[Mike 5]

The Collective Mind of Siafu Ants

A while back I saw a TV documentary on the the "number one predator" in Africa – colonies of Siafu ants.

These are the swarming ants that eat people and horses alive if they do not get out of the way. Watching this film, it was clear that our thories of mind as "inside" a physical body are inadequate.

We get a slight sense when watching a flock of birds or a shoal of fish, even some crowded human mob, that a collective mind is there, but we can blink and shake that idea out of our heads. No serious thinker can witness Siafu Ants and shake off the idea that so many functions of a body - nesting, nourishment, excretion, are all organised at the communical level here involving "intelligence" that simply cannot fit into any single ant brain.

The Siafu Ants live in colonies of several millions, and are about as large as small locusts. There is just one helpless female queen, millions of baby maggots to be fed, millions or worker ants, and they must move nest every couple of weeks because they have eaten every living thing for miles around. To move 7 million ants to a new nest in a few hours, the Siafu form a flowing river like a motorway with living barrier rails and what look like streelamps – ants on other ants shoulders about three or four high and the top ones are regularly spaced and ready to attack any thing or any one who stumbles near the snaking dark amoeba of discrete individuals.

Then along come the sausage flies, the males are the size of a chipolata and fly in from another nest to mate. If I had not seen the film, I would not believe it either.

The logistics of moving so many million ants, over and over, a good many of them helpless pupae, and watching that, it is very hard to avoid the conclusion that these ants have a "mind" that is not physically in any one ant at all, but in the flowing spaces between them as it were.

Of course at the atomic level, matter is mainly space, so it is just a presumption that mind has to be within walls that are not there when you get beyond nanoscopic levels.

Every couple of days the ants go hunting and in such numbers, no creature is safe unless they are awake and running fast. The way they chase and capture any and every creature appears to us to be an action of a single large organisms that "knows" what to do.

Of course our own bodies are made of individual cells that for unknown reasons joined into collective collaborations and specialisations, technically each cell is still a separate cell but grown for a purpose from a blueprint of a single double helix of DNA.

The questions arises as to the future of our species. Some have the idea that people will become communal in the way that these ants are, and that the cells in our own bodies are. That as a species we already form mobs, teams, and know what that feels like, but could there actually be some level of mind beyond ours that wakes up and is there in the spaces between humans guiding us blindly to group actions?

Scary thought, especially thinking of wars and so on.