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?
Austin Kelly
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
Julian Morgan
> 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.
Bentley Martinez
>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.
Wyatt Carter
Actually the lack of cues might be indicative for the ant to move forward to find said cues.
Liam Brown
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.
Gabriel Walker
What if OP used all clones of the same ant?
Cameron Torres
>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
Michael Flores
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
Christian Reyes
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.
