Could ants ever achieve sentience? What would it look like?

>>2380761
An even bigger and industrialized ant colony, but the (((hierarchy))) elite ants living in the nicest caverns would have all of the honey and nectar for themselves as they legislate to import foreign ants from neighboring mounds to take up the jobs of the natively-hatched ants.

>>2380773
I don't think you're taking my question very seriously

>>2380773
>ants
>honey
stupid?

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>>2380773

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>>2380779

>>2380785
This thing makes me want to throw down a poison bomb so I can carve its body

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>>2380761
>>2380773
>>2380777
cappable/10

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>>2380782
Oh man I remember doing this in Sim Ant. Shit took way longer than it was worth, but it was cool that it was possible.

>>2380761
Ever see the Outer Limits episode called "Sand Kings", yeah probably that.

Eusocial sapients are speculated on constantly in sci-fi, if anything it's a cliche.

>oh woops, space evolved another hivemind lol

>>2380855
My problem with that is they always do it shittily. They always either give the individual "ants" personalities or they just make the entire goddamn species into one big hive mind (like the borg). Even within species, that's not what ants are like. Ants within COLONIES are mostly hive-minded (with large vaiation based on species), but at an inter-colony level within the same species there exists no such collaboration. I have NEVER seen a hive mind where there's 1. multiple minds, each with its own reproductive capabilities and 2. they aren't all subservient to some species-wide will (zerg, borg, etc). Then again, I'm not super into sci-fi.

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>>2380865
What do you think about Necrophages? Only few of them have minds to speak of, but there's no magical wi-fi hivemind.

>implying ant are not sentient

>>2380865
Would humans count?
We make massive "hives" of millions of sentient, free thinking individuals coexisting and cooperating with one another.

>>2380761
>Could ants ever achieve sentience?
unfortunately no.
> What would it look like?
Ants would probably farm more then just aphids and fungus.
There would probably be whole miniature fields with walls around them where the ants would grow crops and raise insect cattle.
Single queen ant colonys would probably not be isolated and ants would probably trade goods between other colonys instead of full blown war like they do now.

They would not live in separate houses or some dumb shit like that as they would still be all sisters of the same queen.
Male ants would not be taught the culture or the ways of the world as they would only exist for sex and then die just like they do now.

>>2381426
They're like a limb. Send them the right pheromones and they do whatever, there's no decision making.

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>>2380773

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>>2380782
You know how you turn over rocks and such to find any colonies with lots of eggs and larva?

I wonder if you can steal tons of eggs from various colonies and put them with the eggs of your new queen, before her eggs hatch and have them become "slaves" to that queen?

I think it'd be really interesting to test out. You could conceivably jump start your colony a great deal by doing that if it works. Of course, you'd only want to do that if you are using a local species for your queen, since there may be some disease a foreign queen might not be able to defend against.

>>2380761
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_IV

>>2381450
that's stupid because there is no male ants except for when nuptial flights occur and they just die.

>>2380761
No they need a central nervous system to do that, insects dont have "self" try to imagine if every part of your body had a mind of its own and worked together to keep the entire body intact to get an idea of what insect cognition is.

An insect's head is nothing more than an independent structure meant to see the world around it, while an insects limbs move on their own thats why insects sliced in half will still move around because the brain in their head is seperate from the nerves in their other ganglia. The reason the legs stop moving is because eventually they run out energy and thus stop moving.

So no arthropods WILL NEVER EVER EVOLVE sentience heck they wont will never have the level of cognition of fucking fish let alone humans they are doomed to be mindless cogs.

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>>2380761
>What would it look like?

Their entire society will crumble because of NEETs and trade unions

>>2381486
That's what's perfect about it: the femenist ants will just flail around autistically over a practically nonexistent boogeyman.
A nonexistent scapegoat is the perfect one.

>>2381506
>they need a central nervous system
They have one. Many "higher" insects have fused ganglia whose function is a lot more brain-like
>>2380761
Repeat after me:
Sapience
Sapience
Sapience

Nematodes are sentient
Plants are sentient
Bacteria are sentient

>>2380785
Aborigines in Australia will dig up these fucker's tunnels just to gobble them up like candy.

>>2380865
Some ant species do form super colonies, where a portion of the population breaks off to form its own nest. The two populations are genetically related to each other and socially they aren't aggressive to one another. They don't technically cooperate, but through their "genetic alliance" they only compete with other colonies or species. This allows them to quickly dominate an area and displace its other colonies. Ants with this colony structure are doing alarmingly well on a global scale at the moment. I wouldn't be surprised if this was the dominant type of ant hierarchy in a few more decades.

>>2381452
This doesn't work. Ants can tell that pupae and sometimes even eggs aren't from the same species. At that point they usually kill them or eat them. This will occasionally work with ants of the same genus that are morphologically very similar.

Also, despite the name, a queen has no control over the colony. She's simply a very specialized member of it.

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>>2381670
Yeah, I figured they'd need to be closely related in a genus or even of the same species. I was meaning when you have the queen in the test tube before there's any other ants that have hatched. She's just by herself. Then either her eggs hatch first or the "slave" test hatch first.

It makes me want to go out and find a queen and give it a try. I'm interested in what would happen even if they merely eat each other. I knew I should have caught some of those queens on their nuptial flight earlier this month, but they were not what I wanted.