[MD] Social Ants?

[Steve Peterson]

Hi Arlo, Platt, DMB, All who wonder if animals can be social,

Platt provided a long list of quotes saying that Pirsig only means human customs when he refers to the social level.

He missed a couple Pirsig quotes that contradict this view:

RMP Annotation 45
"After the beginning of history inorganic, biological, social and intellectual patterns are found existing together in the same person. I think the conflicts mentioned here are intellectual conflicts in which one side clings to an intellectual justification of existing social patterns and the other side intellectually opposes the existing social patterns. A social pattern which would be unaware of the next higher level would be found among prehistoric people and the higher primates when they exhibit social learning that is not genetically hard-wired but yet is not symbolic."


Also from LC:
DG:
Perhaps we could look at the sign language that researchers have taught gorillas as an example of a social pattern being unaware of intellectual abstraction.
RMP:
That sounds okay.


Steve:
So though Pirsig generally suggests that it is best to think of social patterns in terms of people, he does also say that it is possible that animals could have social patterns too.

In the quotes that Platt provided, for the most part, what RMP wants to explain is  that "goup" does not equal "society." A pile of rocks is not a society of rocks. I don't think we should use such quotes to say that the MOQ says that social behavior among non-humans is impossible.

A helpful word that Pirsig uses for social pattern is "custom." Humans have customs that are passed down from generation to generation through unconscious copying of behavior or conscious teaching and learning rather than through DNA. I think that there is evidence that some animals do copy the behavior of others or can even learn. Based on the two quotes provided above, it sounds like Pirsig is open to hearing about such evidence as well.

Not being zoologists, neither RMP nor I am experts in whether a given pattern of behavior of an animal is genetically transferred or an example of animal culture. Again, I don't think the quotes that Platt provided should be taken as the final word. He just didn't want us to think that any group is a society.

Instincts are biological while learned behavior is social. I guess we even need to be more specific about types of learning. The sort of conditioning with treats that we do to train a dog is making use of biological patterns. If a dog copied another dog's behavior out of its sense of that behavior having Quality, that would certainly be social learning. I don't know enough about dogs to say whether that ever happens.

Personally I don't think that ants display learned behavior or copy the behavior of other ants. The roles that different ants play seem biological rather than social to my understanding of the levels. There are no ant celebrities, for example. The queen has a special role but the other ants don't subconsciously try to be like her.

Is the alpha male of a group of animals a celebrity in a sense? Maybe, but I think the alpha-male pattern is biological. Since it is seen everywhere for a given species it does not seemed to be passed along socially but rather biologically. I think if you raised a bunch of horses completely separate from their "horse society" I think that they would still develop this pattern, so at least it is not passed along socially. Arlo could still argue that the social level for the horses would emerge Dynamically under those conditions.

I remember someone years ago posted an article about a species of primate where two groups (societies?) where studied. They lived on separate islands, but the islands were geographically close with the same climate and vegetation. On the one island, the animals used a tool of some sort to get food like sticking a stick in an ant hill or breaking open clams with something. I forget what it was, but the point is that this method was being passed along from primate to primate. The method was not used on the other island. That is social behavior in my book.

I also heard of gorillas being taught sign language who then taught it to other gorillas. Again, that sure sounds like social behavior to me.

Unfortunately Platt's response to such cases is to simply post a quote of RMP saying that he thinks it is better to think of social patterns as human customs rather than thinking about what a social pattern is. 

Arlo, as I'm sure you noticed in the recent discussions between Platt and I, Platt sees the levels as types of people rather than types of patterns of value. If you want to discuss defining what a social pattern is you won't get far with Platt. He doesn't want to talk about types of patterns of value unless you are talking in terms of the values of the individual, i.e. politics. I don't think he has an interest in seeing how the MOQ levels couuld be applied to zoology or in any arena other than politics.

Regards,
Steve




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