I recently discovered the new TV show Pluribus, about a scenario where the whole world gets turned into a hive mind, an annoyingly nice one, at least in the initial episodes, but where a few humans turn out to be immune to the virus that converts everyone else, including the cantankerous protagonist, Carol Sturka. The hive mind in the show appears to work via telepathy, enabled by alien sequences of DNA. It’s an interesting show, with good writing, not just from a sci-fi perspective, but a dramatic one as well. I recommend checking it out.
And it’s early days. We’ll likely learn more about the premise as the show develops. So this post should be seen as only inspired by the early episodes. But watching them, I found myself wondering, would a hive mind actually be like the one portrayed? In the show, the hive mind seems very at peace with itself, and seems to act without factions differing on what to do, at least not visibly.
The thing is, normal minds aren’t like that. Composed of large collections of neural circuits, animal minds seem to be a pandemonium of competing impulses. Incoming stimuli vie for domination in the attention competition. And the winner ends up spurring a wide range of impulses which vie for control of motor responses. All mediated by the cumulative innate and learned dispositions we call “the self.”
The hive mind in the show seems to imply that all the disagreements are caused by us simply not talking enough with each other. That if we were all fused together, we’d all understand each other’s perspective and we could then all live in total harmony. Sorry to be the one to throw cold water on this notion, but reality isn’t that clean. A carnivore can’t simply decide not to hunt prey, at least not if it wants to continue living. And even among humans, there are competing interests that wouldn’t just melt away with sufficient communication.
(Which isn’t to say that communicating with each other doesn’t help. There are, more often than not, compromises which can allow us to live together, and talking it through is crucial to finding them. It’s just that the strategy doesn’t hold all the way to the extreme case that all our conflicts disappear if we do enough communication.)
An actual hive mind, I think, would have a dynamic very similar to what happens inside each animal mind, at least if we’re going to use the word “mind” to refer to it. There would be a period of competing impulses, with a competition on which impulses would be acted upon. And there might occasionally be extended periods of indecision, just like in individual minds.
There’s also the issue of what the hive mind itself would be concerned about. The show portrays the hive mind having conversations with Carol and the other still independent individuals. But I have to wonder if a hive mind would even notice such individuals. We don’t notice if a dozen of our neurons won’t participate in the overall dynamics of our mind. And while a scientist might interact with individual neurons, we certainly can’t do it just by ourselves. We didn’t even know we had neurons until modern times.
Likewise, I’d expect an actual hive mind would only be glancingly concerned about individual humans, except maybe for ones at pivotal points in its dynamics. Its attention and affordances would exist on much broader spatial and time scales. Its principle concerns might be what it does on those scales, and what other hive minds, if there are any, exist and how they could affect its own efforts.
The idea of individual humans communicating with such a mind, as minds on equal footing, seems a little like a category error. We don’t normally communicate with cells. Cells communicate with other cells. Humans communicate with other humans and animals. And I would expect group minds to communicate with other groups, again if there are any.
This makes sense if you think about it. Each human, each animal, is a nexus of attentional dynamics, focused on what that animal needs to do. For a hive mind to be focused on the dynamics of individual members doesn’t make much sense. It seems more likely that it would be more federated, with some degree of volition left to the individual. But any volition means that there would inevitably be differences in viewpoints, and in opinions on what needs to happen on broader scales.
All of which raises an interesting question. Are we already living in a hive mind? Or maybe more accurately, a hierarchy of group minds? Things that match what I described above might be families, clans, clubs, companies, nations, and cultures. As a social species, one of a subset of mammalian species which take the impulses toward caring for our young and bootstrap them into an organizing principle for forming collaborative groups, maybe creating group minds is what we do. How often do we see the idea expressed that people crave belonging to something “bigger than themselves.”
It could be that these group minds are the next step in evolution, similar to the steps that transitioned life from unicellular organisms to multicellular ones. Social minds could be seen as the next advance. One we supercharged when we invented language, and seem to be dialing to eleven with increasing advances in communications. Maybe we don’t need telepathy to be a hive mind.
Which reminds me of Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam’s idea of superminds. Of course, they’re far from the first ones to propose something like this. Eric Schwitzgebel likes to point out that materialist theories of consciousness might imply that the United States, or any other country, is conscious. And I’ve seen the notion multiple times in science fiction, which means it’s likely far older. And its not unusual for people to talk about our “group consciousness.”
And think about how resistant people can be to the idea of their culture dying out, or being appropriated by others? It’s almost like elements of a group mind fighting to preserve its existence. Or consider all the nationalistic backlashes in recent years. It’s like the nation minds are resisting being enveloped in the overall world mind that’s being constructed as all of humanity becomes more connected.
I don’t have strong feelings about this viewpoint, but it is interesting to look at things through it. What do you think? Am I maybe missing things that make it less feasible?
SelfAwarePatterns 
You will be assimilated & the Andromeda Strain…
Our Dan Wilson (Robopocalypse) wrote the sequel to Crichton’s novel, recently.
An ASI would also assimilate all computation systems, the AllMind would be vulnerable to EMPs and CMEs.
Group-think might work for the bottom 2/3s of non-critical thinkers, of which there are billions.
In other news, maybe you can comment on this blurb I read about Google’s quantum processor solving some problem in 5 minutes that would take trillions of years, otherwise. And… How that somehow proves the multiverse?
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The success of quantum computing, as in validating the theory that it can be done at all (not necessarily in it being practical), is one of the things that moved me from being agnostic about the reality of the wave function to a more realist stance. So I do think quantum processors, along with things like the PBR theorem, makes realism about quantum states much more likely. (Not that people don’t deny realism anyway.)
But even if you accept that, you still have at least a few off ramps before accepting the multiverse. You could accept that there are objective wave function collapses. The empirical data seem to be making that increasingly unlikely, but it’s not a shut case yet. Or you could buy into Pilot-Wave theory. It complicates the reconciliation of QM with Special Relativity and quantum field theory, but many seem willing to live with that. There’s also the Transactional Interpretation, which I’ll admit I don’t know much about, except that it involves effects moving both forward and backward in time.
Only if none of those seem plausible do you end up having to face the predictions of raw quantum theory, that the environment is in a superposition of an ever increasing number of states, aka the multiverse. Even then, you can take my stance, that the raw theory by itself fits the current data, but that until we can test the other worlds, we should stay loose about whether or not they exist.
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Hi, Mike. You mention “objective wave function collapse” but you don’t say anything about the possibility of an “observer” being involved. I’d call that an oversight. The adjective “objective” might be a bit misleading that way.
I’ll take this vaguely appropriate opportunity to call your attention to an article in Quanta magazine about “the awful consequence of an observer-free universe”:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/cosmic-paradox-reveals-the-awful-consequence-of-an-observer-free-universe-20251119/
The gist of this tentative new theory, as far as I can make out, is that an “objective description of the universe” results in an extremely uneventful closed universe, but “When you consider a classical observer inside a closed universe, all the complexity of the world returns”. Apparently this involves introducing boundaries within the closed universe.
Not having any real idea what this is all about, I wondered whether the (uncollapsed) wave function might correspond to the uneventful closed universe, and the introduction of boundaries corresponding to one or more observers might cast light on the notion of “many worlds.” A way to have your cake and eat it?
As for hive minds, could all the life forms on Earth constitute a hive mind? Are all the cells in the body a hive mind? Does a hive mind operate at the same level of causal emergence as its constituents? One thinks of Seven of Nine as having a sort of “discussion” with the Borg hive mind, as if hers is one voice in a cacophony of voices, but this is almost certainly the wrong conception. How would that even work? It seems like the hive mind, if there is one, would have its own level of consciousness, incommensurable with the individual consciousnesses of its constituents. This sounds related to the “combination problem” of panpsychism (understood at a limited, biological level).
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Hi Jim,
I didn’t intend to exclude the consciousness-causes-the-collapse interpretation when I said “objective wave function collapse,” although in retrospect maybe “ontic collapse” might have been a better choice.
Though I will note that quantum processors have a problem with environmentally caused decoherence, which happens regardless of whether any conscious entity has knowledge of its state. (Although I guess for a panpsychist, the environment itself counts as a conscious entity.)
That Quanta article loses me in the opening paragraphs. They have a model that doesn’t predict our universe. The normal response is to conclude their model needs work, but instead they declare a paradox, which can only be solved with observer dependent physics? Sorry, but that smells to me like someone is looking for a problem for their preferred solution.
Good point that the combination problem could be seem as an issue for a hive mind. But to me, that problem, similar to the hard problem, exists for those convinced that consciousness is irreducible. For anyone who does see it as reducible, neither problem arises, at least as far as I can see. Although I wouldn’t think group minds present any new problems for the panpsychist. But it might for a non-panpsychist property dualist.
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I read the article too and it is talking about thought experiments rather than attempting to explain our universe.
I’m not sure I understand it either. But it seems the gist of it is that QM requires an observer – not necessarily a “conscious” one. Without one nothing happens. Nothing collapses or splits or whatever your favorite interpretation of QM is.
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Thanks for adding that clarification. Can’t say I’m a fan of that use of the word “observer.” It seems to obscure rather than clarify. Do they mean any kind of macroscopic system? If so, then it doesn’t seem like they’re really saying anything new. We already knew interaction with the environment is necessary for macroscopic reality to emerge from quantum phenomena.
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“Observer” is kind of fundamental to relativity and QM. But, yes, they are talking about classical observers, macroscopic systems to my understanding. To me the paradox is a variation of how do you get something from nothing problem. If the universe is fundamentally quantum, how did anything collapse to create something? How did macroscopic reality come into existence in the first place? Without an observer, you have a universe with a zillion possibilities but no facts, data, or information.
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That does seem like a problem for many collapse interpretations. Although not all of them. Spontaneous collapse models wouldn’t need a first collapser.
But personally, I don’t think we need a collapse at all. Decoherence seems to explain our observations. All we need for it is the second law of thermodynamics. (That does get back to the problem of why the early universe was in such a low entropy state.)
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I’m not following your logic. Superposition and entanglement do not require an observer or measurement to exist but they don’t have any discrete information, instead they just have possibilities. When a measurement occurs by an observer, we get a definite outcome. Decoherence similarly involves the loss of quantum properties but is result of incidental interaction with the environment. But it also requires the existence of a macroscopic, non-quantum world.
Spontaneous collapse might work but according to Wikipedia:
“Collapse theories stand in opposition to many-worlds interpretation theories, in that they hold that a process of wave function collapse curtails the branching of the wave function and removes unobserved behavior.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-collapse_theory
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Another thought on the early universe.
I’ve have been intrigued with the black hole universe idea. This wouldn’t resolve the ultimate problem, but here’s a thought.
Let’s say when a black hole forms the matter which falls into it returns to a quantum state. However, let’s hypothesize that some small amount of matter from the larger universe happens to avoid this fate. This small amount of matter, perhaps only a few atoms or quarks, might serve as a seed to collapse the quantum state of the black hole and create our universe.
BTW, take the above paragraph and let Google AI work on it.
It potentially resolves a lot of issues, although AI does acknowledge its speculative nature.
If you take the dive deeper option, AI says:
The idea is that a minuscule amount of stray matter from a “larger universe” could act as an observer. When this seed interacts with the black hole’s internal quantum state, it forces the superposition to collapse into a single reality, forming our universe.
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The thing to understand about decoherence is that it’s entanglement en masse. We don’t need any classical macroscopic physics for it, just the mathematical structure of quantum theory. (This is true whether we prefer wave mechanics, matrices, or path integrals.) Another way of putting this is that decoherence is an isolated quantum system becoming entangled with the environment, but “environment” here is just a profoundly large number of other quantum systems. Decoherence could be seen as the resulting increase in entropy from that process.
We only need to add additional assumptions if we insist on everything resolving to one outcome. If the other outcomes do disappear in a collapse, then the question becomes, when? Experiments have maintained superpositions in ever larger systems, including tiny macroscopic objects.
As you note, if we accept collapse, then we’re forced to bring on additional auxiliary assumptions, some of which become increasingly exotic. QM realism doesn’t make things easy.
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Interesting article you may have seen:
https://nautil.us/reality-exists-without-observers-boooo-1252289/
“At this point, the Many Worlds fans in the bleachers might start chanting “Decoherence!” But decoherence—the process by which quantumness leaks out into the larger world, leaving behind the appearance of an objective thing—requires, you guessed it, an observer. It’s the observer who partitions the world into the system under study and its environment, which is defined as whatever part of the world the observer chooses to ignore. Only then can quantum correlations from the system slip away into the crowded environment and disappear out of sight. Should the observer decide to keep tabs on the environment, too, there’s no more decoherence.
That’s the trouble with the “no observers” story—you can’t tell it from the inside out. You can’t start with a world, already divvied up into space and time, containing distinct systems and measuring apparatuses and environments, and then talk about objects interacting and getting entangled, because in the “no observers” story, none of those things can be defined in the first place. As a Many Worldser, you can’t even define a “world” or a “branch of the wavefunction” without bringing in an observer. That’s why American physicist Hugh Everett, when he proposed what’s now known as Many Worlds, didn’t talk about worlds branching into parallel realities so much as observers branching into parallel states of having observed or not observed different outcomes. It’s why Vedral dislikes the name “Many Worlds.”
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Thanks. I did see it. And thought about writing a post on it, but it would have amounted to me just pointing out that quantum processors have environment induced decoherence all the time without any observer. It’s a major design headache. (Again, unless we deflate “observer” to just the environment, but then it’s no longer an interesting proposition, at least not for me.)
But her article did lead me to Vedral, and I’m liking some of what I see about his approach. Similar to Chad Orzel, he emphasizes the physics, with the worlds just an interesting possible side effect.
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“environment induced decoherence”
But how would you know that without a measurement?
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You know because when you do get output (take a measurement) it’s not right, because the quantum algorithm didn’t run to completion.
It’s not really any different from the double slit experiment. You don’t consciously get a result any sooner with a detector at one of the slits, but the results on the back screen are different. No conscious observer had time to get the result between the slit and backscreen. It’s the difference in the end result that lets us know when decoherence happened.
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Yep. Once you measure, you have an observer, but not necessarily a conscious one.
I hope you do the post.
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We know that macroscopic reality emerges from quantum phenomena because of some interaction with the environment. Traditionally this is called the “collapse of the wave function,” and it’s interpreted many ways. For example, the Many Worlds Interpretation has an infinite number of macroscopic realities emerging from an uncollapsing wave function. The observer theory is just one more approach. Like MWI or Pilot Wave, it adds by way of explanation something we don’t know: it adds a theory.
The Observer theory in its early forms suffered from anthropocentrism. In later forms, “observer” came to mean simply an interaction of some sort. But the point is that the interaction itself affects the outcome. You could even say it creates the outcome, within a certain probability. One could easily imagine the created macroscopic event as the interaction of two or even multiple wave functions.
When we say that the interaction “affects” the outcome, what we are really saying is that we expect something to happen, and we don’t know quite what. This sense of anticipation invites thoughts of an “observer” who is taking interest in the proceedings. Maybe this affected Bohr’s interpretation. I know some find his views a bit too philosophical, or just hard to believe. My opinion is that, whether he meant to or not, he planted something intriguing.
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I had to read that article more than once (and even backwards, starting from the last paragraphs and tracing the thoughts back). The ideas are admittedly tentative: “At this stage, everyone involved emphasizes that they don’t know the full solution. The paradox itself may be a misunderstanding, one that evaporates with a new argument. But so far, adding an observer to the closed universe and trying to account for their presence may be the safest path.”
Here, “everyone involved” refers to three papers (including the original one from MIT), plus the opinions of various scientists quoted during the piece. To me, it doesn’t sound like anybody’s looking for a problem just in order to bolster a preconceived notion that physics requires an observer. The problem seems to be real enough that a solution of some sort is needed, and the “observer” proposal appears to be promising, whatever other alarms it may raise for the current paradigm.
You’re quite right that explaining decoherence in a quantum computer is not a problem if the environment itself counts as an “observer.” That could involve panpsychism, or just a form of relationism (if that’s the name) — the sort of thing Carlo Rovelli likes to talk about. What is a thing without its environment? What is the sound of one hand clapping? (and all that).
The combination problem is a problem for panpsychism, and I suppose for hive mind theories too, but I’m not sure it’s about irreducibility. At least, that’s not where I meant to place an emphasis. In some way our consciousness might be reducible to the consciousness of our cells or our neurons (not to make any claims about “consciousness” at these levels, but just to go with the hive-mind notion in unanalyzed terms) — but they may operate at different scales, which I believe is what you were saying. This means the consciousness of the whole is not to be understood as a collection of smaller consciousnesses having a huge conversation. The lesser consciousnesses are likely completely unaware of the larger consciousness _as consciousness_. They might be aware of a political entity, for example, but if that entity is conscious, its citizens would have no access to that consciousness. This would go against the idea that patriotism, felt at the level of citizens, is derived from a conscious will to survive at the level of the political entity. But I suppose the relationship might work the other way. The will of our cells to survive might make its way up into our consciousness.
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I’m onboard with a relational view. Although I think Rovelli’s name for his quantum interpretation is misleading. It’s not just relational quantum mechanics, but flash ontology quantum mechanics, which is my blocker for his view.
My understanding of the combination problem is that it’s about how larger consciousness emerge from smaller constituent consciousnesses. To me, that’s a reduction problem. Although in this case, it’s how one consciousness reduces to a collection of consciousnesses. And the hard problem is about how consciousness reduces to physical mechanisms.
For a reductionist, consciousness of a groupmind is exactly a collection of smaller consciousness having a huge conversation. Of course, a reductionist is usually committed to accepting that our consciousness is a collection of neurons having a huge conversation. In this view, the magic is in the way the conversations happen, admittedly a non-trivial problem, but not a metaphysically intractable one.
“The lesser consciousnesses are likely completely unaware of the larger consciousness _as consciousness_.”
I’m mostly onboard with what you say from this sentence on!
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“My understanding of the combination problem is that it’s about how larger consciousness emerge from smaller constituent consciousnesses. To me, that’s a reduction problem. ”
I’m not sure I would describe an emergence as a reduction problem. A theory of emergence that I think even you would endorse is that emergent behaviour operates on a different functional level. There are new entities, new affordances, new meanings. Comparing functions at different levels is like comparing apples and oranges. It doesn’t make any sense to say we can “reduce” the things at one level to the things at another. We can only adopt these different ways of approaching the world for one purpose or another.
It the neuronal level, each neuron is not hearing from all the other neurons in the brain. It is hearing from a relatively few nearby neurons, which are its TCP/IP ports, as it were, to the network of the brain. If there is literally a huge conversation, it is happening at another level of emergence.
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“It doesn’t make any sense to say we can “reduce” the things at one level to the things at another.”
To me, this is what reduction actually is. Certainly it may not be convenient to use the one level’s components to model the other level’s dynamics, but in many cases that’s just a matter of practicality, of which models it’s productive to use in particular domains. In my view, emergence and reduction are just two sides of the same coin, with emergence moving “up” and reduction moving “down”. This is, of course, a weak view of emergence, but I’ve never found any of the justifications for the strong version convincing.
Each neuron only talks to a limited number of other neurons. But historically that’s the same way human societies worked. In both cases, individual instances could have outside effects on the overall system, but they only worked with other individuals directly. Today mass media and the internet give us the ability to communicate more broadly, but that’s a very recent development in historical terms.
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Nice! I had a few thoughts reading your commentary:
[accidentally deleted next item, so gonna go pout for a bit]
*
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Thanks!
[sorry]
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Fascinating! So many ideas worth thinking about. There is the element of competition that runs through everything- and just won’t go away. Simply stated: War within and war without. A complexity we cannot untangle.
It seems to be getting worse the more connected we get. Enmeshed is the word that comes to my mind. Loss of Self. And that’s not a good thing, I think.
I’ll have to check out the show. Thanks 😊
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Loss of self, or a change in our self model. Whether it’s a good thing or not seems like it would be relative to a particular model. If nationalism is important to you, you’ll resent the global culture, and vice versa if you live somewhere where the national one is re-asserting itself. On a human by human basis, it likely comes down to your economic interests.
It’s a seriously good show. Hope you like it!
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Unlike you to be talking in such terms – or is the theory of hive minds falsifiable? I’ve been having some fun delving deeply into the Orch Or theory. I can’t help finding Penrose’s platonic mathematical realm rather too metaphysical for such a renowned scientist. Presumably the colour blue exists there somewhere in a mathematical form. I watched him discuss competing theories with Faggin – the latter seemed laughably naive by comparison. And Penrose couldn’t see any common points at all – pity I wasn’t in the audience. Oh well, perhaps a hive mind is no more inherently absurd than mathematical Platonism.
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The issue with falsifiability is when to give up on a particular theory. In the case of a hive mind, the less like an individual mind it is, the less likely the idea seems compelling. But how similar does it have to be to count as validation? Or how different to count as falsified? I don’t see a fact of the matter. Which I guess makes it more a matter of philosophy.
Platonism is definitely metaphysics. That’s another one I’m not sure there’s any fact of the matter, at least with the contemporary version of abstract objects that exist acausally with no spatiotemporal extent. To me the concept is redundant, but I’ll admit it serves as a helpful mental convenience for a lot of mathematicians. The trouble only comes when people forget about the acausal with no spatiotemporal extent part.
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I guess you’ve seen studies of brain waves of groups of individuals synchronizing when working on a common task. Also, true with music. Drumming or other simple repetitive song (Icaros, for example) is common in many shamanic rituals which also probably also plays on the brain synchronization between shaman and patient(s).
Culture in a broader sense represents a kind of exteriorization of consciousness. A cultural symbol represents internal feelings. Memes spread like viral agents through the hive mind. Culture, in turn, ingrains itself in our individual minds forging a sense of commonality.
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I have seen a few science articles that discuss synchronized waves, but can’t recall if I’ve ever followed through to the papers. But it makes sense if you think about it. The brains of those involved are receiving synchronized stimuli and engaged in synchronized actions, so it would be strange if their brains weren’t in sync to at least some degree.
Good points about the relations between cultures and minds. For a monist, they’re made of the same stuff, so it makes sense there’d be a lot feedback between them, with the whole thing forming its own complex system.
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When writers do the hive scenario regarding humanity, they seem to commonly employ mood altering drugs as the tool from which to throttle our independent thinking (so we can then become happy parts of collective wholes). This was true way back in the ancient Greek Odyssey tale of the Lotus-Eaters, as well as the Soma used for Huxley’s Brave New World. It sounds like this new story instead uses a virus and even some telepathy. In practice I actually think the drug thing was the incorrect sort of mechanism though. Yes certain varieties might make us feel more like parts of a whole, but then drugs also tend to cognitively degrade our thought. Furthermore we remain self interested beings even given prosocial drugs. So I think it’s good that this new iteration throws in some straight sci-fi magic to let us put the question aside and so focus merely on the story. Looking forward to it!
Of course here we also like to consider things practically. What would it take to get an actual human hive….
I suspect that bees are just as conscious as we are. They should still function in a cooperative way however since evolution essentially permits them to not dislike, or even to enjoy, doing their various jobs. Ants too. The difference with the human is that we aren’t quite as programmed for a certain way of achieving our calories. Our niche is more about figuring out how to feel comfort, safety, and strength, regardless of the conditions. Therefore if life seems better for you than me, that could make me envious. Thus you may need protection so I don’t take what you’ve got. There should be no envy for bees. Humanity instead requires governing. Today this often comes by means of written laws and enforcement, though less formal tribal governing works too.
Given our difference with creatures like bees, how might we effectively also become “hives”? I’ve said this to you before Mike. I think the Chinese government is using its Social Credit Score to progressively transform their country into such a thing. Essentially everything that someone does which can be publicly tallied, may potentially be used to add or subtract from the person’s social credit score. Low scores effectively punish a person while high scores reward them with various privileges. I’ve heard things to be so shameless that people are even docked for associating with low scorers and rewarded for the converse. Furthermore this is all happening so progressively that outsiders in general seem unconcerned about the blatant institution of mind control.
It’s difficult to say how much China will use soon to be superior military might to expand its empire. Fortunately Putin’s invasion of Ukraine hasn’t been a ringing success for him. Perhaps the productivity of the Chinese people itself will make the country so wealthy that their example itself will degrade the institution of liberty by means of the path that they’ve taken? Regardless of how exactly this change occurs, I expect that humanity in general will ultimately function by means of such mind control. Therefore people will have reason to not express free thoughts in ways that our governments might punish us for. I think this will end up being the most powerful way to run our specie, and so will end up being evolutionarily successful whether we like it or not.
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Sorry Eric. I left out some key details that might make a difference in your thinking here. In the show, the virus (or whatever it is) actually comes about from a signal received from space. Scientists realize the transmitted information is a DNA sequence (IIRC) and reconstruct it in the lab. Of course someone gets infected and immediately starts spreading it. A few weeks later the whole planet is infected by the carriers.
So at least in the show, it didn’t come about due to any clandestine attempt to control humanity. (Unless of course there’s some future plot twist.) It’s just that everyone but a few people end up being part of the worldwide hive mind. And Carol Sturka, the protagonist, has a history that makes her particularly resistant to cooperating with the hive mind.
We’ve discussed China’s Social Credit Score thing before. The last batch of reading I did on it actually made it sound like an attempt to reproduce something like the west’s credit scoring systems, but as a communist country, they were taking a more centrally planned approach. (It does give their government access to data that are held by corporate companies here. Not sure who’s worse off on that.)
I continue to be skeptical that they’ll be able to use it to create a super optimized society. But I guess time will tell.
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On the show’s theme I guess my position stands that this is a reasonably standard scenario in literature that even goes back to Homer’s isle of the lotus eaters (where Odysseus’ men were so happy there that they had to be forcefully removed). Furthermore a signal from aliens inciting this DNA virus (or whatever) seems pretty clandestine to me! I’ve now seen those first four episodes. In effect these humans function no more competitively than bees and so there’s no need for governing institutions.
The first episodes got a bit tiring for me since my interest in Carol’s shock and incredulity could only last so long. My wife didn’t mind though. And sure, to me it makes more sense to just join the fun. I’m ideologically different than most — if we could have what was portrayed, I wouldn’t try to bring back former humanity. We suck! But now that Carol’s shock has subsided and she’s fighting back, I am finding the show more interesting.
On the topic of the human hive I’ll try to lay this out simply. Because bees and ants evolved to do specific jobs, they also require no central governing. It wouldn’t make evolutionary sense for them to fight each other. Since the human doesn’t have pre programmed jobs however, we instead evolved to often compete with each other for our happiness. It’s this competition which mandates our need for governing. But given our massive conflicting interests, effective governing is still difficult. Tremendous resources are lost even under relatively well run liberty based governments. So let’s now consider compromising the liberty part.
Let’s say massive government monitoring existed for all that we do (somewhat like God itself). Furthermore this information gets fed to algorithms which constantly score the things that we do on the basis of rules that estimate how positively to negatively we affect others. This score would punish people for being assholes while rewarding acts of kindness. If we couldn’t cheat then this should incite behavior that discourages unkind acts and encourages kind acts. Of course there’d still be disputes since we’d fundamentally remain the same creature that gets jealous, vengeful, and all the rest (unlike the show’s scenario, or bees). Groups of people who have common interests would still hope to alter the algorithms to their own favor, though to be successful they’d also need to make their cases in civil ways. But imagine how transformative such an instrument could potentially be. In at least a conceptual sense, I’m starting to like the sound of this!
It seems to me that even in a dastardly way, China’s SCS is effectively taking this same road. Thus the algorithm will be adjusted as the years go by to make the Chinese people effectively a mind controlled hive. Less waste from standard conflict should help them become far more wealthy and so powerful. When this becomes clear I think western people will decide that they need some mind control too. But will China use its power to expand their country across the world for its general control, or will the west realize what’s happening quickly enough to build its own surveillance and algorithms to make mind controlled people that are productive enough to create a power that can compete? I’m not sure.
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The show hasn’t bored me yet, although I don’t know how long they can maintain things in the current state. But my guess is we won’t level up until the season finale.
You noted to Jim that China is now communist in name only. They discovered that tight central planning doesn’t work. Although they remain a pretty tightly controlled country. I guess I have little faith that central planning in social engineering is going to work any better than central planning in economics.
But maybe I’m wrong. We’ll have to see what happens over the years.
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Yes Mike, we’ll have to see. I also expect each of us to be around long enough. For now however we also enjoy using evidence to predict these sorts of things. I do see some relevant evidence supporting my case. It used to be that police officers, given their professional connections with each other, would rarely challenge the sometimes horrible behavior of other police officers. It was essentially their word against a sometimes mistreated public. So when things would get heated they might inflict horrible beatings and killings without repercussions. Now that body cameras are generally mandated, and with citizens often armed with cell phone video footage, things seem different. So they commonly witness officers like themselves being thrown in jail for things that used to be ignored. I realize that this isn’t exactly the same as China’s SCS, though a microcosm nonetheless. People naturally behave differently when they know they’ll either be credited or penalized for it on the basis of the provided rules.
My point is that the Chinese government won’t need to figure out any grand social engineering principles to improve their country’s situation. It will simply need to know that certain things should be discouraged, like propensities for violence, using drugs, lying, and so on, though certain other things should be encouraged, like doing well in school, eating healthily, tending to family needs, and so on. Yes this is China and therefore protesting the government will remain a cardinal sin. This simply isn’t rocket science however. Will government incentives and rewards make their people generally more civil to each other to the point that more productive activities tend to occur? Science and technology are often considered highly productive, though there’s much more than that, like farming, manufacturing, building trades, culturally connecting arts, and so on. Given our naturally competitive nature, human societies require effective governing. Bees don’t. So perhaps full government monitoring and algorithm based punishments and rewards will determine our ultimate governing structure.
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If your bar is China improving their situation, that’s actually going to be trivially validated. In terms of purchasing power, they already have the largest economy in the world. But their GDP per capita remains pretty low, so they have a lot of room to improve. It won’t take anything special for that to happen, aside from the large population and natural resources they already possess.
On the other hand, it is very possible for them to mess it up, as they did for most of Mao’s tenure. If they can just stay out of their own way, they’re likely to dominate the later 21st century. But that was already in motion long before the SCS.
In any case, I think you’re vastly underestimating the complexity of social dynamics. If you think about it, central planning for economies fail for the same reason, the social dynamics are very complex, and subject to unforeseen externalities.
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Yes Mike but you’re not addressing my point itself. We know that letting the invisible hand of the market figure out what things should cost, how much to produce, what to produce, and so on is more productive than trying to plan such things centrally. That might even be known by the central planners of North Korea, or at least academically. Furthermore the reason America was able to advance so quickly is because it’s government was able give its people enough hope to try to better themselves. Thus even normal people often found it productive to work hard. I realize this is easier said than done given standard corruption and systemic biases. Some countries do figure this out however, and perhaps China will too. But that’s our existing paradigm and so not my point.
What I’m talking about is directly adding a mechanism that effectively promotes a hive mind. Bees don’t need such a mechanism because they evolved to be satisfied with what they’re programmed to do. We’re different because we instead compete with each other. We lie, cheat, feel persecuted about being wronged, and so on. Not so for bees. So I’m talking about directly moderating the difference between the two varieties of organism. Here an algorithm exists that produces a moving score regulating one’s social privileges. So every time cigarets are bought for example, the purchaser’s score decreases in an associated way. Conversely getting an education for a career in a needed industry could help increase one’s score. Furthermore if normal people were to perceive that even high earning people must also navigate this scoring system, this might suggest to them that the deck isn’t stacked quite as badly against them, and maybe enough to insight hopeful attempts at betterment.
I get your point that it would be difficult to socially engineer a society, though that’s not quite what I’m proposing. Instead basic algorithmic rules exist about what’s socially good and bad, with citizens left to their own devices about how to proceed. So the invisible hand of the market would actually be essential here. In a conceptual sense is it wrong to think that people would tend to function in more socially productive ways, if they knew that their monitored actions directly affect their social privileges?
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Consider Prohibition, the period in the US when we outlawed alcoholic drinking. It’s arguable that we would have been a far healthier and more productive society if everyone had given up drinking. But it didn’t work. People found ways to evade the law, even though many in society judged them harshly for it. Even today we prohibit a lot of drugs that really aren’t any more dangerous than alcohol, and the people who really want to take them anyway find a way anyway.
These examples, I think, highlight a couple of problems with the idea that the social credit system could be transformative.
1. People find ways to be human, to evade the laws. Think of the 1920s speakeasies.
2. Politics inevitably gets entangled into the rules and prescriptions, which stop them from being the optimized engine you’re imagining. We allow alcohol and tobacco (with some controls) but for a century, not marijuana, largely because marijuana was historically an immigrant drug.
China is likely to be ascendant regardless. But whether they’re ascendant in the way you’re talking about, we’ll just have to see.
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Well this isn’t exactly about banning things that people want (though there’s plenty of need for that too, such as banning the hand grenade and heroin Carol was given in the show). The SCS is more about subtly influencing the Chinese people away from what the government wants less of and towards what it wants more of. I get the sense that it’s left relatively weak right now while they adjust the parameters and assess the results. But parents should already be training their children to be mindful. It should be quite difficult to evade this and there should be penalties for getting caught trying to. So whether or not people do become more productive given this influence, it should help them function more like a hive. Yes we’ll have to see, but I expect increased productivity. In the meantime, here’s a quick AI assessment of the system today:
———
China’s social credit score is determined by
a person’s behavior, which is tracked through a wide range of data including financial records, criminal history, and online activities. Scores can increase for positive actions like paying taxes on time or volunteering, while they decrease for negative actions such as making negative statements about the government, committing crimes, or even poor driving. The system is a combination of national guidelines and local, decentralized pilot programs, leading to variations in how it is implemented.
Factors that determine a score
• Financial and legal history: This includes credit history, tax payments, and any criminal records or violations.
• Online behavior: Social media activity, online purchases, and browsing history can be taken into account.
• Public conduct: Everyday actions like traffic violations, smoking in non-smoking areas, or how you dispose of trash can impact your score.
• Social and civic actions: Positive behaviors like volunteering, donating, and taking care of elderly family members can earn points.
• Government and political alignment: Actions demonstrating support for government policies can lead to higher scores.
Consequences of scores
• High scores: Can result in rewards such as priority access to public housing, travel visas, and job promotions.
• Low scores: Can lead to punishments like restrictions on travel (e.g., bans on flights and high-speed trains), limited access to jobs, or public shaming.
How it works
• The system is decentralized, with many local governments experimenting with their own versions of the system, though the central government aims for a unified system in the future.
• Data is gathered from various sources, including government agencies, financial institutions, and increasingly, through surveillance like facial recognition and online monitoring.
• Citizens are often assigned a baseline score, and points are added or deducted in real-time based on their actions.
— — —
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Eric, I’ll just toss in the idea that capitalism has its own form of social credit scoring. It’s called “money,” and it’s used to selectively reward or punish certain behaviours among its citizens, or should I say consumers. The Chinese have simply invented a new kind of currency, with better controls than, say, interest rates and money supply.
Their system is, however, manufactured rather than organic, and because of this it is in danger of failing, just as its version of communism failed (that is, the economics part). Few are the systems of control that last centuries; fewer still last for millennia.
I think Tina may be right that the Chinese system will just stress people out. I think it will lead to bad blood among the citizenry. But then the designers will just keep tweaking it, trying to fix it.
That being said, I was in Beijing for a few weeks once, long before this Social Credit Scoring thing. There were a lot of motivational signs in odd places. At a men’s urinal you might see, “Clean and tidy, you are the best!” (I don’t remember the actual words.) Chinese culture is conformist in its way, and this has deep roots in Confucianism. It’s quite possible they would see credit scoring as a welcome innovation.
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Right Jim, the Chinese probably are already more culturally accepting of a social scoring system than we would be. Also the “communist” title is just a hollow holdover from the past. They’re actually capitalists. Anyway as I was just saying to Mike, I suspect their SCS will evolve to make their people so productive that they end up dominating the world. So it could be that western societies will decide that they need to institute mind control measures to even potentially stay independent. Let me know if you have any thoughts on this scenario.
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Well, you might be interested in this current article from the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/22/mind-altering-brain-weapons-no-longer-only-science-fiction-say-researchers
Apart from that I have no immediate thoughts about Western mind control, except to remind everyone of Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent..
And yes, the Chinese are now capitalists, proving that capitalism and freedom don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand, despite much free-market cant. This is what I meant when I put “the economics part” in parentheses above.
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Good point about dishonest mind control already existing in the west. Therefore like “communism”, blatant government monitoring and mind control algorithms may simply be a nominal difference. Once that line does get crossed however, I do suspect a massive contrast in magnitude to begin. I’m not exactly fighting this anymore however. I’m just trying to figure out what’s what.
On neurological weapons, that’s of course the sort of thing that people get paid to invent. Others are instead paid to sideline what they invent. Bees conversely have no such concerns since they don’t compete with each other. Humans shouldn’t need to worry about weapons so much either if we were to have governing that highly monitors our behavior for potentially corrective responses. So full liberty would be sacrificed to government, though otherwise we’d be relatively protected and free to choose.
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I love this topic!
To create a human hive, I think Eric is on the right track in his comment above. What he brings up regarding the Chinese government is an attempt to manipulate people’s emotions to care for the common good. One of the types of “social glue” brought up in Plato’s Republic is shared sensation, specifically the shared feeling of pain and pleasure. It seems shared emotions are the next best thing to create a hive mind (which I mean literally like an insect colony where each individual still has its own self-interests). Plato’s idea to create conditions for shared emotion seems much more effective than the Chinese gov’t’s attempts, though, since Plato tries to leverage human nature rather than work against it. Of course, the city still fails. But it’s interesting that he has Socrates dissolve the family unit so that no one knows who their own kids are. The idea being when a child dies, the entire community grieves as if it were their own child, since it very well could be. Here at least he’s tapping into our natural feelings about children and family and working with human nature in his social engineering. Of course, much more would be required to dissolve our individualism. Drugs maybe, but that’s not good enough either. I’m not sure if anything would work.
I found an interesting video after publishing that post on Plato, but I went back and added the video to the post. Not sure if you saw it. Anyway, it’s from a study comparing ant problem solving skills to humans (as individual problem solvers, we beat ants, but as collective problem solvers, they beat us). It’s about halfway down the post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/philosophyandfiction/p/organism-as-justice?r=schg4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
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Thanks for mentioning me Tina! I’d actually like to make a point of clarification though because I didn’t make my point well. The point is not that the Chinese government is manipulating emotions for people to care for the common good. I consider that to be the standard morality which governments do in general such as “don’t litter, do drugs, steal, kill”, and so on. Though they do that as well, there’s also something different here. Every time you buy something, or your face shows up on government cameras, or you’re documented to associate with, and so on, is automatically fed into an algorithm to suggest if you’re anywhere from a good to bad person in the government’s eyes. Good people get rewarded while bad people get punished. Obviously people who challenge this government are bad people and so this naturally counters dissent. But given such incentives and punishments, I think this could make their people extremely productive and wealthy, and much more than in liberal societies. I think they could effectively become a mind controlled hive by means of this control. And I think humanity in general could follow given that it wants to have similar wealth. That’s my take anyway.
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Hi Eric,
Yeah, you’re right, what I said about the Chinese gov’t was an understatement. I think such measure will make the Chinese productive and wealthy—and miserable. The situation reminds me of an episode of Black Mirror where everyone’s on social media rating each other for every little thing. The scores have real consequences, though, so it begins to make sense why everyone would care so much.
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“But it’s interesting that he has Socrates dissolve the family unit so that no one knows who their own kids are.”
I had an initial reaction to this that it didn’t seem like leveraging human nature, but then realized that it might describe the situation in many prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies before the role of the male was well understood. Of course, in those societies males would typically be related to most everyone around them, except for the women who’d come in from other bands. I still wonder how well that solution would work in a sizable society, where you couldn’t necessarily know everyone.
That video is interesting. Thanks! One of the things I sometimes wonder is if we’d ever find an alien species more like ants than us, where none of the individuals are intelligent, but the overall group has a similar intelligence to our groups. How much of a civilization could such a species develop? What might prevent it is when the problems to solve become too novel, but maybe that’s just me looking for reasons to prefer the human way.
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Yeah, I think in Western societies it’s hard to understand the emotional motivating factor behind family ties. We’re so individualistic nowadays, and we don’t feel quite so close or reliant on our families as other cultures. Primitive societies are a good model (like the city of pigs). I like to think about animals too and the way they band together in various ways to care for their young. The females often take care of anyone’s babies as if they were their own. And many packs take care of the incest issue by running off the young males. It’s not clear how this would work in a larger society. It’s amazing how unsentimental the females are about running off their own family members, the same ones they raised and protected from birth. It’s hard to imagine us taking on that level of emotional sacrifice for the sake of the coherence of the family unit. But who knows, maybe to them it just feels like sending a kid off to college.
That’s an interesting question about the ant aliens. Sounds like a sci fi novel! I suspect you’re right about problem solving. Or maybe they don’t generate their own novel problems to solve, and so their level of sophistication stagnates? It’s hard to say.
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I think we have to be careful when observing animals because instincts vary from one species to another. From what I’ve read, in human hunter-gatherer societies, it’s usually the women who go to other groups. Although mores vary between different societies, so there are some where the men transfer. Not sure about other primate species, but in most of them there’s an alpha male dynamic at play, which might make a difference.
When it comes to aliens, my suspicion is we’re hemmed in by the limitations of our imaginations. I suspect if we ever do encounter an alien civilization, we might argue about whether it even counts as a civilization. We could even find ourselves arguing about whether it counts as life.
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