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RE: Daily Nature Fix: Ants! - More Human Than Human. (Original Photos)
Fascinating. I always wondered about the collective intelligence of ants. Do their intellect resides in the "mind" of the individual, or do the colony has a collective intellect distributed among the individual members. Your brain consists out of a collection of brain cells. Collectively they make up the premises of your intellectual faculty. Now, does the intellectual faculty of an ant resides in his brain, or is he just one node of a collective faculty where the colony as a whole function as a singular intellectual faculty?
I've wondered the same thing many times while watching them. I've been know to lose time and have an hour or two pass before I know it. I would really love to know if they have any sense of "self" at all.
Having a sense of "self" is one thing. But from a total different perspective, can you imagine: the individual ant's brain is like on brain cell. They connect in a way still unknown to us mortals, and collectively these ants form a collective brain that functions as a unit, like your brain functions as a collection of brain cells. Then the intelligence of the colony resides in the collective "brain". Like your brain tells your different limbs to function, so the colony's "collective" brain tells its different members to function. The colony then becomes a distributes organism.
Hum, sounds logical and insightful.