A way to make it stop hurting to think about, replaced instead by transcendental beauty, is to abstract pheromones to outcome utility backward induction and the following of pheromones to a single worker being a monte carlo tree search rollout with the pheromones as a guide: they play a mixed strategy proportional to the pheromones. The fading of pheromones becomes something like a weighted moving average. Strong parallels with game theory and reinforcement learning algorithms start to emerge. This model is wrong, but the Earth is also not a perfect sphere.

I find it very fun to think about and have been called wierd for taking about ants before with childlike excitement.

The AntsCanada channel is fun for watching ecosystems interact with each other. So fascinating. :)

> And, to quote Oliver Sachs: "I'm not sure about octopuses..."

I thought this quote was about the octopus that correctly predicted the outcome of games in a FIFA world cup. But seems it was something else?

Oliver said this during a roundtable discussion on metaphysics with Daniel Dennet, Steve Gould, Rupert Sheldrake, Freeman Dyson, and Stephen Toulmin from 1993.

It's a fascinating discussion with a lot of my favourite mid-late 20th century thinkers. It's up on youtube, lookup any of the names involved with "roundtable discussion". It's over 3 hours long though.

Anyway, Oliver was talking about what kind of mind he imagined various animals having. And that was most of what he had to say on octopuses.

It's a bit of a sad watch too because all the participants except Dennet and Sheldrake are dead now.

...predicted? Or CAUSED???

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu

It was Paul the Octopus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Octopus