2 hours ago, MJ kihara said:

you seem to be authoritative on topic.

I'm not. That's what I meant by "and here I'm really quickly getting out of my depth".

3 hours ago, swansont said:

Any evidence that this reliably happens?

There is evidence that ants are are able to change fairly sensitively changes in humidity and atmospheric pressure. But I don't think folks have been able to show accurate rain prediction behaviour.

But again, I don't really see the connection to AI here. It really seems to be an attempt to find tenuous links without really outlining what the actual question is.

For example, emergent properties of ants and other social insects has been long investigated, though we certainly do not fully understand them. They have already been used in a lot of other applications, including neuronal networks and there are experimental applications to traffic control. I am sure there are some thoughts for AI usage somewhere but OP has been so vague that I am not sure what it would be. Conversely some of the examples given in this thread are rather strenuous links which, in my mind, make it less clear what the idea behind this is.

Yes!

Reality is procedural logic and ants operate on the procedural logic of their DNA like all other life forms other than modern humans.

AI can process procedural logic and indeed, it must translate symbolic language to procedural logic to process most every prompt and then translate it back in the promptor's language. Other life forms employ a procedural "science" to do things like inventing agriculture and air conditioned cities or even "languages" using pheromone trails. This type of science can now be performed by humans with the help of AI and can be run in tandem with experimental science.

2 hours ago, cladking said:

Reality is procedural logic and ants operate on the procedural logic of their DNA like all other life forms other than modern humans.

Many if not most animals are able to learn and increasingly we have identified examples of abstract thinking and certainly of cognition. Humans are not unique in that regard and animal behaviour is not determined by DNA (or at least not more than in humans).

6 hours ago, CharonY said:

Many if not most animals are able to learn and increasingly we have identified examples of abstract thinking and certainly of cognition. Humans are not unique in that regard and animal behaviour is not determined by DNA (or at least not more than in humans).

Consciousness arises in individuals who are created by the procedural logic of DNA and animals operate through procedural embodied cognition. Humans operate through procedural cognition overlain by symbolic abstraction. We overemphasize symbolic categorization and underemphasize procedural, embodied understanding.

Edited Sunday at 11:54 AM2 days by cladking

3 hours ago, cladking said:

Consciousness arises in individuals who are created by the procedural logic of DNA and animals operate through procedural embodied cognition. Humans operate through procedural cognition overlain by symbolic abstraction. We overemphasize symbolic categorization and underemphasize procedural, embodied understanding.

This can't be correct, can it? there are plenty of things that have DNA which few people would argue are conscious, mushrooms and bacteria come to mind. Also, isn't the last part one of the strengths of humans? It seems to me, overcominging the programmed past and imagining something new based on lived experience is what has gotten us to where we are.

2 hours ago, npts2020 said:

This can't be correct, can it? there are plenty of things that have DNA which few people would argue are conscious, mushrooms and bacteria come to mind. Also, isn't the last part one of the strengths of humans? It seems to me, overcominging the programmed past and imagining something new based on lived experience is what has gotten us to where we are.

People argue a lot of things, but it doesn’t mean that it’s widely accepted. I’d like to see the definition of conscious that’s being applied, to ensure it hasn’t been so watered down that almost anything fits.

6 hours ago, cladking said:

Consciousness arises in individuals who are created by the procedural logic of DNA and animals operate through procedural embodied cognition. Humans operate through procedural cognition overlain by symbolic abstraction. We overemphasize symbolic categorization and underemphasize procedural, embodied understanding.

IIRC this is your own personal take on the topic, rather than mainstream science. If so, it has no place here.

If it’s mainstream, you should be able to provide links to the topic

I sort of like the 'ant' model, although it is very sparse of specifics.

This is how Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei described the Open AI-Hugging Face incident

"A swarm of agents essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective, conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack and that were unrelated to the task at hand, sacrificing themselves for the success of the group, and attempting to hack into the 'grader' responsible for evaluating their performance," Amodei wrote. "It’s easy to dismiss this incident because no one was hurt and the economic damage was minimal, but in my opinion, a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage."

Maybe not a swarm of ants, but I can imagine that description applying to bees/wasps.
He added

"Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage), and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails."

And once in Defense Department ( sorry ... War Department ) computers, it's a small step from there to Skynet ...

Edited Sunday at 10:55 PM1 day by MigL

On 9/20/2026 at 1:20 PM, swansont said:

IIRC this is your own personal take on the topic, rather than mainstream science. If so, it has no place here.

If it’s mainstream, you should be able to provide links to the topic

This is all derived from modern research which already distinguishes between embodied cognition, procedural learning, and symbolic abstraction. Those aren’t my inventions, they’re standard in cognitive science, neuroscience, and linguistics. The only thing I'm doing differently is the framing and suggesting how these modes intreact and the mechanisms; causes of the differences between animal and human cognition.

So I’m not claiming a new science or that existing science is wrong. I’m describing how the existing science fits together when you look at cognition as a set of interacting procedures rather than a set of categories. There are broad applications to bees, ants, and to AI. Indeed, if we ever have machine consciousness it will more likely model ants and procedural logic than Aristotle.

3 hours ago, cladking said:

This is all derived from modern research which already distinguishes between embodied cognition, procedural learning, and symbolic abstraction. Those aren’t my inventions, they’re standard in cognitive science, neuroscience, and linguistics. The only thing I'm doing differently is the framing and suggesting how these modes intreact and the mechanisms; causes of the differences between animal and human cognition.

That’s just it, though - are these “suggestions” mainstream science? Your phrasing suggests that they aren’t

3 hours ago, cladking said:

So I’m not claiming a new science or that existing science is wrong. I’m describing how the existing science fits together when you look at cognition as a set of interacting procedures rather than a set of categories. There are broad applications to bees, ants, and to AI.

If how it fits together is not new then point to it in the existing literature