That's an incredible way of thinking about it. I would say that is the most creditable way of dealing with the question of consciousness as it would apply to collective behavior, which is to say, it is a clear way of stating the difference between what those behaviors are, and how far removed they are from actual consciousness, without dismissing the "interestingness" of the behavior.

I would suspect though, that in our case it may have been something like centralized "nerve cluster" getting more and more complicated over time rather than anything that is in any sense a hive, although that is a very imaginative idea.

The intermediate Value Theorem, in existential form:

A single one of my brain cells is not me,

but all of my brain cells is me.

Somewhere between these two endpoints there is a line where me has to begin, and not me ends.