It seems like ants are not aware or concerned about us at all. I can stomp my foot down in front of an ant and he just walks around it (or under it if he’s able.)
I know if a creature as massive as the Washington Monument put his foot down in front of me, I’d be heading in the opposite direction ASAP.
Which leads me to the question, are ants even aware we exist?
They can be. Put your bare foot near a nest of red ants and see what happens.
It’d be safe to say an ant can sense your presence, but it would have no way of comprehending you in the way that you do. Except inasmuch as you apply to the “Food/Not Food/Building Material/Enemy/Not Enemy” categories.
There is probably a question as to whether ants are “aware” of anything at all. But that would bleed over into GD.
If an ant walks around your foot instead of trying to walk through it, then it is aware (in some sense) that your foot is there, even if it’s not distinguishing it from a rock or a tree. If a fire ant bites your foot, and doesn’t try to bite stones or trees, then it’s aware (in some sense) that your foot is something hostile – though the awareness might be just instinctive, based on your foot smelling like a hostile animal, rather than the result of some chain of reasoning.
Is a paramecium aware that the petri dish it lives in exists? Probably not, yet when it bumps into it, it backs up and paddles away. That response doesn’t mean, to me, that the paramecium is “aware” of its existence. On the other hand, there are those who speculate that insects do, in fact, have some degree of consciousness. In the recently published, What We Believe But Cannot Prove, Alun Anderson, recently the editor-in-chief of New Scientist magazine says he believes that cockroaches are conscious - in a way, as does Joseph LeDoux, of NYU. Clearly, the problems of proving or even investigating the problem are at this point insurmountable. As LeDoux says, “[w]e can’t even prove that other people are conscious, much less other animals.” You’re mucking about in some fairly metaphysical territory there, son. xo, C.
Ok, then, why do people flock **toward **the Washington Monument, rather than running from it in horror? You, as a human, are able to distinguish between the Washington Monument and an equally-massive “creature.” An ant might equate you with, say, a floor lamp. Even if your foot suddenly appeared in front of it, does it have the mentality to identify it as a threat?
I always thought the were like the Borg on Star Trek.
They wont pay attention to you unless they see you as a threat. -Or you have something they want to intigrate into their own system.
“We are Ants”
Of course ants are aware of us! They’re our friends, aren’t they? And they’re blowing in the wind…
OK, seriously, you need to define your terms, not just for ants but for your baseline (presumably us). Are you aware of ants? In what sense? Do you only take notice of them momentarily, or do you think about them in the abstract? Are you cognizant of the personal history of this particular colony? Are you tuned in at this moment to what each enzyme level is, and the current state of transport efficiency in distributing nutrients to the various organelles of the ant-body of that worker-ant over there? Are you smelling and interpreting the little pheromone-markers they’re deploying to communicate with each other?
If you’re asking if the ants are aware of us in almost exactly the same sense that we are aware of them, I would say not.
In the other recent ant thread , I asked:
…if anyone could provide an informed opinion, I think it would be him.