"Like a brain, an ant colony operates without central control. Each is a set of interacting individuals, either neurons or ants, using simple chemical interactions that in the aggregate generate their behaviour. People use their brains to remember. Can ant colonies do that? This question leads to another question: what is memory?

For people, memory is the capacity to recall something that happened in the past. We also ask computers to reproduce past actions – the blending of the idea of the computer as brain and brain as computer has led us to take 'memory' to mean something like the information stored on a hard drive. We know that our memory relies on changes in how much a set of linked neurons stimulate each other; that it is reinforced somehow during sleep; and that recent and long-term memory involve different circuits of connected neurons. But there is much we still don't know about how those neural events come together, whether there are stored representations that we use to talk about something that happened in the past, or how we can keep performing a previously learned task such as reading or riding a bicycle.

...

Ants use the rate at which they meet and smell other ants, or the chemicals deposited by other ants, to decide what to do next. A neuron uses the rate at which it is stimulated by other neurons to decide whether to fire. In both cases, memory arises from changes in how ants or neurons connect and stimulate each other. It is likely that colony behaviour matures because colony size changes the rates of interaction among ants. In an older, larger colony, each ant has more ants to meet than in a younger, smaller one, and the outcome is a more stable dynamic. Perhaps colonies remember a past disturbance because it shifted the location of ants, leading to new patterns of interaction, which might even reinforce the new behaviour overnight while the colony is inactive, just as our own memories are consolidated during sleep. Changes in colony behaviour due to past events are not the simple sum of ant memories, just as changes in what we remember, and what we say or do, are not a simple set of transformations, neuron by neuron. Instead, your memories are like an ant colony's: no particular neuron remembers anything although your brain does."

*psychology

COPYLEFT
A wonderful collection of essays on philosophy, sociology, psicology and more.

@copy_left

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https://github.com/7LPdWcaW/GrowTracker-Android

"Welcome to grow tracker. This app was created to help record data about growing plants in order to monitor the growing conditions to help make the plants grow better, and identify potential issues during the grow process.

...

Grow tracker is the main utility app. Allows you to track statistical and operational data about a plant, from watering details, to photos, to trimmings.

The main feature of this app is that it is 100% anonymous. No data is sent from the app, data can be encrypted and includes a fail-safe option."

See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/growutils/

GrowSync (v1.0)

Grow sync is an addon application for GrowTracker. This addon allows you to backup your plant data and (optional) photos to a remote server configurable within the addon configuration.

and

GrowUpdater (v1.0)

Grow updater is an update checker addon for GrowTracker. Periodically (1 day min, when app is being used) to check for application updates."