Tootfinder

As far as I understand (granted, I don't understand that much, but...) there is a legitimate and actively debated position in philosophy of mind and cognitive science regarding ant colonies.
That is, colony-level cognition may be real, not metaphorical. Ant colonies:
- integrate information over time
- exhibit memory (via pheromone landscapes)
- solve optimisation problems
- adapt flexibly to novel conditions
- show something like attention (resource …

There are three schools of magic. One: State a tautology, then ring the
changes on its corollaries; that's philosophy. Two: Record many facts.
Try to find a pattern. Then make a wrong guess at the next fact; that's
science. Three: Be aware that you live in a malevolent Universe controlled
by Murphy's Law, sometimes offset by Brewster's Factor; that's engineering.