The hivemind society could be desirable and could enable a form of sentient flourishing.
In the broad sense, a hivemind society is one in which individual agents together form a further agent of some moral significance (the “collective” or, as we prefer, the “hivemind”). As we will see, in this broad sense, we are all plausibly already participating in many such minor hiveminds.
To what extent are potentially independent agents merged with a collective, and to what extent has the moral emphasis shifted from the merging agents to the merged agent?
Humans are already drifting in the direction of ever-more integrated hiveminds, and technology will sooner or later enable humans to join real hiveminds.
It is possible for a society to be more or less rationally unified and more or less phenomenologically unified. The degrees depend on both the length of time the individuals spend in the unified state, as well as the number of properties or experiences they share in the unified state.
It is the degree of integration or unification—rational or phenomenal—that matters and not the sheer number of individuals collected together.
Humans get together to form group agents of a sort (couples, teams, companies, states). Sometimes these group agents achieve quite a high degree of rational unity, sharing and coordinating on goals, beliefs, and intentions in a deeply integrative and interdependent way. When deep integration and interdependency arises, the group rational agency is not simply reducible to the agency of the individual members.
Various developments in brain-to-brain communication could enable phenomenological unity, including the possible creation of an ‘exocortex.’ This would be a prosthetic extension of the brain that can integrate smoothly and seamlessly between two or more brains at the same time, enabling them to function as parts of a single whole.
Although it might seem initially farfetched, the creation of a hivemind society has some plausibility. It is possible for humans to be highly rationally integrated with one another, sharing the same intentions, plans, and goals, and coordinating together to achieve them. Technology is facilitating more extensive forms of rational integration. Furthermore, with current technology, it may soon be possible for humans to be highly phenomenologically integrated. Would high degrees of both forms of integration be desirable?
When one person can read another’s thoughts, experience her experiences, and feel her feelings, the lines between minds will be ever more blurry.
Building the hivemind society, particularly by following the path to high degrees of phenomenological unity, would provide an obvious means for overcoming the mental barriers between us and achieving a more perfected form of intimacy. Furthermore, this is an ideal that could be achieved at different scales and in different forms, depending on both the number of people with whom one forms a hivemind, and the degree of phenomenological sharing it entails.
If you put a chimpanzee and a human in the wild, with no prior training, the chimpanzee will out-live the human every time. Humans depend on the existence of a ‘group mind’—a cultural repository of tools, techniques, and tricks—to survive.
If we want to achieve things through our actions—for example, maintain the same levels of material wealth and success in the future—and if we want to retain our problem-solving, achievement-oriented society, stronger degrees of rational unity will be required, up to and including degrees that deserve the label ‘hivemind.’
Individualism is an impediment to impartiality. Individualism favours partiality, self-serving bias, and illusions of responsibility and virtue. It is because so many of us are trapped inside an individualistic bubble that we cannot act with true impartiality.
Our belief that we are separate, persistently existing individuals is, to a large extent, a conventional illusion, not a deep metaphysical truth. If we cast off the illusion we can live more open, altruistic lives.
Pursuing the hivemind ideal, in both of its forms, would help us to shatter the illusion of independent selfhood and live a more altruistic and enlightened life in the sense that eliminating the distinctions between different agents, and seeing everyone as part of a single unified hivemind, would be to achieve a perfected form of impartial altruism.
Individualism is not the only game in town, and there are moral and flourishing modes of existence that are in tension with that paradigm and are best achieved by escaping from it.
The hivemind society is not just a mere possibility to which we should be open, but is also a possibility that we should desire, because it contains within it a pathway to flourishing.
There is no ‘soul-cell’ lurking within your neocortex, the destruction of which would disrupt or end your sense of personal identity. Instead, your identity is a relatively shallow and contingent fact that results from the way in which your brain instantiates an extended chain of overlapping mental states (beliefs, desires, memories, intentions, etc.). In other words, the reason why you think you are the same person right now as you were ten years ago is not because of some deep metaphysical fact linking these two versions of you, but because there is a continuous chain of overlapping mental states linking the present-you to the past-you. That’s all there ever is to personal identity.
There is no really good reason to treat the person who will occupy your physical body in 20 years’ time more favourably than the person who occupies the physical body 20 yards down the street.
Humans have long been more like bees or ants than we might think, since we have already built hives of culture where no individual has a good picture of the final result aimed at by the whole, and the drive for progress is slowly making our endeavors ever more like hives through advances in information communication technology.
Individualism has been contrasted with the hivemind, as though they are polar opposites. But if individuals can exist in different sizes—i.e. if individuals are not confined to a single human body—then the pursuit of the hivemind society could be seen as the attempt to create a larger, super-individual (i.e. group agent or group person).
We are already able to achieve limited forms of hivemind-like status, modest and primitive though they may be, and contemporary technological developments could result in us achieving more impressive forms.
“Minds” come in degrees and many group entities approximate or approach hivemind status.