans and their sky burials with vultures eating your fresh meat is the way to go.
The problem of english: we call it "memory" but it encompasses more than just overt neuronal knowledge acquisition, it includes the gut brain relationship and intracellular activity.
Maybe all the things I list are not in fact "memories" but then..
In this case, neuronal information storage and retrieval, which is the biological basis of memory as the word is ordinarily used, is quite different and separable from the genetic storage and use of information.
This example happens to contain all there is to Searle's "Chinese Room" argument.
Personally, I feel that the last two are useful analogies while the first is not, but they are all of limited applicability because I doubt an LLM's use of language follows from, or is indicative of, an understanding that there is an external world.
Plus I think its kind of archaic now, so it has less baggage to contend with/be translated between folk
Preclude even that and you preclude some humans from the same.
(The simplest refutation would be that demonstrating intelligence requires first demonstrating motivation on the part of the subject. The current way we interact with "AI" is much more akin to prodding an organism with a stick, seeing it recoil in response to the stimulus, and then claiming that it therefore has intelligence. No, you haven't demonstrated intelligence, you have at most proven it has an autonomous sensory response -- anything beyond that is confusing the complexity of the response with complexity of the mechanism producing it).
I know that in my mental model of what intelligence is, a completely passive entity that responds to my questions in a certain way would qualify.
The Pak went about colonising planets and they left their offspring on earth when they discovered radiation coming from the centre of the galaxy that was changing the genetic makeup of their offspring, causing the adult Pak to murder their own offspring and all sorts of wars.
The Pak built a massive ringworld (think Halo) because that’s easier than colonising a planet apparently, but their offspring started to mutate wildly into different offshoots of humans, pygmies, humans with gills, etc.
It’s a good series and enjoyable to read but it’s not a particularly serious story. One of the aliens is depicted as being some sort of hand puppet with legs. Super odd stuff.
I can guess the age of the author... Thanks for the reading suggestion, sounds like a fun read
It seems like there’s a progression from simple organisms with sense/response behaviour but little or no cognitive modelling of the environment. Then organisms that can model and reason about their environment in fairly sophisticated ways. Then some animals develop the ability to model the knowledge, intentions and responses of other creatures. That’s what evolutionary psychologists call theory of mind.
Finally there’s development of a sense of self, and then further on the ability to reason about one’s own thoughts, motivations, intentions and cognitive abilities, and act to change those. That’s us. It’s a continuum though, with various species at different points along the line.
Option 1 has significant implications for humanity; are we just more complex machines who believe we’re different (due to a complexity beyond our understanding), but are ultimately just deterministically executing code like a spider? Are we genetically/chemically pre-determined to learn, think, feel and decay the way we do based on the I/O of our lives, and everything we’ve ever done would be repeated identically if we were rebooted and exposed to the exact same I/O (down to the planck unit).
Option 2 indicates more of an inherent “free will”… but even then, are the memories just a more complex form of input, but still inescapably deterministic.
Personally, I believe in determinism — that another universe which started in the EXACT same way (down to the most miniscule detail), exposed to the exact sane external forces (if any) would lead through the EXACT same events to the EXACT same end.
That time a flea saw the Eiffel Tower - gone.