I feel like you’re over-indexing on the word “hive”.
It’s not about having a queen or mindlessly following. Being a part of a hive mind doesn’t make you a lemming.
Example to demonstrate: assume you know calculus. How much of calculus did you discover yourself? How much of the corpus of math that led up to calculus did you discover yourself? How much of that corpus is your individual contribution vs. how much of it represents the brain power of hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of other humans throughout history exploring that problem domain?
For any given problem domain, humans have documented it in a shared corpus that you can “download” into your brain. You are an individual. You still get to choose what to download and how to interpret it. But you are still sharing in a commons when you do this. That commons is what I’m referring to as a hive mind, it’s a shared consciousness where our collective brain power is building a corpus that no single brain could. It extends far beyond ourselves.
It’s not about having a queen or mindlessly following. Being a part of a hive mind doesn’t make you a lemming.
Example to demonstrate: assume you know calculus. How much of calculus did you discover yourself? How much of the corpus of math that led up to calculus did you discover yourself? How much of that corpus is your individual contribution vs. how much of it represents the brain power of hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of other humans throughout history exploring that problem domain?
For any given problem domain, humans have documented it in a shared corpus that you can “download” into your brain. You are an individual. You still get to choose what to download and how to interpret it. But you are still sharing in a commons when you do this. That commons is what I’m referring to as a hive mind, it’s a shared consciousness where our collective brain power is building a corpus that no single brain could. It extends far beyond ourselves.