Swarm intelligence

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"How do we explain the success of Earth's 12,000 or so known ant species? They must have learned something in 140 million years. If ants aren't smart, ant colonies are. A colony can solve problems unthinkable for individual ants, such as finding the shortest path to the best food source, allocating workers to different tasks, or defending a territory from neighbors. As individuals, ants might be tiny dummies, but as colonies they respond quickly and effectively to their environment. They do it with something called swarm intelligence. " NG.
12,000 species have elaborated a perfect swarm intelligence and it’s definitely a success story. Though our population (only one species) is exploded in 6000 years to 6b can we say that we have elaborated a similar “swarm intelligence”? Where does it reside? In the UN palace? In the Pentagon? Somewhere in Bruxelles or Peijing ? Wouldn’t it be possible that there is no such thing as a collective intelligence for humanity?

I think, in general, an individual human is smarter than the "hive". I don't know why. A single person seems very capable of being rational, but a group turns easily to a mob. Maybe our "Swarm Intelligence" is flawed and communicates only our strongest (and often irrational) emotions.

Well, there's clearly no shortage of collective stupidity.

I love the Tao Te Ching because I feel it can be summed up, "Take your example from nature." I can spend hours just watching an ant hill. I view the Earth as one giant ant hill, with the individuals having no more idea, than individual ants do, of what the collective goal is.

I think collective stupidity (that’s called also democracy) has this origin: the formation of consensus on some subject is always the agreement on a compromise idea. If you meet someone on the elevator or on a train compartment you can only talk with others on some middle, moderate opinion. That’s the way the opinions become gradually stupidities.

As for the Tao Te Ching I think it is the zenith of wisdom reached by human thinking together with Zhuangzi. We should read and study them.

Without it there would be no clans, neighborhoods, communities, tribes, etc. Aid organizations, research organizations and grant foundations would not exist. Granted, most of the organization is done by a few people who enlist/pay followers. But those organizers have to have something they tap within each person to get them to go along. Guilt doesn't work for long before the followers start rejecting it.

I don't know if any of you guys listen to the NPR show Radio Lab, but they did a show about this, well about emergence technically. Here's a link.
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2007/08/14

They told a story about this guy at a carnival or something back in the day, with a jar of marbles I think, and he would have people guess how many there were. He found that when he averaged all of the responses, the average was closer than any one guess. At least that's how I remember it.
Sorry to be vague.
They link to a book called "The Wisdom of Crowds." Which is probably where the story came from.

i have found a dohikky called Darwinbots that works with alife. someone managed to make ant thingys, it must have taken them a week.

You mean, like your opinion? You state something that is merely a deduction - "the formation of consensus on some subject is always the agreement on a compromise idea" - with the implication that words like "consensus" and "compromise" are inherently negative terms and therefore this phenomenon can only result in a negative end.

For your argument to make sense, we have to agree with your subjective implications for those words. In other words, your argument does not stand on logic and reason alone. It hinges on your "opinion" and we have to adopt your cynicism and prejudices first for your viewpoint to make sense. That only exposes the presumptions and biases in your own thinking, and ultimately invalidates your argument. Afterall, those words, in a broader context, transcend personal bias, being neutral in meaning. There's no logical, rational or even historical basis to hold that the phenomena of consensus and compromise must necessarily result in "stupidities" (a rather useless word, I also mention, as it lacks a constructive, broader meaning in this context past the subjective, cynical biases it expresses).

As for meeting people on an elevator - there's something called "etiquette" that you fail to take into account in your analogy, rendering it nonsensical. So this is basically a red herring. Again, another fallacy that only makes sense by resting solely on your very narrow, cynical view.

I think I hear this, or anotehr NPR eport similar to this. Was this the one talking about wikipedia? I find this fascinating. GK Chesterton hinted at soemthing liek this is his idea of "the democracy of the dead." He felt that we ought not simply weigh our opinions against those just happened to be up wlking around at the moment, but also all those who had lived in the past. Afterall, human experience is human experience, and every human's individual experience is essentially an experiment of what works in this life. So why not look at it scientifically? In a way that is what human culture is - a somewhat scientific collection and transmission of collective knowledge tested by the generations that preceeded us. That means we can assume that, despite certain biases caused by various factors from geopraghical isolation, cross-cultural conflicts to technical limitation, human culture possesses well proven "wisdom."

It is culture that is one of the primary influences on our own opinions, whether we recognize that reality or not. So it is therefore logical to assume that, if you take a random selection of people, on average, they will express that historically validated wisdom they've recieved from their native culture to some extent. They may express it differently, in ways that reflect their own individual life experiences - say an Evangelical would express that murder is bad differently than an atheist - but that piece of cultural wisdom would remain intake.

There is also an inherent streak of conservatism in human behavior that hinges on this cultural "wisdom" althoug it's often protrayed popularly as being instinctive or reactionary. Someone once studied the contestant responses on the show "Deal adn No Deal" and said that the majority of contestants were more conservative with their winnings. That reflects general human behavior in the real world. Contrary to the kneejerk response that this shows humans are herd animals, this actually shows how we are individuals making individual choices, and weighing those individual choices against the expeirences of the larger community. Keep in mind that humans are also inherently selfish and competitive - the opportunity to get more and be better than others is always a temptation. So for a person to take $50,000 assured winnings and walk away instead of risking it for $500,000 more is actually contrary to our competitive nature. That demonstrates rational choice, not complusive pack mentality. Conservatism like this isn't really a primal behavoir like competitiveness. It's learned behavior that is justified and reinforced by communal experience that imparts wisdom like "Better to have one bird in the hand than two in the bush."

While some view conservatism like this as group behavior, it's really more about an individual relying on the wisdom of the group for his or her own self-preservation and betterment. In other words, it's simply communal cooperation - the individual cooperates with the community for the sakes of his or her own self interests. I mean, think of it - do you think we culd be as educated and techinically advanced if we had to spend most our day procuring food and shelter? Isn't that why other animals haven't evolved like us? Because they lacked that kind of communal cooperation that allows for individual acchievement? I mean, sure, ants have a collective intelligence that is admirable in its complexity and efficiently, yet it profoundly limiting for the individual.

Of course there must be a balance in human society, because for the community to continue existing and providing an advantage for the individual, the individual must work in coopertion with others to maintain and preserve the community. Honestly, I think that's as close to "collective intelligence" we humans can get. That primal competitiveness is too essential to being human and our sense of individuality - for all its negative potential, our competitiveness also drives our individual desires to create and acchieve. Without individuality like that, human society would be stagnant. Without society, our individual development would be sarcificed for our baser needs, like procuring food and shelter. So we must always allow for individuality in society, yet as individuals respect what society provides for our individuality. Again, it's a balance.

There are at least three ways for accumulating wisdom. One is scientific knowledge. This is intrinsically anarchic and casual, a matter of financial resources allocated, of chance ( someone called it serendipity). The allocation of resources is often dictated by “democracy” like research against cancer (who would oppose that?) or military needs like the concave mirrors of Archimedes or atomic bombs Teflon is very useful, but is the fallout of military research.
Then there are humanities, here there is less anarchy end perhaps no democracy. Research in the humanities is essentially elitist. There is no popular demand about more studies about the Upanishads or Dante or the Iliad.
Finally there is the accumulation of know-how of evolution. The aerodynamic structure of a bird or the hydrodynamic structure of a fish or a whale is knowledge of a particular kind, accumulated in millions of years.
I believe that between the second and the third types of accumulations of culture (or wisdom) there are many interconnections. The attachment of a mother to her offspring has its origins in evolutionary wisdom, but in the humanities we will often be moved by narratives about maternal love, compassion, courage and other feelings which are rooted in evolutionary wisdom. The first type (science) has very few, if any, relationships with the wisdom of life and is something which separates us humans from the wisdom of life.


When we talk about democracy we talk about politics. There is much confusion and rhetorics here: all political systems are fundamentally oligarchic. France, for example is oligarchic, (or it has been so until now).Trends toward populism and demagoguery have negative effects (Le Pen, possibly Sarkozy). Pre WW2 Germany was oligarchic until the advent of Hitler. The positive aspects of a political system are pluralism in the centres of power, protection of minorities and individual rights (those things an organization like Amnesty fights for). The US are on a dangerous slide.

Thank you Spacemonkey for your very interesting sites.