Chapter 6 2.3 Inhomogeneous invisible hand

Wheeler, the pioneer of ant research, was the first to use the term "superorganism" to refer to the busy collaboration of insect colonies, in order to clearly distinguish it from what "organism" represents.Wheeler was influenced by the philosophical currents of the turn of the century (around 1900).This trend advocates understanding the overall pattern of the upper layer by observing the individual behavior of the component parts.Scientific development at the time was diving headlong into the study of the microscopic details of physics, biology, and all of the natural sciences.This swarming research method of reducing the whole to its components was seen as the most practical way to understand the laws of the whole at the time, and it will continue throughout the century (referring to the 21st century), and it is still the mainstay of scientific exploration. model.Wheeler and his colleagues were leading proponents of this reductive view and lived it up, writing fifty monographs on the enigmatic ant behavior.But at the same moment, Wheeler also sees "emergent traits" in superorganisms that go beyond the inherent traits of an ant colony.According to Wheeler, colonies form superorganisms that "emerge" from large aggregates of ordinary insect organisms.He pointed out that this emergence is a science, a technical, rational explanation, not some mysticism or alchemy.

According to Wheeler, this emerging idea provides a way to reconcile the two different approaches of breaking it down into parts and seeing it as a whole.The duality of body and mind, whole and part literally dissolves when the whole behavior emerges regularly from the limited behavior of the parts.However, at the time, it was not clear how this transcendent attribute emerged from the bottom.And it still is. What was clear to Wheeler's team: Emergence is a very common natural phenomenon.Corresponding to it is the ordinary causal relationship that can be seen in daily life, that is, the causal relationship in which A causes B, B causes C, or 2+2=4.The chemists invoked ordinary causality to explain the experimental observation of the combination of sulfur and iron atoms into iron sulfide molecules.According to the philosopher C. Lloyd Morgan of the time, the concept of emergence represents a different type of causality.Here, 2 + 2 does not equal 4, and it is not even possible to accidentally equal 5.In emergent logic, 2+2=apples. "Emergence—although it may seem more or less a leap (jump)—is best interpreted as a qualitative change in direction in the course of events, a critical turning point." This is Morgan's 1923 book "Emergent Evolution" "A paragraph in.It was a very gutsy book, and it goes on to quote a passage from Browning that demonstrates how music emerges from chords:

And I don't know what better gift humans have than this (music). For out of three scales (triads) he constructed not a fourth scale, but stars. We can claim that it is the complexity of the brain that allows us to distill music from notes—obviously, it is impossible for a lump of wood to understand Bach.All the "breath of Bach" that fills us when listening to Bach is a poetic picture of how meaningful patterns emerge from notes and other information. The model represented by the body of a small honey bee applies only to its smaller wing chambers, tissues, and exinity, which weigh a tenth of a gram.The body of a hive forms a unified whole with worker bees, drones, pollen and honeycomb.A hive mechanism weighing fifty pounds emerges from the individual parts of the bees.A hive possesses a great deal that is absent from any of its constituent parts.A blob-sized bee brain has a memory of only six days, while the hive as a whole has a memory of three months, twice the average lifespan of a bee.

Ants also possess a hive mind.Ant colonies that move from one settlement to another exhibit a "Kafkaesque nightmare" effect of contingency control.You will see that when a group of ants is dragging eggs, larvae and pupae to the west with their mouths, another group of enthusiastic worker ants is dragging those belongings back eastward at the same speed.At the same time, some ants, perhaps aware of the confusion and conflict of the signals, were running eastward and westward empty-handed.Just a typical office scene.However, despite this, the entire ant colony was successfully transferred.Without any explicit decisions from above, the colony selects a new site, signals the worker ants to start nesting, and then begins self-management.

The magic of the "hive mind" is that no single bee controls it, but an invisible hand, a hand that emerges from a mass of dull members, controls the whole colony.Its magic also lies in the fact that quantitative changes cause qualitative changes.To move from a single-bug organism to a swarm organism, it is only necessary to increase the number of bugs so that large numbers of bugs come together so that they can communicate with each other.At a certain stage, when the complexity reaches a certain level, "clusters" will emerge from "bugs".The inherent properties of bugs imply clusters, implying this kind of magic.Everything we find in the hive is hidden in the individual bee.But although you can examine a bee with a cyclotron and an X-ray machine, you will never be able to discern the properties of a hive.

Here is a general rule about living systems: the existence of lower levels cannot infer the complexity of higher levels.It doesn't matter whether it's a computer or a brain, and it doesn't matter which method -- mathematics, physics, or philosophy -- you can't reveal the emergent patterns fused into individual parts without actually running it.Only an actual colony can reveal whether a colony is fused within a single bee.Here's what theorists say: The quickest, most direct, and only reliable way to gain insight into the emergent structure underlying a system is to run it.There are no shortcuts to truly "expressing" a complex nonlinear equation to reveal its actual behavior.Because it has too many behaviors that are hidden.

This makes us wonder, what else is hiding inside the bees that we haven't seen yet?Or, is there something else wrapped up inside the hive that hasn't been revealed because there aren't enough hives on display at the same time?For that matter, what is latent in the individual human being that has not come to the fore unless all are connected through human communication or political management?Something most unexpected must be brewing in this hive-like bionic supermind.