Overview
Building on the Ant Colony Test (ACT) introduced in 2019, this paper further develops the case for using ant colonies as model systems for consciousness research. We examine how colony-level information integration, adaptive behavior, and meta-cognitive processes in ant colonies relate to proposed criteria for consciousness.
Overview source: Curated paper metadata.
Methods and contributions
Read the source for the full argument, qualifications, and evidence.
Findings and contributions
- The authors argue that consciousness and social complexity are both potentially scale-independent descriptors, and that Active Inference can operationalize their study separately and jointly.
- They argue multidimensional measures of consciousness or social complexity have no simple higher/lower ordering unless collapsed to a single value, paralleling critiques of a social 'ladder' in insects.
- They note that some ant social-complexity measures resemble consciousness properties yet carry little metaphysical baggage in ants, suggesting empirical measurement alone may not resolve philosophical debates.
- The authors propose that consciousness studies should proceed recognizing that consciousness shares many properties, and overlapping referents, with social complexity in ants.
- They argue against an entrenched 'Scala Conscientia', a singular ascending scale of consciousness within or across species.
Methods
- System-Measurement-Theory framing under scientific pluralism — Organizes consciousness studies by target system, empirical measurements, and theories, taking the ant colony as the system of interest.
- Comparative review of GWT, IIT, quantum, and FEP-based consciousness models — Reviews Global Workspace Theory, Integrated Information Theory, quantum and 'inner screen' models, and FEP-AI syntheses for their applicability to non-human systems such as ants.
- Operationalizing Birch et al. (2020) dimensions via Active Inference (Table 1) — Maps Birch et al.'s five dimensions of animal consciousness to Active Inference constructs and to ant social-complexity phenotypes in a juxtaposition table.
Summary sources: Paper metadata and evidence · Extracted source text.
Document downloads
PDFs are hosted here; supporting sources may use pinned archives.
- 2025_ConsciousnessAnts.pdf PDF · 3.70 MiB · extracted-text source
Citation
Citation metadata follows the unified bibliography.
Catalog details and resources
Related works
Ranked by recorded methods, topics, contributors and associated software, with contributor roles and domain-only matches labelled. Metadata overlap is not a citation or a scientific equivalence.