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Collective Intelligence?
Jan. 13th, 2014 10:37 amI recently finished reading Robert Charles Wilson's novel Burning Paradise. The book is set in the year 2014, but it's not our 2014. WWI ended in 1914, and there was no WWII. Humanity is generally at peace and growing more prosperous. There's a catch, of course - humanity is being manipulated by a collective of aliens.
The human characters in the book keep saying that "the collective isn't intelligent" and compare it to an ant colony. "We can see the interactions between the various beings," they say. Two questions: one - who says an ant colony isn't intelligent? Two - would a bacterium, looking at a human, think we were an intelligent being or just a collective of cells moving in formation?
I submit that the answer to question #1 is that an ant colony is as intelligent as the typical animal of equivalent mass of the colony. I submit that a bacterium looking at a human would have doubts if we were intelligent. Basically, it's a scale thing. If you can see the gears turning, it's easy to assume that there's nobody home.
The human characters in the book keep saying that "the collective isn't intelligent" and compare it to an ant colony. "We can see the interactions between the various beings," they say. Two questions: one - who says an ant colony isn't intelligent? Two - would a bacterium, looking at a human, think we were an intelligent being or just a collective of cells moving in formation?
I submit that the answer to question #1 is that an ant colony is as intelligent as the typical animal of equivalent mass of the colony. I submit that a bacterium looking at a human would have doubts if we were intelligent. Basically, it's a scale thing. If you can see the gears turning, it's easy to assume that there's nobody home.