Did you know Ants Exhibit Compassion, Empathy and Sympathy

Roger F Malina July 3 2024

Compassion:

I am working with high school teacher Antonia Moran , https://artscilab.utdallas.edu/2024/04/04/compassion-as-medicine-literature-as-the-catalyst/ , and Johnathan Tsou https://profiles.utdallas.edu/jonathan.tsou .

Antonia Moran is leading a funding proposal in our UTDallas ArtSciLab , https://artscilab.utdallas.edu/ , on Compassion Science. She is focusing on the role of literature and narratives. She will be applying her work to teaching her high school teaching colleagues, and her students, the methodologies of compassion based on contemporary neuroscience.

Tsou is director of our Bass School Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology. He happens to have written: The Social Construction of Human Categories. Review of Ásta, Categories We Live By: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Metascience  2021 – Book Review 

Positive Eugenics

Which connects with the work I am collaborating on, as a phd committee member, with John Varghese which is centered on contemporary understanding of Eugenics. He just taught me the concept of “positive eugenics”, that I was unfamiliar with.

Pre-announcement of the Center for Emergence Studies at UTDallas

One of my current interests is CSS or Coincidence, Synchronicity and Serendipity . This is a methodology that we are using in our new Center for Emergence Studies which will soon open at UTDallas.

 Yes ants, compassion and emergence do cross-connect by accident but our mind is a pattern finding machines and often creates fake patterns to feel OK.

I just happened to read: Ants perform amputations to save injured nestmates (phys.org) :

“Saving lives through surgery is no longer exclusive to humans. In a study published July 2 in the journal Current Biology, scientists detail how Florida carpenter ants, a common, brown species native to its namesake, selectively treat the wounded limbs of fellow nestmates—either by wound cleaning or amputation.

An ant-assisted amputation takes at least 40 minutes to complete. Experimental testing demonstrated that with tibia injuries, if the leg was not immediately removed post-infection, the ant would not survive.”

Watch this video: https://youtu.be/UL2XtQZaH1I?si=x_V4Cfm14Kdvj_w0&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fphys.org%2F&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjQsMTY0NTA2&feature=emb_share

So compassion may be innate to all living things. Center for Emergence Studies cofounder geologist Robert Stern just published an article arguing that the emergence of life requires plate tectonics. This is so rare that none of the 8000 exoplanets discovered so far are likely to have any forms of life (at least not similar to our own), and certainly none of the other planets in our solar system. They have magma but that is buried too deeply to move the surface around and trigger the emergence of life:

https://qz.com/drake-equation-update-fermi-paradox-intelligent-life-1851507963

So perhaps this means that compassion exists in all life forms on our planet, but maybe not elsewhere in the universe, unless they have ants.

Anti-Non-Center for Emergence Studies

Just to complete this narrative. We are about to start the Center for Emergence Studies under the leadership of poet Fred Turner, Geologist Robert Stern and I and you  (if you would like to be involved, contact us). Paul Fishwick and Tina Qin have joined the emergent team and bring very different perspectives, methods and objectives from predicting future catastrophes to applying metaphor theory to data visualization in banks.

We already published a theoretical article and podcast on what we mean by ‘emergence’, mostly autopoietic bottom up, but also up and down and oscillating:

A Brief History of Emergence: With Frederick Turner, Robert Stern, and Roger F. Malina

Our second article is on the emergence of the arts and humanities at our university, University of Texas at Dallas. Our university was founded as a technoscientific institute last century with no plan, strategy or intent to include the arts and humanities. But by accident our university became a refugee center for experts in A and H who could not stay in their current job or find other work. Our Bass School of Arts, Humanities and Technology, https://bass.utdallas.edu/, is now emerging and yes arts humanities AND technology.

If you would like a pre-publication copy, contact us.

 Paul Fishwick and gang are reworking our Aesthetic Computing manifesto from last century. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233981183_Aesthetic_Computing_Manifesto

Fred Turner is now a maestro in writing AI generated poetry but he says:

“First, the good news. The program noticed that I like quatrains, though I work in many different forms and often vary even the quatrain form, replacing the expected pentameter line at the end of each stanza of a poem with a tetrameter, or vice versa, or suchlike undermining of expectations to suggest a change of feeling. 

The AI seems to be trying to give no offense, to tell the reader what it expects the reader will want to hear. There’s no hint of the tragedy, bitterness, caustic reversal of expectations, metaphysical questioning, moral paradox, sardonic glee and acceptance of existential punishment that informs much of my work, and that of other poets. Its appearance of mellow goodwill would feel false if it were not automatic.”

So coming back to the start of this blog post: does AI exhibit compassion? I have not used AI in generating this text, or maybe it happened behind my back. And I got the ok of all mentioned humans to go ahead and publish this text on line, but how do I know they weren’t bots that replied to me giving me permission.