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[Javis]

My friends who play Dwarf Fortress and I have always talked among ourselves how much the game works like an ant colony.  Little did I know how many parallels there were before I listened to this TED lecture from Deborah Gordon about ants: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/deborah_gordon_digs_ants.html.

The ants act as interdependent individuals, adopting a role and completing tasks within that role as the need arises.  There's no central direction from the Queen.  They can even change roles throughout their lives.  The most surprising thing was that at any given time about 50% of the ants in the colony are just sitting idly! Parties in the dining hall, anyone?

Check it out and be amazed.

[TheDJ17]

Well this explains why Dwarves don't bathe.

[Vattic]

I haven't watched the lecture yet but I have read a little about ants and emergence, find it fascinating. Cant help but wonder that if the organised behaviour of ant colonies emerges from the interaction of simple rules implies that we don't control the dwarves but as players emerge from interactions of the simple rules in DF?

[Volfram]

I have had a theory for a while that colonial insects have a literal "hive mind."  That is, a single bee or ant itself is pretty stupid(ants moreso than bees), but if you assemble them into the full colony, they actually have a collective intelligence, with each member of the colony behaving as a single neuron or a set of neurons in a brain.

I also have a similar level of this theory about pack animals and forests, and I believe that humans are much disadvantaged by our individuality.

A wolf pack, for example.  A single human may live for seventy years.  A single wolf will live for maybe twelve.  The wolf is not an individual, though, the pack is, and the pack will live for longer than a single human.  A single tree often has a lifespan greater than that of a human, but the tree is not the individual, the forest is, and most forests today have been around for millennia.

At least, that's my theory.

[Yanlin]

I have had a theory for a while that colonial insects have a literal "hive mind."  That is, a single bee or ant itself is pretty stupid(ants moreso than bees), but if you assemble them into the full colony, they actually have a collective intelligence, with each member of the colony behaving as a single neuron or a set of neurons in a brain.

I also have a similar level of this theory about pack animals and forests, and I believe that humans are much disadvantaged by our individuality.

A wolf pack, for example.  A single human may live for seventy years.  A single wolf will live for maybe twelve.  The wolf is not an individual, though, the pack is, and the pack will live for longer than a single human.  A single tree often has a lifespan greater than that of a human, but the tree is not the individual, the forest is, and most forests today have been around for millennia.

At least, that's my theory.

Every group of living entities forms a hive mind to some degree.

Mythbusters for example. Adam and Jamie are a hive mind.

Special forces units. Each one is trained to fill a role. Alone they are worthless, together they are awesome.

[jaked122]

A wolf pack, for example.  A single human may live for seventy years.  A single wolf will live for maybe twelve.  The wolf is not an individual, though, the pack is, and the pack will live for longer than a single human.  A single tree often has a lifespan greater than that of a human, but the tree is not the individual, the forest is, and most forests today have been around for millennia.

At least, that's my theory.

... are you serious? individuality is all that separates us from communism+(90% of all dumbass animals)

[commondragon]

There is a small set of combined, shared intelligence with everyone and everything...

Theres hereditary memory, theres social effects, and theres a very weak "hive mind" effect.

the "hive mind" effect is 2000% stronger with creatures of the same species, but its still very, very weak.

Which explains why I was able to recruit minotars-who-were-ex-dogs into my military when I started playing with DF's sanity (AKA using companion to mess with things)

[Maggarg - Eater of chicke]

Woof. Er, Raaagh!

[Javis]

I have had a theory for a while that colonial insects have a literal "hive mind."  That is, a single bee or ant itself is pretty stupid(ants moreso than bees), but if you assemble them into the full colony, they actually have a collective intelligence, with each member of the colony behaving as a single neuron or a set of neurons in a brain.

I also have a similar level of this theory about pack animals and forests, and I believe that humans are much disadvantaged by our individuality.

A wolf pack, for example.  A single human may live for seventy years.  A single wolf will live for maybe twelve.  The wolf is not an individual, though, the pack is, and the pack will live for longer than a single human.  A single tree often has a lifespan greater than that of a human, but the tree is not the individual, the forest is, and most forests today have been around for millennia.

At least, that's my theory.

This used to be the prevailing theory about hive insects, but IMO recent research has proved it to be wishful thinking BS.  The individuals in a hive follow simple rules, and the collective result is not the sort of perfectly organized product of a single consciousness, but a haphazard product that compensates for the imprecision of its individual parts with sheer volume.  The ants constantly contact one-another as they pass by with their antennae to detect the levels of certain oils on their exoskeletons.  The role changing behavior is correlated with the frequency of contacting each type of worker ant, and as was said in the lecture I linked, this effect can be falsely created by planting glass beads marked with the right organic compounds.

From the bugs in Heinlein's Starship Troopers onwards, insect-like species in fiction have manifested a group consciousness rather than the interdependent individually displayed in reality.  I suppose the idea of a species that communicates on a deeper level than is possible for humans is more inspiring. As inspiring as it may be, it just doesn't seem to be the reality.

Maybe in the future, job allocation in DF can become as sophisticated as task allocation in and ant colony, and it will no longer be necessary to enable and disable jobs as needed for Dwarves.  They would pick up new jobs as needed based on the relative volume of jobs in that profession that are available.

[DoubleJ]

I have had a theory for a while that colonial insects have a literal "hive mind."  That is, a single bee or ant itself is pretty stupid(ants moreso than bees), but if you assemble them into the full colony, they actually have a collective intelligence, with each member of the colony behaving as a single neuron or a set of neurons in a brain.

I also have a similar level of this theory about pack animals and forests, and I believe that humans are much disadvantaged by our individuality.

A wolf pack, for example.  A single human may live for seventy years.  A single wolf will live for maybe twelve.  The wolf is not an individual, though, the pack is, and the pack will live for longer than a single human.  A single tree often has a lifespan greater than that of a human, but the tree is not the individual, the forest is, and most forests today have been around for millennia.

At least, that's my theory.

Are you implying that the internet is the next stage of human evolution? That's amazing!

...

Oh wait, you were talking about the collective becoming SMARTER. Never mind. Carry on.

[thezeus18]

I have had a theory for a while that colonial insects have a literal "hive mind."  That is, a single bee or ant itself is pretty stupid(ants moreso than bees), but if you assemble them into the full colony, they actually have a collective intelligence, with each member of the colony behaving as a single neuron or a set of neurons in a brain.

I also have a similar level of this theory about pack animals and forests, and I believe that humans are much disadvantaged by our individuality.

A wolf pack, for example.  A single human may live for seventy years.  A single wolf will live for maybe twelve.  The wolf is not an individual, though, the pack is, and the pack will live for longer than a single human.  A single tree often has a lifespan greater than that of a human, but the tree is not the individual, the forest is, and most forests today have been around for millennia.

At least, that's my theory.

Interesting that you should bring up wolves. I'm just now reading "A Fire Upon the Deep", a novel by Vernor Vinge, in which he imagines a race of wolf-like animals who live in packs of four to six that are so coordinated and intra-dependent that a single pack is the equivalent of a human individual, and has become the basic unit of their social structure like a single person is in ours. The main wolfpack character is 500 years old: every time a member grows old and dies, the pack absorbs a new one and transfers the dying's memories to it, and in this way the pack renews itself while retaining its identity in a "Ship of Theseus" (or Trigger's Broom) kind of way. However, counterintuitively, this pack-consciousness actually works to prevent the wolves from forming larger groups like societies and nations, because when packs move close to eachother their thoughts interfere and they can't keep a grip on their identities.

It's a pretty awesome book.

[Yanlin]

The Geth from Mass Effect are a realistic example of a true hive mind. They easily handwave it by being super-robots.

[Sunday]

Squirrels also have hive minds.

[Soadreqm]

Humans also have hive mind thing going on. Toss a human alone in a forest, and he's feeding maggots in a week. Toss a human in a forest with 4000 years of research that brought about the Spear, the Fire and the Pit Trap, and he's an unstoppable killing machine. Toss a GROUP of humans in a forest, and they'll cut it down and build a city, and before you know it you have them terraforming the ocean and sending people to space just because they can.

[Javis]

Humans also have hive mind thing going on. Toss a human alone in a forest, and he's feeding maggots in a week. Toss a human in a forest with 4000 years of research that brought about the Spear, the Fire and the Pit Trap, and he's an unstoppable killing machine. Toss a GROUP of humans in a forest, and they'll cut it down and build a city, and before you know it you have them terraforming the ocean and sending people to space just because they can.

I'd have to disagree.  Our current technological progress is not simply a deterministic result of our having settled in large enough numbers to cooperate towards a given goal.  The way you are using the term, a hive mind is nothing more than the product of a sum of individuals that exceeds the expected product of those beings accounted for individually.  In actuality, the current state of he world is the current equilibrium of a constant process of give and take due to environmental, biological, social factors all pushing and pulling in different directions.  You would not observe the same result if you plop down a number of random individuals in a random environment.