Ants and Dreams

Do Ant Colonies Dream of Economic Systems?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism#Concept "Concept The term superorganism is used most often to describe a social unit of eusocial animals, where division of labour is highly specialised and where individuals are not able to survive by themselves for extended periods. Ants are the best-known example of such a superorganism. A superorganism can be defined as "a collection of agents which can act in concert to produce phenomena governed by the collective",[2] phenomena being any activity "the hive wants" such as ants collecting food and avoiding predators,[3][4] or bees choosing a new nest site.[5] In challenging environments, micro organisms collaborate and evolve together to process unlikely sources of nutrients such as methane. This process called syntrophy ("eating together") might be linked to the evolution of eukaryote cells and involved in the emergence or maintenance of life forms in challenging environments on Earth and possibly other planets. [6] Superorganisms tend to exhibit homeostasis, power law scaling, persistent disequilibrium and emergent behaviours.[7]

The term was coined in 1789 by James Hutton, the "father of geology", to refer to Earth in the context of geophysiology. The Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock,[8] and Lynn Margulis as well as the work of Hutton, Vladimir Vernadsky and Guy Murchie, have suggested that the biosphere itself can be considered a superorganism, although this has been disputed.[9] This view relates to systems theory and the dynamics of a complex system.

The concept of a superorganism raises the question of what is to be considered an individual. Toby Tyrrell's critique of the Gaia hypothesis argues that Earth's climate system does not resemble an animal's physiological system. Planetary biospheres are not tightly regulated in the same way that animal bodies are: "planets, unlike animals, are not products of evolution. Therefore we are entitled to be highly skeptical (or even outright dismissive) about whether to expect something akin to a 'superorganism'". He concludes that "the superorganism analogy is unwarranted".[10]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism#In_social_theory

"The economist Carl Menger expanded upon the evolutionary nature of much social growth, but without ever abandoning methodological individualism. Many social institutions arose, Menger argued, not as "the result of socially teleological causes, but the unintended result of innumerable efforts of economic subjects pursuing 'individual' interests".[18]

Spencer and Menger both argued that because it is individuals who choose and act, any social whole should be considered less than an organism, though Menger emphasized this more emphatically. Spencer used the organistic idea to engage in extended analysis of social structure, conceding that it was primarily an analogy. So, for Spencer, the idea of the super-organic best designated a distinct level of social reality above that of biology and psychology, and not a one-to-one identity with an organism. Nevertheless, Spencer maintained that "every organism of appreciable size is a society", which has suggested to some that the issue may be terminological.[19]

The term superorganic was adopted by the anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber in 1917.[20] Social aspects of the superorganism concept are analysed by Alan Marshall in his 2002 book "The Unity of Nature".[21] Finally, recent work in social psychology has offered the superorganism metaphor as a unifying framework to understand diverse aspects of human sociality, such as religion, conformity, and social identity processes.[22]

In cybernetics Superorganisms are important in cybernetics, particularly biocybernetics. They are capable of the so-called "distributed intelligence", which is a system composed of individual agents that have limited intelligence and information.[23] These are able to pool resources so that they are able to complete goals that are beyond reach of the individuals on their own.[23] Existence of such behavior in organisms has many implications for military and management applications, and is being actively researched.[23]

Superorganisms are also considered dependent upon cybernetic governance and processes.[24] This is based on the idea that a biological system – in order to be effective – needs a sub-system of cybernetic communications and control.[25] This is demonstrated in the way a mole rat colony uses functional synergy and cybernetic processes together.[26]

Joel de Rosnay also introduced a concept called "cybionte" to describe cybernetic superorganism.[27] This notion associate superorganism with chaos theory, multimedia technology, and other new developments."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organismic_computing#Challenges "Challenges A key challenge in developing effective organismic computing methods is the problem of information overload. Because humans are limited capacity systems, which include both attentional and processing bottlenecks, the availability or imposition of additional information may create interference that reduces goal-related performance."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality#In_humans "In humans Further information: Group selection An early 21st century debate focused on whether humans are prosocial or eusocial.[44] Edward O. Wilson called humans eusocial apes, arguing for similarities to ants, and observing that early hominins cooperated to rear their children while other members of the same group hunted and foraged.[3] Wilson argued that through cooperation and teamwork, ants and humans form superorganisms.[45] Wilson's claims were vigorously rejected by critics of group selection theory, which grounded Wilson's argument,[3][46][47] and also because human reproductive labor is not divided between castes.[46]"

Technological Solutionism should not adopt disproven concepts of group selection nor of inequitable superorganisms, but first understand the collective intelligence of a globalized world:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_intelligence "Collective intelligence (CI) is shared or group intelligence (GI) that emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making. The term appears in sociobiology, political science and in context of mass peer review and crowdsourcing applications. It may involve consensus, social capital and formalisms such as voting systems, social media and other means of quantifying mass activity.[1] Collective IQ is a measure of collective intelligence, although it is often used interchangeably with the term collective intelligence. Collective intelligence has also been attributed to bacteria and animals.[2]

It can be understood as an emergent property from the synergies among: 1) data-information-knowledge; 2) software-hardware; and 3) individuals (those with new insights as well as recognized authorities) that continually learns from feedback to produce just-in-time knowledge for better decisions than these three elements acting alone;[1][3] or more narrowly as an emergent property between people and ways of processing information.[4] This notion of collective intelligence is referred to as "symbiotic intelligence" by Norman Lee Johnson.[5] The concept is used in sociology, business, computer science and mass communications: it also appears in science fiction. Pierre Lévy defines collective intelligence as, "It is a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills. I'll add the following indispensable characteristic to this definition: The basis and goal of collective intelligence is mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals rather than the cult of fetishized or hypostatized communities."[6] According to researchers Pierre Lévy and Derrick de Kerckhove, it refers to capacity of networked ICTs (Information communication technologies) to enhance the collective pool of social knowledge by simultaneously expanding the extent of human interactions.[7][8] A broader definition was provided by Geoff Mulgan in a series of lectures and reports from 2006 onwards [9] and in the book Big Mind [10] which proposed a framework for analysing any thinking system, including both human and machine intelligence, in terms of functional elements (observation, prediction, creativity, judgement etc.), learning loops and forms of organisation. The aim was to provide a way to diagnose, and improve, the collective intelligence of a city, business, NGO or parliament.

Collective intelligence strongly contributes to the shift of knowledge and power from the individual to the collective. According to Eric S. Raymond (1998) and JC Herz (2005), open source intelligence will eventually generate superior outcomes to knowledge generated by proprietary software developed within corporations (Flew 2008). Media theorist Henry Jenkins sees collective intelligence as an 'alternative source of media power', related to convergence culture. He draws attention to education and the way people are learning to participate in knowledge cultures outside formal learning settings. Henry Jenkins criticizes schools which promote 'autonomous problem solvers and self-contained learners' while remaining hostile to learning through the means of collective intelligence.[11] Both Pierre Lévy (2007) and Henry Jenkins (2008) support the claim that collective intelligence is important for democratization, as it is interlinked with knowledge-based culture and sustained by collective idea sharing, and thus contributes to a better understanding of diverse society."