in a cultural sense…the phenomenon whereby unintelligent members of an insect colony can act together to achieve intelligent solutions, has fascinated thinkers like: Eric Bonabeau founder of Icosystems, and San Francisco author Kevin Kelly, who was one of the first to apply terms like SWARM LOGIC, SWARM INTELLIGENCE and the HIVE MIND to human systems and organizations…
Swarm insights and emergence theory obviously key into the well-known view of the earth as a living self-regulation entity, popularized as the GAIA HYPOTHESIS,
and unto the slgihtly more prosaic idea of the GLOBAL BRAIN, which has received attention more recently in business circles…
anyone familiar with that? I would like to hear of your views…
See E. O. Wilsons’s “Consilience: The unity of Knowledge” (1998) for its pragmatic description of what bees do. There is no need to enlarge this into human abstractions such as world mind or other such claptrap!
Lo, the “other beings” would think I was mad,
For even a group of low-density alien robots from failing times would have told me thus:
“The universe is a being.”
=D>
What does a brain do…?
It sends and it recieves energies.
=D>
For many eras,
Man hath said:
“I am intelligent.”
Or: “I have intelligence.”
But, he secretly spake unto himself thus:
“The universe is not intelligent.”
Like attracts like, in some cases.
And lies hath been like water,
For they flow out, and they give birth to one another,
And they wish to wash into a sea of themselves.
But sometimes they are simply the little-opposite…
And they would say nay unto this:
“The universe is intelligent,
And man is not.”
And it is much like thus:
A blind man wanteth to catch a wild-fox, for he heard another say unto him: “The fox is a beautiful thing, it is to have.” But he hath not quick-enough feat to catch it, and he hath no eyes in order to see it, so that he does not have it. And if he ever take it, would he have also thus reduced it, so that it was caged? Lo, he is making all things less, and he is saying that is better!
Hunger says thus:
“Dirt is bad.
Wood is bad.
Rocks are bad.
Only fruits and meats are good.”
But hunger is a dieing and burning hole.
Many of the terran selves are self-making,
And thus they are closing,
For they maketh the reduced into themselves,
And THAT is self-shrinking, self-destructing, and self-losing.
But they call it “building”.
I also say that all things are true,
For they exist.
So, I am of the neither-neither.
I open unto both, and I close into both.
Lo!
Science is the expanding self-blindness.
But even when inside-out and self-smashing,
They still mannaged to build “better” inside-outs for the lesser inside-outs.
Lo, where are their outside-ins!?
Hopefully one day soon,
They will say:
“We need not the more-refined knowledge…
We need the less-filtering brain!”
[that is to say:
Improve the thought-maker,
And that is only how to improve the thought beyond itself.]
But babies crawl before they walk,
And they take before they can give.
So, I say yes unto all stupidity,
For it is burning beyond itself.
Why do people keep making the mistake of thinking that an individual insect is without intelligence until they are combined with a society?
The insect in this case (for the sake of the argument) was never without intelligence, it is only extended when in society just like humans, what’s the problem?
A group of humans are smarter then an individual, so does that make the individual non-intelligent?
I’m think its logical to think that much intelligence did evolve from social interaction as there are some experiences that you can only get from this social environment. However I will disagree that all of our intelligence evolved solely from this as we had to have some inane intelligence to start with, once again, non-intelligence does not beget intelligence, that’s something from nothing.
"the boundaries of the distinctive pattern called ‘life’ are virtually impossible to fix clearly: in somewhat circular fashion, we recognize life life when we see things somehow ‘making a living.’ That is, things begin in an active way to maintain an existence in terms of something else: amino acids have no need for protozoa, bbut protozoa require amino acids. Life is thus distinguished by a qualitatively new level of relatedness.
"This new form of relatedness is in some way a ‘presence’ of one thing in another. Primitive life emerged in a soup of nutrients, amino acids, which were simply absorbed trhough semiporous membranes. But as soon as this system emerged, the single-cell creatures by their very structure ‘expected’ certain nutrients, which in that respect were present even when physically absent. I would suggest that this present-while-absent quality inherent in the advent of ‘needs,’ even though it is only a matter of structure or pattern at this point, might be regarded as the seed of what we recognize as a far more complex level as conciousness.
"To put it another way, the most elementary form of conciousness seems to emerge as creatures begin to live in terms of one another. The strategies for making a living, which fit an organism into the emergent and ever-transforming community of life (‘survival of the fittest’), become more complex as we move from plants to herbivores to carnivores. Structural conciousness, the selective taking in of nutrients, takes on new and more active dimensions as more elaborate strategies for susenance and reproduction come into play. The emergence of controlled mobility, accompanied by the development of the various forms of sensation that make mobility meaningful, is a decisive step in the direction of more familiar forms of conciousness.
“In this framework, consciousness in its more and more progressive forms might be best regarded as a particular strategy in an overall process which is most fundamentally a matter of adaptation, literally ‘fitting in’. As the range of consciousness increases, so do flexibility and the complexity of the fitting in. Mobility and sensation emerge as strategies that can detach the creature from strict depedence on immediate environment and bring instead a new kind of dependence spread out over a much larger environment.”
Can’t be alive without amino acids. At least, post-RNA world. That’s the point. By being alive, these needs are created, demanded, as a function of being alive.
And, I don’t like to use ‘survival of the fittest’, I think it is a fairly naive description that creates more problems that it solves in terms of thinking about evolution. But, I think that in this case he uses enough qualifiers, while throwing in a common term. He is changing the meaning of survival of the fittest merely to mean a function of the ever-changing, transformative aspect of life. That hits far closer to the truth than Spencer.
That is simply the nature of life. Life is driven by chemical reactions, after all, so it makes sense that those chemicals are necessary for life. I realize this is just defining terms, but I’m not sure how else to express this concept.
As you’ve said before, you can’t have something from nothing, so these required things are the building blocks to make more. Why does a house require building materials? Why do humans require food? Why does fire require oxygen and something to burn?
As for ‘caring’ whether other lifeforms are created, that is an anthropomorphic fallacy. There is no ‘caring’. But, the ceaseless vitality of nature does manage to produce more. This is driven by a combination of competition and cooperation that is ‘natural selection’. When a new niche is made available, then life fills that niche. When new pressures exist, then life adjusts and adapts to it.
Agreed. Comparing insects to humans, or more generally, one species to another is absurd. Stupid people are stupid people, no matter how many of them there are. As cliche as it sounds - great minds think for themselves. Revolutionary ideas come from individuals, which usually don’t catch on with the mass population (which says something about humans), and not from groups.
Why is comparing one species to another absurd? Unless your philosphical stance doesn’t allow for evolution (in which case, I would have a long, hard look at that philosophy) then I would say that it would be absurd to arbitrarily divide species and not to compare them in many ways, including intelligence.
As for individuals and their revolutionary ideas . . . name me one individual who came up with a novel idea, without the influence of other men. Likewise, name me one individual who managed to change history, alone.
What I meant was comparing invertebrates to vertebrates is absurd. The intelligence of insect is almost nonexistent to that of any vertebrates.
How about Albert Einstein? or Da Vinci? It wasn’t 600 people sitting down and creating that idea. If there were other people involved in the idea, it was very very few - not “swarm intelligence.”
I never said anything about action. I’m talking about the idea that sparked that change - which came from an individual and not a mass consensus.
At the very least, Einstein was influenced by Maxwell and Leibnitz. Newton too. While slightly less clear, Plank and Mach would also be players there.
With Da Vinci, you’ve got Verrochio as a major one. And, heck, just about any proto-renaissance artist, including vivisectionists and grave-diggers that lead to modern anatomy.
Plenty of influences. That it without even digging that deep. If you’d like, I am confident I could provide many many more.
=D> 
