From my understanding, indigenous Australians and Polynesians had rich oral histories and cultures. Also oral culture may be more adaptable than a musty written document that never changes and must be followed. The human experience of living in an oral culture is naturally being lost, but it doesn't mean it was wrong or bad. I find it fascinating to imagine what life was like for them, how they did things differently.
"doesn't mean it was wrong or bad"
It is a dead-end, though.
While these cultures are interesting from anthropological point of view, I highly doubt you would give up all the benefits of the culture you live in today and join an Polynesean or Australian tribe.
This hive mind over-simplification is ridiculous and to me: disgusting. As if we were one
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.
We may not be a hive mind, but we may have one.
Hive mind as an emergent property still implies a common thing for which one lives. Or a queen. A peer that is one's reason to live. The closest thing I can see to a hive mind is the army.
We are all different and it is not because a person one talks with does not express a different opinion does it mean he thinks the same.
Would one say that lions have a hive mind?
I don't understand how that has any bearing on whether human society can form hive minds or hive mind like entities.
> Hive mind as an emergent property still implies a common thing for which one lives. Or a queen. A peer that is one's reason to live.
No that is absolutely not what a hive mind is. A hive mind is a collective consciousness. That's it. It says nothing about the objectives or agency of it's parts.
> We are all different and it is not because a person one talks with does not express a different opinion does it mean he thinks the same.
You seem to be laboring under the apprehension that a hive mind supplants the consciousness of it's parts. That may be the case for certain hive minds, but it is not a necessary feature. A hive mind can just be an emergent property of individual minds that are strongly connected but still retain agency.
Thanks for precising hive mind, I understand it better now.
Hive mind can be seen as uncritical conformity or collective intelligence. Because it can be understood as uncritical conformity I will use another word/concept. Like tribal mind. Because it suggests tribes (plural) that one belongs to or not, status, etc
If we define hive mind as a collective consciousness, then for sure one can argue that such a thing seems to be arising in human society. As a matter of fact in modern parlance it is fine to call a strongly unifying force, set of norms, school of thought or strong social bonds a hive mind. The hive mind can still be constructed of individuals capable of agency and independent action. It does not replace the minds of it's constituents, rather it can be thought of as an emergent property of many individual agents forming a deeply connected collective.
You're a bee, dawg.
There’s your hive
I feel computers (and the networks between them) are a natural evolution of our hive mind. When we first started taking spoken language and committing it to writing, we created a hive mind that extended beyond a generation. Prior to that point, everything was passed on through observation of other humans (observing behavior, observing speech, etc.). This meant everything had to pass through, and be mediated by, a human brain. Once we committed that to writing, we had a direct line back to the original brain that created the content unencumbered by the mushy grey bits that have consumed and regurgitated it since.
I feel we are still iterating on that. Cataloging our collective minds and building ever low latency systems to navigate those catalogues. Computers are just an extension that improved our ability to catalogue and retrieve the contents of each other's brains in an incredibly low latency way.
We are part of a hive mind. Our industry is actively building the load bearing infrastructure that supports our hive mind.