SPECULATIONS ON HIVE MINDS - How do lots of things become one thing? Including ruminations on ants, weird sea creatures, consciousness and (briefly) MASSIVE ROBOTS.
3. Q: How does an individual
perspective/identity arise
from an arrangement of
matter?
(We are not going to answer this
question today. Sorry.)
4.
5. One Idea: Information
Processing!
The more complex and responsive the
processing is, the more likely it is that
“consciousness” (an individual
perspective/identity) will arise.
6. The brain is a massively complex information processing thing,
with around 100 billion neurons working together to carry out
various tasks. Different parts of the brain specialise in
different things.
7. Not everyone is convinced by this.
• Suggests we are just like computers, but
computers (so far) are not (apparently)
conscious. At least mine isn’t.
• Still doesn’t tell us how or at what point
consciousness is supposed to magically appear
14. • Individual ants are very basic creatures and
pretty useless without the hive – and that
includes the queen.
• But together they act very intelligently,
creating astonishingly engineered colonies
and responding to their environment as one.
• This is down to two things – extreme
specialisation and extreme integration = act
like one “super-organism”.
15. Siphonophores
Ernst Haekel’s drawings from samples caught on the HMS Challenger expedition 1873-1876
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NWEdAkL92w&feature=related
18. • Siphonophores blur the boundary between what is
one organism and what is many
• It depends on how you look at it whether you would
class it as an individual or a colony
• There are interesting possible parallels with how
simple, single-cell organisms evolved into complex,
multi-cell organisms... like US.
• To an Amoeba (a single cell organism) WE are like a
Siphonophore – WE ARE A COLONY.
19. Return to the The China Brain
•The reason why a “China Mind” doesn’t seem to work is because the
individuals that make it up are already autonomous individuals in
themselves – not specialized or integrated enough.
•If they became more specialized and integrated so that they truly
acted like one organism, it suddenly doesn’t seem so unlikely.
20. • It may be a stretch to talk about ant colonies or siphonophores as having
a “mind”.
• But what they tell us is that our concepts of what is multiple and what is
individual are not as cut-and-dried as we think they are – it is more of a
continuum.
• Modern thinking on the development of consciousness suggests it is
about interaction, feedback, dialogue – both externally (with others and
your environment) and internally (processes within your own brain and
body)
• For an organism to be complex it must also be, at some level, “multiple”.
• Viewed like that, it is possible – maybe – to see ourselves as an example
of (highly evolved) “Hive minds”.
