this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2024
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No Stupid Questions
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There is no such thing as a Stupid Question!
Don't be embarrassed of your curiosity; everyone has questions that they may feel uncomfortable asking certain people, so this place gives you a nice area not to be judged about asking it. Everyone here is willing to help.
- ex. How do I change oil
- ex. How to tie shoes
- ex. Can you cry underwater?
Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca still apply!
Thanks for reading all of this, even if you didn't read all of this, and your eye started somewhere else, have a watermelon slice 🍉.
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Fear is an emotion, and we can’t know about whether animals (or depending on where you fall on the qualia debate, other humans) feel that emotion. We can measure their behavior, though, and there are a great many studies on animal fear and avoidance behaviors, including ants.
Ants don’t have a memory in the sense that you or I think of. There is no collective memory of “avoid that place” that lives in the minds of ants or a hive because some ants had a bad time in that place, as far as we can tell. However ants deposit pheromones as they navigate the world. Other ants follow along later and maintain or update these pheromone “trails” (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4590477/). Ant pheromone signaling is a deep body of research but there are both positive (go this way) and negative (don’t go this way) signals.
Ants have a memory. Their memory is written on the world in pheromones. Just like human memory is kept in books.
Human memory is kept in our brains. You’re using precise words - like memory - imprecisely