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heh, ok maybe wasps are 16bits ..

jokes aside, i was simply making a dumb model based on brain size, in the sense that we are supposed to have more neurons than insects but maybe the core structure is similar, they just have less room for fat and shallow details.




That's fair, although it's also worth noting we share quite little in terms of neural architecture with even the smartest of insects, and our brains differ in neuron count by something like six orders of magnitude - I don't know of any insect with as many as one million neurons, most being around the 50-150k range, while human brains weigh in at around a hundred billion.

That said, to take this as prima facie evidence that insects are meat robots, the way behaviorists like to do, strikes me purely as motivated reasoning. There's no basis for it - no one yet has established an objective mapping between brain size or complexity and behavioral complexity, nor does this seem likely to happen soon. Ethologists, by contrast with behaviorists, spend most of their research time observing live, active animals in their own accustomed habitats - Jane Goodall, as opposed to that pervo freak Skinner - and it's no accident that all the really interesting results, from individual recognition by facial features in polistids to the likely range and spread of V. mandarinia in the Nearctic, are coming from biologists who take an ethological approach.


Well you know.. numbers. If you count lines of code on hard drive these days, it's also many order of magnitude more than old OSes. Some people made tiny lisp, tiny prolog that fits into a few kB while some use a full blown JVM class tree with god knows how many MB of code to achieve probably less.




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