2021/12/15 Ants like sugar. They found an uncapped grinder bottle of cinnamon sugar on the spice shelf. No other spice was touched. The ants like to keep things neat. They clean up after themselves. They clean up after everyone. As long as it's edible, they clean it away. They like order. They stay in their little lines, even when they don't make sense anymore. They like to follow along. The boundary of the nervous system of an ant is somewhat permeable. Some of the information exchange happens outside their bodies. They pick up chemicals with their feet that guide their actions. They leave down chemical trails for other ants to react to. They share a mind this way. The foods and acids and other poisons they encounter have similar effects as these marker trails. They too are direct stimuli that operate the mind of an ant. The ant is very much a part of its environment. We humans are too. We are permeable in the same ways. We may not have as many senses but ours too are acted upon by what what we call the outside and it directly effects our minds. Our nervous systems may be more complex and have more activity inside relative to outside by far, but the outside does still work us almost as easily as it does an ant. We have more capacity to learn to overcome specific reactions, we do this a lot. Still, this learning happens for the most part one at a time for each reaction we design to overcome and new experiences can always catch us without this preparation. Our behaviors themselves are also much more complex and so it is sometimes harder to tell when a chemical signal from a tree has changed our behavior. We call it subtle, though that is only because of what we are focusing on when we observe it. Our minds are shared as well, our social activity seems to take up the largest share of our brains resources. This independence that we consider so often is hardly there at all. What we wear, and how we talk, and what we eat, and how we think as well as what, are all almost completely dependent on our social and physical environment. We also like sugar.