The latest issue of Seed features an article entitled “The Hive Mind” by Benjamin Phelan: The selfless behavior of ants, bees, and wasps has confounded scientists for more than a century. Is the question a red herring or the key to a new evolutionary synthesis? Speaking…
A human brain has 10,000,000,000 cells so a colony of 40,000 ants has collectively the same size brain as a human. If the human population is 6,760,000,000 (2009) and the ant population is 1 quadrillion 1,000,000,000,000,000 (1999). If my mathematics is correct the brain cell count of the ant population is nearly 4 times that…
Here’s an introduction to swarm intelligence featuring Christian Jacob – one a podcast from CBC Radio 1; the other a video from the Discovery Channel. Another string to Jacob’s bow is his swarm artwork.
Sad as it is, we were chuffed to discover that our co-authored paper is the 57th most popular paper in Chalmers’ MindPapers database out of a total of 18,477 papers.
Now it is becoming clear that group decisions are also extremely valuable for the success of social animals, such as ants, bees, birds and dolphins. And those animals may have a thing or two to teach people about collective decision-making. There’s an article in the Economist entitled “Decisions, decisions: What people can learn from how social…
The new issue of EPISTEME is now available. Table of Contents Special Offer ALL issues free until Feb 28 – hurry now while stocks last :)
The Brain: How Google Is Making Us Smarter Humans are “natural-born cyborgs,” and the Internet is our giant “extended mind.” Science journalist Carl Zimmer writes about the extended mind thesis in the latest issue of Discover. Whatever one might think about the Clark-Chalmers argument, Zimmer offers a well-needed corrective to the recent rash of articles…
I want to bring your attention to the first issue of the on-line journal Studies in Emergent Order (papers are freely available). I was privileged to attend the recent conference associated with the Journal. A more eclectic and interesting group one couldn’t hope to find. To listen to and chat with Gus diZerega, David Emanuel…
The BBC are broadcasting a two-part programme on swarm behaviour. It’s worth checking it out for the terrific footage – not having had the sound on, I don’t know if anything conceptually interesting is discussed. I will revisit the programme with sound soon. Click here to view part 1.
In a post on the OUP blog Adrian Vermeule writes: The basic problem with “The Use of Knowledge in Society” is what we might call the Hayek Fallacy: a false comparison between the aggregate product of many minds and the product of a single mind. Perhaps that comparison is relevant in special contexts, such as…
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