Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Hive Mind (cont'd)

Hive Mind 2:
"This is a universal law of vivisystems: higher-level complexities cannot be inferred by lower-level existences. Nothing -- no computer or mind, no means of mathematics, physics, or philosophy -- can unravel the emergent pattern dissolved in the parts without actually playing it out. Only playing out a hive will tell you if a colony is immixed in a bee. The theorists put it this way: running a system is the quickest, shortest, and only sure method to discern emergent structures latent in it. There are no shortcuts to actually 'expressing' a convoluted, nonlinear equation to discover what it does. Too much of its behavior is packed away.

That leads us to wonder what else is packed into the bee that we haven't seen yet? Or what else is packed into the hive that has not yet appeared because there haven't been enough honeybee hives in a row all at once? And for that matter, what is contained in a human that will not emerge until we are all interconnected by wires and politics? The most unexpected things will brew in this bionic hivelike supermind."
Ok, read the whole thing starting with the link in the last post. Really there's too much here to reduce to a blog post, but I'll hit a few of the philosophical notes: These ideas can be re-interpreted in a religious context-- deity emerging from collective humanity, or rather, collective humanity expressing the imprint of deity through earth-life...

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