Tom,
Heck, why not just get the NSA to do it. They probably have most of them on file and already have the algorithms to extract the data. ;-)
As usual, you are focusing in on how to best solve the specific point, not drawing back and looking at the larger context, which is that eye color is only an analogy for all possible information. What are all those billions of eyes looking at, the moment. What thoughts are trailing through the connecting neural systems, from what they were looking at previously. What is going on around them, that they are not noticing. What is going on in all the non-human brains, deep geology, atmospheric conditions, other stars and their planetary systems, etcetc.
" "Unlike humans, ants don't build a unified map of the world."
Yes, they lack the imagination to tie all that disparate data together. No religious ants.
Tom; "human complex neural networks allow us to choose the scale at which we make decisions, while ants apparently cannot."
Article: "Thus we have evidence that ants can also take into account what they have recently experienced in order to modulate their behavior. What's more, we have shown that the ant's navigational modules are not purely isolated. In the case of backtracking for instance, the experience of familiar visual scenery modulates the use of sky compass information.
Evolution has equipped ants with a distributed system of specialised modules interacting together. These results demonstrate that the navigational intelligence of ants is not in an ability to build a unified representation of the world, but in the way different strategies cleverly interact to produce robust navigation."
How do you know the "modulator" isn't a primal sense of self, focusing in on the specific problem at hand? Thus choosing the scale to which the problem is best suited, rather than getting all philosophical about the nature of problems and rocks and grass and sun and how sometimes they are good and sometimes bad and just trying to tie it all together in some unified representation of the world/belief system.
"showing how laterally-distributed information in a complex network is more robust than the conventional hierarchical model"
Isn't swarm intelligence an example of lateral distribution, while hierarchical models are how our governing processes focus information into a central processing unit/decider? Which then extends to top down systems to deal with broader applications, as our sense of identity extends beyond the local, because we are no longer an indigenous group of hunter-gathers? What we gain in size, we lose in efficiency.
Hasn't recent work in neurology shown our brain function more as a distributed network of various nodes, sections, hemispheres, etc, having their specialized functions, yet working together?
Regards,
John M
