People say ants are just bio machines with no thought processes of their own...

People say ants are just bio machines with no thought processes of their own, they just respond to the environmental cues and have no conscious decision making abilities. Would it be possible to design an experiment to disprove this? Here's my idea.

Take a sterilized tile and make sure there are no chemical traces on it for the ant to detect, so no smell, taste, whatever that would influence how it acts. It's completely neutral.

Put the tile in a sealed chamber with clean air that also has no scent or chemical traces.

Put an ant at one end of the tile and observe what it does.

Remove it and clean the tile/chamber and try again with a different ant.

If they truly have no thoughts they should respond the same every single time and just follow the same route. But if you notice that sometimes the ant goes left, and sometimes it goes right, that should prove the ant is making a conscious decision about which way it wants to go so that demonstrates an ability to think and choose.

Good plan?

You're correct that the spirit of this experiment is valid and attempting to demonstrate that ants are just deterministic little machines

But there are too many variables. You cannot make an exact copy of the ant. It may remember that it had been on this tile before, there may be a little speck of dust its foot touches, maybe some air current brushes it a bit and it turns, maybe one of its legs is kind of tired from talking around earlier, maybe it's more hungry now than it was before

It's impossible to perform this experiment in a way that accounts for all of the variables that matter, so the ant will never walk in the same way, but this doesn't disprove that its behavior is deterministic because of the variables I described

> if you notice that sometimes the ant goes left, and sometimes it goes right, that should prove the ant is making a conscious decision about which way it wants to go so that demonstrates an ability to think and choose.

Or in the absence of environmental cues the ant is controlled by random processes, i.e. choosing anything from left to right. Your setting doesn't prove the ant's consciousness.

>It may remember that it had been on this tile before

You would use a completely new ant each time so it's not about it having a memory.

>there may be a little speck of dust its foot touches

I guess you could sanitize the ants first too. Ideally it would be like a NASA clean room with zero particles in the test chamber.

>maybe some air current brushes it a bit and it turns

It would be a sealed box, so no wind or outside interference.

I agree each ant is individually different, but over thousands of ants ones with like tired legs would be statistically insignificant.

Actually the lack of cues might be indicative for the ant to move forward to find said cues.

Even if ants all respond to environmental cues in a completely deterministic way, that doesn't mean that each individual ant would respond in the same way.

They all have slightly different genes, mutations, and environments.

What if OP used all clones of the same ant?

>You would use a completely new ant each time
Then this experiment won't work since ants learn over time and you'd be testing different ants which would have learned different things, so the internals of their tiny tiny brains would be different and they would clearly behave differently

The experiment would only work with an identical copy, atom for atom and energy state for energy state, of the ant

Even clones aren't identical - in humans identical twins are still raised differently so they grow up differently. One was on top in the womb and the other was on the bottom, etc, and this affects brain growth

You can't do this twice because even if it's the same ant it will be in a different state. There's too may variables.
Instead, perform the experiment only once but don't look at the ant. If it goes one way, than it's deterministic. If it goes two or more ways at the same time, that means it makes a conscious decision.

it's impossible to ensure exactly the same initial conditions, the ant is too complex.

>One was on top in the womb and the other was on the bottom, etc, and this affects brain growth

Would it really? That's pretty neat.

>If they truly have no thoughts they should respond the same every single time and just follow the same route.
That's a dangerous assumption to make because you won't be sure you have removed all possible variables such as how it is held and how it is released onto the tile, where it is on the tile down to nanometers.

The better idea is to do the experiment hundreds of times, carefully filming and documenting everything, then see if there is an external influence that affects the way the ant moves or if there is no relation.

observing how something behaves in the complete absence of stimuli or meaningful external cues isn't really a good way to gauge its intelligence anyway

Ants, humans, whatever, are all slaves to their external stimuli. No one thing is more deterministic than another.

Humans, for example, just happen to be highly stateful, and past experiences have a large impact on how they react to repeated or even new stimuli.

This

Humans are very chaotic physical objects. Memories from childhood can be acted on. We can decide to themselves "if I ever see a bike that reminds me of the bike I had back when I was a child, then right before I die I'm doing to donate all of my money, otherwise if I don't see one I'm going to burn it" and they can hide this state in their brain for decades, only acting on it way way later when they write up their will. This is a weird example but you maybe know what I mean

There is no other more complex, stateful object in the universe

We are chaotic by nature - approximate initial conditions do not approximate end conditions, same for ants to a lesser degree. This computational unpredictability is, I believe, our ticket to claiming free will exists

>The experiment would only work with an identical copy, atom for atom and energy state for energy state, of the ant
The same could be said for humans, or any system for that matter.

>implying free will exists

Ants pass the mirror test, therefore they are conscious.

You would have to have the same exact copy f the ant, not all ants are made equal, they are born each with their own unique genetic code and each ant has led a different life so and since are actions are determined by past experiences + our genetic predisposition, each ant would choose a different path. That said even if you had 2 copies of the same ant, we could still not achieve anything with this experiment, because even a human put under the same circumstances, would make the same choices as its exact clone with exact memories would.

scientists are already making "life tree" of c. elegans.

Since when does passing he mirror test makes you conscious ? It only proves you are self aware

this is gonna turn into a consciousness thread in 3...

What's the mirror test, that they realize it's not another ant when they look into one? It could be they just don't smell the other ant and don't recognize it as anything at all.

biosemiotics already