Natural versus artificial

This is a truly great article (yes, I occasionally read Esquire for the articles, and no, you may not parse that any way you like!) by Tom Junod on humans and ants. What I love most is the manner in which the author elevates his personal experiences in a house infested by Argentine ants to the level of a cosmic struggle (which, admittedly, it must be for him and his family), and in doing so, casts light upon the unilluminated corners of our musings on society, complexity, and consciousness. In brief, the author points out that "[E.O. Wilson's The Superorganism] proposes that what an ant colony possesses is a kind of accumulated intelligence, the result of individual ants carrying out specialized tasks and giving one another constant feedback about what they find as they do so."

This kind of emergent complexity means that the ant colony as a whole is infinitely more intelligent than any single ant, or even a small collection of ants. The whole in this case truly is bigger than the sum of its parts, and no mereological reductionism can explain precisely "where" the "intelligence" of the ant colony resides. This is the kind of thing that makes me question naïvely reductionist theories of consciousness even when applied to the human mind.

Douglas Hofstadter's awesome Gödel, Escher, Bach has an excellent interlude called, if I remember correctly, "Ant Fugue." It deals with precisely the same situation, and indeed Hofstadter uses this as a way to argue for his own perspective on complexity and consciousness. But for now, another pretty cool excerpt from Junod:

The worst part about discovering that the ants in your house are actually emissaries of the enormous teeming brain in your backyard — is that it worsens the other worst parts, of which there are many. For example, I have found ants in my underwear. Lots of them, which I didn't find until I put the underwear on. As a person who has had ants in his underwear, however, I have to say that what makes their presence particularly irksome is not the momentary discomfort but rather the knowledge of why they're there. They're not just passing through, you see, on their way to somewhere else. They're not in your underwear by accident. They're nation-building. They're extending the range of their civilization, and they're doing it in your drawers.

Speaking of which, Abstruse Goose has a very insightful point to make on the distinction between "natural" and "artificial".