The term “hive mind” refers to the apparent intelligence that emerges at the group level in some social species, particularly insects like honeybees and ants. An individual honeybee might not be very bright (although that’s debatable), but the honeybee colony as a collective might be very intelligent.
The Hive Mind Theory
The hive mind theory is the theory that a collection of numerous beings that interact and communicate with each other, each with an individual consciousness (or mind), form a collective consciousness. This collective consciousness is known as the hive mind. This can be applied very well to creatures like ants. Ants are very goal-oriented. They all work together to achieve their certain goals. Is the worker ant even aware of the bigger picture? Probably not. It just does its job, what it is designed to do.
This same logic can be applied to humans. Humans are much more complex creatures than ants however, the most complex on the planet. This theory is even more supported by the fact that we have access to the internet. This is the ultimate source of communication between each other right now. As individuals, we have jobs, just like ants. That begs the question: are we aware of the bigger picture? Most people would say yes, but can our minds even comprehend the complexity of what humans accomplish? Every person has a role keeping this giant machine turning, but how can we fully understand it? A vast number of different things make up this machine, most of them too complex to understand. Economics, the free market, politics, the internet, and much more contribute to the whole. each of those examples are far too complex for one individual to understand. We can only study them and get a general idea of how they work. If an intelligent alien life were to observe humanity, would they just see us as stupid ants? Maybe that is why no intelligent lifeforms pay us a visit -- they couldn't care less about us. That is a different conversation though. Humans are goal-oriented, just like ants. Our goals are more complex though. We make hive mind decisions through government and the free market to build huge structures, manufacture a vast number of products, initiate wars, and more. While it is a fact that these things happen, the hive mind theory takes this one more step. It states that our minds come together to form the massive hive mind network of humans. Instead of having one central brain, a collection of brains in separate bodies interact and make decisions together.
What I am proposing
What if humans are not separate beings. What if together, we create one being separated into different bodies. This design would be a smart one on evolution's part. Instead of an organism having one body, it has separate independent bodies. The reason why this is a smart design is because if you cut a person's arm off, they will become significantly less useful and fit to survive. If you kill off 10,000 creatures that make up one being, that being will hardly be affected (given that there are still a lot of the creatures left). Anyways, it can always just make more of the creatures.
I want to take this even a step further. What if all life itself is one being? As humans have different parts that do certain things, so does life. We have lungs to take in oxygen, red blood cells to transport the oxygen, cells that use the oxygen to burn sugars to produce energy, and so many more countess parts of our body that contribute to the whole of our existence. Go back to the larger scale. We have plants that take in energy from the sun, animals like cows that consume the plants and turn that energy into protein, and people that consume both plants and animals for their energy. This can be seen as different parts of the giant organism. Some parts are made to produce energy, and some parts take that energy and use it to create (humans -- right now we are the most capable thinkers of all life. We are the currently develpoed brain of this life form).
Creatures evolve, and sometimes they have remnants of body parts that are no longer useful to them. These are called vestigial structures. Humans have many of these. One example is the appendix. Life may have many vestigial forms also. There are life forms that do nothing to contribute to any form of life except itself.
Evolution may be the smartest concept of this huge organism. Through trial and error, it comes up with different creatures that are able to survive. It tries many different things. The forms that cannot survive die off. This helps the ones that do survive perfect themselves. The creatures with the most useful features are more likely to survive, thus evolution. Evolution is just like adaptation. When a creature is born, it hardly knows anything. It has to learn to adapt to the world around it through trial and error.
What do you think?
Do you think that all life on Earth could possibly be one huge organism? Could we just be a tiny part of a way bigger picture? Are we just like little worker ants, doing their part for the bigger picture? Are we even more insignificant that that; do we have no more purpose than a pack of red blood cells? Are we even worse off, just a vestigial creature of life that will eventually die off and serve no purpose in the distant future? Or is all of this BS, and we are the spectacle of the universe? Leave your thoughts in the comments, I would love to hear them.
The fact that we can even conceive the idea of a collective consciousness hive mind shows that it is possible for evolution to head in that direction. Here is a website that talks about a true hive mind noosphere actually being possible in the future through telepathy:
http://io9.gizmodo.com/how-much-longer-until-humanity-becomes-a-hive-mind-453848055
Let's take it one step further, what if the entire Universe is one consciousness expressing itself in such a variety of different forms that some of those forms can't even recognize other forms as conscious elements?
And does it even end there!?
Great post! In fact, it was so good that we decided to feature it in our latest newspaper. Read it here: https://steemit.com/steemplus/@steemplus/steemplus-thursday-october-13-the-daily-newspaper-that-pays-you-to-find-high-quality-content
Thanks a lot! I'll resteem!
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Very well written @charlie.wilson! I just made reference to the noosphere and posthumans becoming the limbic system for the global brain / ai superintelligence in my introduceyourself post. Very much where I believe things are headed, and I think much sooner than most people really consider. I don't think it will be more than 15 years til a large number of us are connected via brain implants.
I'll check your page out! Thanks for reading!
Would we be another vibrating atom in a blade of grass, or a star in the universe... nature did not spring us aboard without purpose. What the purpose is I have no clue, I just know my own.
But we do also need to consider "Herd Mentality" as humans sure as shootin, follow that.
I do imagine that life on Earth may be viewed as one large organism, and that we are just little parts of this. Most of this organism's 'thoughts', however, likely take place on time scales that are BIG. And our human frames of reference can rarely accommodate complexity and such big-ness simultaneously.
That is true. Bigger organisms take a much longer time to do what they want than tiny organisms due to their complexity. If Life is one big organism, I feel like it will naturally evolve a super-smart massive "brain." We haven't gotten to that yet, just a collection of minds (hive mind) that resemble this "brain." Its intelligence must very limited. If this is true, that is undoubtedly the next step for evolution, and life is still in a very primitive form.