SilasBarta comments on It's not like anything to be a bat - Less Wrong

15 Post author: Yvain 27 March 2010 02:32PM

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Comment author: SilasBarta 30 March 2010 06:10:43PM *  3 points [-]

Humans are more analogous to an ant colony than to an individual ant, so that's where you should make the comparison: to a number of ant colonies with ant mass equal to your mass. Within each colony, you should treat each ant as a neuron in a large network, meaning you multiply the ant information not by the number of ants Na, but by Na log Na.

Assume 1000 ants/colony. You weight as much as 167 colonies. Letting N be the number of neurons in an ant (and measuring in Hartleys to make the math easier), each colony has

(N log N) (Na log Na)
= (1e4 log 1e4) (1e3 log 1e3) = 1.2e8 H

Multiplying by the number of colonies (since they don't act like a mega-colony) gives

1.2e8 H * 167
=2e10 H

This compares with the value for humans:

1e11 log 1e11
1.1e12 H

So that means you have ~55 times as much information per unit body weight, not that far from your estimate of 165.

I don't know what implications this calculation has for the topic, even assuming it's correct, but there you go.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 30 March 2010 07:15:53PM 0 points [-]

Within each colony, you should treat each ant as a neuron in a large network

Good point!