New Study Finds Insects May Have Basic Consciousness

When I die I want to meet the God who made this world, I have one question for it. What sort of asshole made a world were for something to live it has to kill something else, then calls itself a God of love

originally posted by: imod02
When I die I want to meet the God who made this world, I have one question for it. What sort of asshole made a world were for something to live it has to kill something else, then calls itself a God of love

once you think outside the box of religious dogma, you will see how irrelevant the musings that lead to this question are.

originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan

originally posted by: imod02
When I die I want to meet the God who made this world, I have one question for it. What sort of asshole made a world were for something to live it has to kill something else, then calls itself a God of love

once you think outside the box of religious dogma, you will see how irrelevant the musings that lead to this question are.

You seem to have missed the point, but then again you are a MOD so I dont expect too much understanding from you

All insects, which comprise 80% of Earth's biomass, belong to the order
Lepidoptera.

Ant colonies contain 85 million individuals and are bigger than any human city.
The way they make their society work is to make it depend on a single queen -
and all activities are directed to providing food, shelter and security for her.

Simple robots might be programmed with a range of functions for it to do inside
of it's range of action. This might require 100,000 lines of code taking up 10 million
bytes. It is loaded into the robot computer and then runs the code in order to
perform it's functions.

The ant mind might consist of a simple sense of Self, or I(ego) and certainly a
predisposition to fulfill it's role as a worker or defender or assistant to the queen.
The leaf cutter ant tends it's nurseries keeping the ant larvae moist and well fed.
This symbiotic relationship allows them to construct rooms of leaves that are
glued together with the larva's silk. With a million neurons they can run 1000
million programs - sufficient to maintain the greatest society of individuals on
Earth.

Refer to David Attenborough's Nature's "Micro Machines".



a reply to: Mrgone

originally posted by: FamCore
New Study Finds Insects May Have Basic Consciousness
Is this a monumental find or nothing too significant?

There's not an orgasm on the planet which isn't aware. An ant scouting for food encounters a seed and collects it. A vine in a shadow detects the location of sunlight and grows toward it. A phiX174 virus attaches to a host cell, grows a tail, pierces the cell, then injects genetic material into the cell, infecting it, followed by dissolving the now superfluous tail and detaching.

The ant is aware of its mission to collect sustenance and is aware of the presence of the seed. The vine is aware of its need to acquire sustenance and is aware of the location of sunlight. The virus is aware of its desire to reproduce and the system through which to mate with a cell.

If you wish to argue that consciousness involves "perceiving a simulation within one's brain that is recreated from the external environment, using input from the individual's senses," as the article defines it, then it's difficult to imagine how a plant or virus may be conscious, considering that they don't possess brains as we understand them. However, they are never the less, aware. I think science has a tendency to behave with intense bias toward numerous subjects, including this one.

Consciousness: The normal state of being awake and able to understand what is happening around you.
Marriam-Webster Dictionary
Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself.
Wikipedia

It's a contentious subject. If you click the Marriam-Webster link you'll see they've written more than a dozen unique definitions for consciousness. What is consciousness? "Well, we don't know exactly and for that reason we can't agree on a definition, but it's certainly not descriptive of plants let alone viruses," someone might say. In other words, the definition of consciousness is "the state of being aware, except for in the case of plants and viruses." What's wrong with that? "He was conscious of the rules, but chose to break them anyway." In other words, "conscious" is a synonym for "aware." That is, we observe a very human bias which commonly leads us to expand on that definition simply for the purpose of preventing various organisms from joining the consciousness club. Humans are special, you see, and we must not compare ourselves to a fern. We're just too superior to them for that. To translate that into reality, we're just too narcissistic.

Bees "weren't consciousness" just as "animals didn't feel pain," and slaves "weren't people." If you'd like to stop beating around the bush entirely, bees are conscious because they're aware of things in their environment, and we know that because they respond to those things. Meanwhile, the most accurate definition of consciousness is "a word."

originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan

originally posted by: imod02
When I die I want to meet the God who made this world, I have one question for it. What sort of asshole made a world were for something to live it has to kill something else, then calls itself a God of love

once you think outside the box of religious dogma, you will see how irrelevant the musings that lead to this question are.

From a standpoint of faith as opposed to religious dogma ... as I really would not like to see anyone's dogma get run over by someone's karma ... if you return to the books of Kings, you can see that humans explained to God, in what was basically a repeat performance of the incident in the Garden of Eden, they would rather have men as rulers of men, believing that men would be better able to understand one another than God would. We see also in the Bible that "man has ruled man to his own injury" though some would translate it as "detriment" rather than injury.

The bottom line is when we questioned God's sovereign rule, he said "go ahead human, have at it if you think you can do a better job" ... and we have not.

a reply to: FamCore

I'm not sure why they even studied it.. unless they think insects are robots. They've disproved their own assumption that they did not have consciousness despite all evidence to the contrary. If you're raised to think the planet and universe was created to indulge one species then that is alot to unlearn.

they're very cute in their white coats though. The butteries are teaching them and they're understanding.

a reply to: FamCore

Monumental AND significant. Especially when considered in the context of research into proteins and prions, as well as industry efforts involving Directed Evolution - www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...


F&S&


NOTE: Link works, but can't embed. ?!

a reply to: riley

they're very cute in their white coats though. The butteries are teaching them and they're understanding.

LOL Yes, I completely agree. Anyone with 2 braincells should understand that yes, insects have consciousness as well. But scientists want to see the facts and either prove or disprove ideas/theories if they are able to, which is probably why they did the study

I you've ever looked into the eyes of a praying mantis, you can tell there is a little spark there.
But many othe insects are really just robots.

Bee's for example, when they leave the hive to forage, they fly a couple feet away and look at the hive, then they fly ever larger circles away from the hive while keeping a focus on the hive, till the next major landmark comes up, then they focus on that, and so on. When they return they they do the same thing in reverse till they return to the hive.

a reply to: punkinworks10

If you are suggesting that bee's are just robots, they are certainly sophisticated robots with at least rudimentary AI.
Check out this article/video from National Geographic that shows the insect's incredible ability to learn by watching.

In the first study of its kind in insects, scientists constructed experiments that challenged bees to pull strings in order to access rewards of nectar. It's a technique that has long been used to test cognition in various vertebrates, but hadn't yet been tried with insects.

The first step was proving that bees could learn to solve a simple problem. But what's more interesting is that other bees that hadn't encountered the problem before picked up the ability to solve it more quickly when they had a chance to watch a trainer bee that had already figured out the puzzle. Further, that knowledge was shown to spread from bee to bee throughout a colony, even if the first bee that figured out the trick died.

The experiment suggests that social learning may be more widespread in the animal kingdom than people previously thought, the authors wrote.

a reply to: FamCore

For some reason humans think that other life forms on earth are any different, because it has been taught in corrupt education that humans are unique because they have souls. That is preposterous, there is nothing different about the spirituality of all living things, only the cognitive difference.

You all must also know that the correct teachings of Christ have been suppressed from the world. Christ taught many things but the two things he asked us not to do was to sleep around, and to eat meat. The reason why the historical Jewish Christ asked us not to eat meat was because he claimed that animals also have spirits just like you and I, and that we can acquire punishment from God for abusing animals just like we would for humans. This was all though the Aramaic scriptures which I have uncovered from a massive corruption and cover up over the Christian religion.

a reply to: UFOdanger

Point to vegan scripture.

Animal spirit different from Man.

Too much con, not enough scious.