…A human being is actually a giant swarm. Or, more precisely, it’s a swarm of swarms, because each organ—blood, liver, kidneys—is a separate swarm. What we refer to as a ‘body’ is really a combination of all these organ swarms.
We think our bodies are solid, but that’s only because we can’t see what is going on at the cellular level. If you could enlarge the human body, blow it up to vast size, you would see that it was literally nothing but a swirling mass of cells and atoms, clustered together into smaller swirls of cells and atoms.
Who cares? Well, it turns out a lot of processing occurs at the level of organs. Human behavior is determined in many places. The control of our behavior is not located in our brains. It’s all over our bodies.
So you could argue that ‘swarm intelligence’ rules human being, too. Balance is controlled by the cerebral swarm, and rarely comes to consciousness. Other processing occurs in the spinal chord, the stomach, the intestine. A lot of vision takes place in the eyeballs, long before the brain is involved.
And for that matter, a lot of sophisticated brain processing occurs beneath awareness, too. An easy proof is object avoidance. A mobile robot has to devote a tremendous amount of processing time simply to avoid obstacles in the environment. Human beings do, too, but they’re never aware of it—until the lights go out. Then they learn painfully just how much processing is really required. So there’s an argument that the whole structure of consciousness, and the human sense of self-control and purposefulness, is a user illusion. We don’t have conscious control over ourselves at all. We just think we do.
Just because human being went around thinking of themselves as ‘I’ didn’t mean it was true.
We think our bodies are solid, but that’s only because we can’t see what is going on at the cellular level. If you could enlarge the human body, blow it up to vast size, you would see that it was literally nothing but a swirling mass of cells and atoms, clustered together into smaller swirls of cells and atoms.
Who cares? Well, it turns out a lot of processing occurs at the level of organs. Human behavior is determined in many places. The control of our behavior is not located in our brains. It’s all over our bodies.
So you could argue that ‘swarm intelligence’ rules human being, too. Balance is controlled by the cerebral swarm, and rarely comes to consciousness. Other processing occurs in the spinal chord, the stomach, the intestine. A lot of vision takes place in the eyeballs, long before the brain is involved.
And for that matter, a lot of sophisticated brain processing occurs beneath awareness, too. An easy proof is object avoidance. A mobile robot has to devote a tremendous amount of processing time simply to avoid obstacles in the environment. Human beings do, too, but they’re never aware of it—until the lights go out. Then they learn painfully just how much processing is really required. So there’s an argument that the whole structure of consciousness, and the human sense of self-control and purposefulness, is a user illusion. We don’t have conscious control over ourselves at all. We just think we do.
Just because human being went around thinking of themselves as ‘I’ didn’t mean it was true.
