???????? № 11 – Hive

What is the Hive Mind and how does it relate to our understanding of ourselves and our place in society?

The concept of the hive mind has been around for centuries, but it has gained renewed interest in recent years due to technological advancements, as well as our growing interconnectedness and synchronicities.?

Today’s MEMO is a mix of Descartes, spiritual evolution, nanotechnology, empathy, and other valid remarks. Here. We. Go.

1. The Nature of Unconscious Connections

Hive Mind as a concept suggests that individuals are connected in ways that are not immediately apparent. These connections manifest in various ways, from synchronicities or the feeling that one's thoughts are echoed by others around them. One way to understand this phenomenon is through the lens of empathy and intuition.

Going back a few centuries on the topic of “thoughts”, one of my favorite philosophers, René Descartes, was by nature a huge skeptic; so huge that he doubted everything that could be possibly doubted, and concluded there is only one thing that can’t be doubted:

Cogito Ergo Sum – I think therefore I am.

The thoughts and dreams that preoccupied much of Descartes’ life aren’t something that could be referred to as concrete, physical, or material. The notions that make Descartes who he is, the only things he can prove to be real are the ethereal, the ephemeral and the uncertain. It’s a bit counter-intuitive, mainly because since birth we’ve been taught the opposite of this – by seeking truth, eventually you’ll need to learn to be comfortable with questioning things, and the discomfort of uncertainty.

When referring to the unconscious connections, especially on a surface level, what happens is that sometimes there is something on our mind that we begin to notice it all around us. It can be very mundane, like an old TV show you’re rewatching, or devoting your time to a topic, as simple as learning a new cocktail or reading about a scientific or esoteric study… suddenly, everyone around you is talking about the same ideas or concepts you just learned about, unconsciously as if they know what you’re thinking.?

Going one level deeper, you examine your first premises: “why is everyone talking about this?”, “why did I become interested in this?”, “where did the first thought about this topic come from?”; and when you find an answer to those subjects, you start to realize that we are not as isolated as we seem.?

We are more connected than one would think.?

The hive mind isn’t a concept that is engineered, it is rooted in biology.

Even when going another level deeper, the world and the issues one might have with it are simple projections of one’s self, like fragmented pictures. This can be explained as to how people feel isolated and anxious when they bottle up their thoughts and feelings because they feel like no one else would understand them. However, when individuals find others who share their thoughts and experiences, they feel a sense of relief and connection, thus creating synchronicities through empathy.?

Empathy allows us to transcend our individual selves and connect with others on a deeper level. It allows us to understand and share the feelings of others, even if we have not experienced those feelings ourselves, yet somehow these is an innate connection, often translated through a “I know how you feel”.

Imagine the universe being a hologram produced by the mind of the observer which is itself the hologram processing and interacting with itself in the assembly of the whole.

Similarly, intuition plays a role in our understanding of the hive mind, with individuals making connections between seemingly unrelated events based on their unconscious understanding the world around them.?

The concept of synchronicities, whether they are conscious or unconscious, is something both beautiful and terrifying. Perhaps it is fate, knowing your words may be preordained to be the foundation or destruction of countless ideas within countless other people; or that you are simply the observer, choosing which thoughts lead to an actual reality out of a billion possibilities; perhaps it just sympathetic magic.

2. The Hive Mind as a Metaphor

Metaphorically-speaking, the idea of “hive mind” has been around for centuries – used in various contexts, from describing the behavior of social insects to understanding the dynamics of human societies.

Working in the creative industry alongside marketing, the nature of creating desire around products or services can easily be traced back to the dawn of civilization. The concept of similarities in the minds of the masses isn’t anything new – society in itself is a hive mind, a symbolic metaphor for the industry where bees act together as machines that produce goods and services for consumption.

The hive mind comes into play when the colony is under attack, and since it is an invisible force, it is quite magical when bees collectively know where to go and who to attack, acting purely on instinct.

However when it comes humans, there is a concept of duality. When our own mental hives come under attack, whether through criticism or insult, we are faced with a fight-flight-freeze-flop-friend response, and even those have a multitude of shades of grey scenarios that protect our hive mind. Essentially, we not bound by instinct alone and can make choices based on our own desires and beliefs.

As a societal hive mind, people are used to enjoy their comforts, the nostalgia of earlier times, and the occasional guilty pleasures. And I have been noticing this in multiple settings, in crowds or groups of familiar people, even without consciously bringing up a subject, the conversation inevitably reflects my subconscious. The sum of my experiences can be condensed into an idea of a feedback loop, where thoughts travel without being said. I don’t think it’s benevolent or malevolent, it’s been happening too many times recently to just write it off as pure coincidence, which is why I think there is some metaphorical sense to it.

The metaphor lives as a simple feedback loop – that’s where it starts anyway – one thing creating the other, one thought leading to someone else’s idea. I think feedback loops are a fundamental part of unconscious connections.?

Feedback loops occur when two things are connected to each other and become aware of each other.

When synchronicity exists between two things, we acknowledge that those things are connected to each other though means we cannot perceive or aren’t immediately apparent. You could say the awareness is subconscious or purely physical or supernatural. The mutual awareness changes one, and in turn the other.?

We live our lives with filters on our perception. Though we may not always see it, everything is connected to each other, and there are feedback loops within feedback loops within feedback loops.?

3. The Ethics of Collective Consciousness

Collective consciousness raises some important questions about the nature of individuality and the role of the collective in shaping our thoughts and actions.

I’ve covered Consciousness and its relationship with micro/macro-cosmos more in-depth in a previous MEMO for anyone interested.

On one hand, collective consciousness can be a powerful force for good. Just like bees who work together in a coordinated manner to build complex structures and gather food, individuals can work together towards common goals, pooling their resources and talents to achieve things that would be impossible on their own; and we’ve shown this multiple times throughout history.

However, collective consciousness can also be used to manipulate groups of individuals and suppress dissenting voices, and we’ve all (hopefully) noticed how govs and corpos are using forms of media manipulation to shape public opinion and control the narrative around certain issues.

As with every hive, there are numbers and ranks amongst them. The queen can easily be replaced with an idea, a mother of thought. For a hive to function, an individual’s goal in society is to protect the “queen”, as the queen is main producer. Without a queen, nothing is produced. Without production, nothing is consumed. Without consumption, death follows.?

But as we have seen, not all hives are the same, and individuals have the power to rethink their roles, leading to the creation of different societal hives.

This raises the ethical questions about the role of the individual in society:

How do we balance the desire for autonomy with the need to work towards common goals??

How do we ensure that everyone's voices are heard in a society built on conformity and consensus?

While there is no direct answer to these ethical questions, a new perspective is necessary here, one that emphasizes the importance of individual autonomy while still recognizing the power of collective action.

In order for the hive society to function, there needs to be discontent inside the hive.

This can be achieved though critical thinking that balances individual rights and freedoms with the need for cooperation.?

4. The Role of Technology in Unconscious Connections

Tech and more specifically social media has been one of the main facilitators of the unconscious connections between individuals, and these have been accelerating over the past couple of years.

Whether you post a picture on Instagram and get likes from complete strangers, or someone posts a Reddit thread that you just thought of writing, or see an ad for an item you’re certain you’ve never brought up in conversation or looked up in any app, the hive algorithm has been getting a lot better at reading your mind recently – maybe it’s AI, maybe it’s something along the lines of synthetic telepathy.

Either way, social media and more specifically Twitter has been a great example of how technology reinforces existing beliefs to the point of one-way communication. Even in the past couple of years, events such as the US election or COVID have divided the public into left-vs-right echo chambers, with misinformation and propaganda on both sides and no communication whatsoever between the two different groups. I think the recent ‘Twitter Files’ sheds some light into the polarization and division that was orchestrated around those topics. Essentially, when an individual becomes too well-categorized into a certain algorithmic value, it is difficult to reset those informations and opinions, thus canceling any diversity of thought.

Even when referring to nanotechnology and its current uses, there are significant developments in establishing communications between two or more individuals’ brains. But at the same time, there are also cases where they implanted dopamine regulator chips in brains of patients for testing purposes, and when the chip malfunctioned, there was a complete depletion of dopamine and the patient become so dependent on the chip that he had to get it replaced.?

As for AI (not AGI, again, that’s not happening) part of the hive mind, although I am referring to it in a previous MEMO, the aspect of the AI hive mind collective beyond a parasitical technological entity is laughable. As it stands, it will always be a tool of submission and codependency instead of something empowering us.?

The obvious topic here is how can and will technology be abused for the purpose of hive mind benefits, or can and will technology have a role in assisting that for a humanitarian benefit.

It’s a longer topic in itself, and probably best saved for a later date.

5. The Future of Collective Consciousness

Our species will inevitably enter a new era of spiritual evolution, whether we like to admit it or not.?

Beyond monkey pictures, NPCs, AI image generators and whatever else flavor of the month is trending, we are returning to a collective consciousness, a spiritual mechanism that has long been deprived from humanity.?

The reason why synchronicities are accelerating, whether it’s artificial or natural, tells a tale of consciousness traveling through thoughts and actions and that everything that has happened or ever will, happened already and we’re just traveling these paths creating our reality both internally and externally.?

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That’s it for today’s observation.?

I think that regardless of our take on hive minds, its implications for our understanding of the collective consciousness are definitely paving the way into a better understanding of society as well as our role in it.

Bzzz Bzzz,

-m-