[wjholden]

I'm going to hazard a speculative answer with poor evidence: love.

The ants love one another, as shown by their child-rearing, grooming, playing, the "antennating" mentioned in the article, collective defense, and deliberate handling of their dead.

We don't understand their language, but I have a certain faith that ants experience a very similar kinship for their sisters as we. If they were strictly-rational robots then why would they show these behaviors?

[sk65]

Well ants have outlived the chimp troupe and its over rated intelligence by 200 million years.

So there are serious people who think if the chimps(or any social species for that matter) ever survive 200 million years borrowing ant like behavior at individual and group level is a possible way.

[tialaramex]

While I concede it's possible the ants in some sense love each other. I suspect that it's actually net beneficial. Each ant has a certain cost to manufacture for the colony, a damaged ant is better than no ant, they're not rehabilitating ants who will never be productive again, these ants lost (part of) one limb, and with it removed they are disabled but still productive for the colony and at low risk of introducing infections.

I remember when I was much younger I got cancer. The same cancer Hank Green had more recently if you want a relateable celebrity example. It's fixable, and I live in a country with universal healthcare, so of course they fixed it. Even if you care only about simple economics that's a sound investment. I was already a massive net cost, needing feeding and care for decades before I became an adult able to do something useful and then almost immediately (in fact, technically before getting my first "real" job) getting cancer. If you do nothing the cancer kills me, we can't prove it's fatal because we figured out how to cure it† before modern scientific medicine and it would be unethical to study that on real volunteers now, but we can observe that crazy people who insist "No" when offered a cure today do die, horribly, as you'd expect if it's deadly.

But under universal healthcare of course you fix people like me, we become ordinary productive citizens and contribute to society including by paying some eyewatering amount of taxes over the subsequent years, which helps pay for said universal healthcare.

Many cases aren't like mine, but we forget that quite a lot are, and without universal healthcare you are net losing money so as to hurt poor people which is full-on "Capitalism is a death cult" insanity.

† Some people will tell you cancer can't be "cured". Well, OK, the doctors who treated me do this all day every day, they'd never had a young man die of this cancer. They'd had some close calls, some old men die of this cancer, and they'd had plenty of young men die from other cancers under their care, but this one, nope. There are technical reasons, but they're boring and Hank Green probably made a better video explaining them than I could.

[ahahs]

All beings have emotions and feel things. Especially love. It is not a specifically human thing to form attachments, have bonds, and share community.

[afavour]

I’d be careful labelling any of that “love” though. There’s certainly not any proof of ants “loving” each other, they have a community, sure, but that’s just doing what best serves their colony. I’d need more evidence to consider that “love”.

[drekipus]

Try experiencing it yourself firsthand, first

[altmanaltman]

I mean that is an untestable claim right? Like we can only infer from their behavior and there is no absolute way to really understand what consiousness is and how other species experience it. So while yes they may love each other but love is a very complex emotion with specific meaning while what they do is more reactive actions that keep the herd safe instead of subjective affection. It is highly unlikely ants are capable of complex emotions given their nervous system design

[ahahs]

You said its an "Untestable claim" yet you are sure its "highly unlikely" ants are capable of emotion. Which is it?

I think you're wrong, and its painfully obvious that ants do indeed form a bond with their community. The proof is in the system.

[altmanaltman]

> You said its an "Untestable claim" yet you are sure its "highly unlikely" ants are capable of emotion. Which is it?

It can be both, right? To the best of our knowledge, they are not likely to have complex emotions. We cannot test it due to physical and technological limitations.

You can argue the other way but "proof is in the system" is not a very sound one.