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[spokehedz]

See, I tried this in my latest fort--everybody does everything--and it just leads to chaos. Now I know why. Instead of seeing that there was an abundance of toothpicks (trees) outside and ramping up workers--they dropped everything, and all spent days upon days piling the wood up while letting all of my foodstocks go to waste.

luckily, they then quickly replanted the farmsteads, but we were consumed with lava shortly thereafter. Oh, those tricky researchers filling my forts with lava to see how deep we went!

[Javis]

Yeah, unfortunately the Dwarves just don't have the same priorities with regard to simultaneously available tasks as we would want to have.

[Soadreqm]

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.

What would you call a hive mind, then? The current technological progress was made possible by sharing information in ways not available to lesser animals. Humans can communicate abstract concepts. Humans can record their thoughts so other humans can use them after the original thinkers are long dead. Humans can make desicions as a group. Humans can direct the resources of a huge group of humans to a single project that does not necessarily benefit every single one of those individual humans. Humans sacrifice some humans to benefit the rest of the humans ALL THE TIME. These look like traits of weird-ass SciFi insect hive people to me.

[thezeus18]

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.

You're just using big words now. It's not the same as communicating.

[Volfram]

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.

I shall have to look that up, then.

I have something of a thing for wolves.

[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.

You're just using big words now. It's not the same as communicating.

Sorry, I wasn't communicating very clearly.  What I meant is that technological progress is not inevitable, and is not an inseparable part of human society and development.  What if a group of people found themselves free of competition and lived perfectly content lives harvesting just the resources that they needed from a forest.  What incentive could they possibly have to knock down the forest for grazing land in the absense of some outside influence? If you want to read more about technological determinism and its critique, check out the wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_determinism as a starting point.

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.

What would you call a hive mind, then? The current technological progress was made possible by sharing information in ways not available to lesser animals. Humans can communicate abstract concepts. Humans can record their thoughts so other humans can use them after the original thinkers are long dead. Humans can make desicions as a group. Humans can direct the resources of a huge group of humans to a single project that does not necessarily benefit every single one of those individual humans. Humans sacrifice some humans to benefit the rest of the humans ALL THE TIME. These look like traits of weird-ass SciFi insect hive people to me.

I wouldn't call anything but a group of organisms that showed distributed intelligence and the means to communicate thoughts throughout the collective and dependence on that intercommunication and decision-making ability to the extent that individuals could not function apart from the group a hive mind.

[A_Fey_Dwarf]

AS a matter of fact i thought the exact same thing and was inspired to make this mod: http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=30293.0 Unfortunately it is only partway done and i gave up on it.

[Anfold]

Lots of Big Words Scary to Mystical Thinkers

Translation: Technology feels a need.  No need, no technological progress.  Also hive minds (i.e. massive group that makes up one mind) not possible.  Filling a specialized role via evolution or training: possible.

Take the wolf pack, have you ever played an online game with really good friends all on the same team? Do it enough and you'll soon find yourselves predicting each others movements and switching roles on the fly without even thinking about it.  Teamwork is a learned behavior.

[Time Kitten]

I'm actually having quite the fun time with swarm and hive mind mechanics lately in my bots.  Mostly the more of them there are, the stupider they become, ignoring the preset way points and forming small packs with a logic train that is supposed to actually disperse them, but really just ends up with them choosing random places in the mazes to bunch up in.  Where a single bot on the path usually makes it through the platforming maze, five or six usually fling themselves onto all the false paths, and 10 of them hitting makes them rush a single direction in a concerted effort.  All this in practice makes the player discount the one flawless bot at a time successfully navigating the maze, and getting stuck in traffic or performing the lemming rush as they stick to the group.  And the player will stick to the group, mindless of signposts, but seems to listen to calming voice instruction for some reason.

[Rhenaya]

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.

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.

i am so going to use this :>

[Soadreqm]

Sorry, I wasn't communicating very clearly.  What I meant is that technological progress is not inevitable, and is not an inseparable part of human society and development.  What if a group of people found themselves free of competition and lived perfectly content lives harvesting just the resources that they needed from a forest.  What incentive could they possibly have to knock down the forest for grazing land in the absense of some outside influence? If you want to read more about technological determinism and its critique, check out the wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_determinism as a starting point.

Oh, THAT'S what you meant. Yeah, of course technological progress does not necessarily happen, but it HAS HAPPENED, and I feel proud of it. Humans have succesfully developed metallurgy, steam power and space flight; and I don't think this would have been possible without some coordinated effort.

I wouldn't call anything but a group of organisms that showed distributed intelligence and the means to communicate thoughts throughout the collective and dependence on that intercommunication and decision-making ability to the extent that individuals could not function apart from the group a hive mind.

Humans can communicate thoughts across pretty much any distance. We're communicating RIGHT NOW. And as for distributed intelligence, I'd say humans have that as well. Looking again at our beloved technological progress, that's how it mostly happens today. Someone publishes an article on particle physics somewhere, and someone else reads it and builds on the ideas. If every individual had to think alone, without help from the collective intelligence of the rest of humanity, we'd never manage to do ANYTHING. Or, as a more common example, Wikipedia.

And if you require COMPLETE dependance of the central hive mind at all times, the Borg don't qualify. They actually seem more competent when isolated. And even when alone, humans rely on other humans. Robinson Crusoe survived because he already knew how to make a fire, how to build a shelter, where to look for food and so on. And he had a whole bunch of salvaged tools, mass-produced by other humans. As a thought experiment, take a newborn human and DON'T connect it to the human hive mind. Don't teach it language, don't let other humans near it, just give it required nutrients, and see how it fares. My guess is it will do worse at tests of intelligence than rats.

[Shoku]

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.

And the brain isn't haphazard and basically functional based on volume? Any large brain is made out of tons of repeating units and their development is based on how often other neurons "bump" them.

...there's this particular worm we spend a lot of time studying that only has 302 neurons but we still can't simulate it with a computer model...

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.

How do you make progress on your own and without anyone to pass it on to?
So what you'd call a real hive mind wouldn't have to deal with any other individuals and environmental factors tugging in different directions? We take on particular roles to do a lot of things we couldn't alone- and when it works we're frighteningly synchronized.
And you wouldn't see an ant colony if you plopped them down on impenetrable rock or the ocean or the moon.

...yet, even though ants don't directly pass on any kind of knowledge they do develop technology. If you make them live in caves they dump the eyes and pigment and they grow longer legs and antennae. Give them the opportunity and they figure out agriculture. Sometimes they even give up the entire digging thing and start forming colonies inside of plants.

Lots of Big Words Scary to Mystical Thinkers

Translation: Technology feels a need.  No need, no technological progress.  Also hive minds (i.e. massive group that makes up one mind) not possible.  Filling a specialized role via evolution or training: possible.

Take the wolf pack, have you ever played an online game with really good friends all on the same team? Do it enough and you'll soon find yourselves predicting each others movements and switching roles on the fly without even thinking about it.  Teamwork is a learned behavior.

If a lot of individuals can't come together to act as one point to the part  or aspect of my brain that's not a single cell with a couple of connections to other cells -_-

[Javis]

I wouldn't call anything but a group of organisms that showed distributed intelligence and the means to communicate thoughts throughout the collective and dependence on that intercommunication and decision-making ability to the extent that individuals could not function apart from the group a hive mind.

Humans can communicate thoughts across pretty much any distance. We're communicating RIGHT NOW. And as for distributed intelligence, I'd say humans have that as well. Looking again at our beloved technological progress, that's how it mostly happens today. Someone publishes an article on particle physics somewhere, and someone else reads it and builds on the ideas. If every individual had to think alone, without help from the collective intelligence of the rest of humanity, we'd never manage to do ANYTHING. Or, as a more common example, Wikipedia.

And if you require COMPLETE dependance of the central hive mind at all times, the Borg don't qualify. They actually seem more competent when isolated. And even when alone, humans rely on other humans. Robinson Crusoe survived because he already knew how to make a fire, how to build a shelter, where to look for food and so on. And he had a whole bunch of salvaged tools, mass-produced by other humans. As a thought experiment, take a newborn human and DON'T connect it to the human hive mind. Don't teach it language, don't let other humans near it, just give it required nutrients, and see how it fares. My guess is it will do worse at tests of intelligence than rats.

But the important point is to distinguish between the mere appearance highly cooperative social organization that produces works an individual wouldn't be capable of producing alone, and the actual substance of a hive mind.  A true hive mind is a fictional concept in which the individuals of the collective have no individual identity.  The numerous examples brought up so far in this thread illustrate that individuals of hive mind organisms in fiction typically cannot function on their own.  Humans certainly function at a higher level when utilizing means of communication and cooperation, but we're perfectly capable of getting along on our own.

[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.

And the brain isn't haphazard and basically functional based on volume? Any large brain is made out of tons of repeating units and their development is based on how often other neurons "bump" them.

...there's this particular worm we spend a lot of time studying that only has 302 neurons but we still can't simulate it with a computer model...

Exactly! Ants are not that different from us on the cellular level.  I was trying to say that ants are special because of what they do, not because they do it in some mystical fashion, as some would believe.

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.

How do you make progress on your own and without anyone to pass it on to?
So what you'd call a real hive mind wouldn't have to deal with any other individuals and environmental factors tugging in different directions? We take on particular roles to do a lot of things we couldn't alone- and when it works we're frighteningly synchronized.
And you wouldn't see an ant colony if you plopped them down on impenetrable rock or the ocean or the moon.

...yet, even though ants don't directly pass on any kind of knowledge they do develop technology. If you make them live in caves they dump the eyes and pigment and they grow longer legs and antennae. Give them the opportunity and they figure out agriculture. Sometimes they even give up the entire digging thing and start forming colonies inside of plants.

That's a fantastic illustration of the fallacy of technological determinism. An organism faces challenges in a particular environment.  Solutions that enable the organism to become more successful emerge. We, in looking at the history of our society, might see that we possess writing, a technology that allows us to transfer knowledge across distance and time, so naturally that's the key to our success, but a broader view captures examples of varying situations producing varying results.  Writing was developed as a means to keep track of mundane information, like crop stores and weather.  It wasn't a deus ex machina that set humanity on the path to greatness.

[The Mad Engineer]

...


I'm really sorry, guys, but all I see is "Blah blah blah..."