Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Proof of A Collective Will in the Hive Mind Architecture of the Ant



It gets really interesting at about the 4 minute mark. If anything, this is proof that the collective will of a species can be made manifest in various cultural and social organisms....in this case a complex city-state that shows evidence of intention and intelligence. In nascent free market theory Adam Smith called this unseen but positive force the "Invisible Hand", but I think that there are a number of discrete entelechies that lurk quiescent within the human genome. If we examine the current slew of crises animistically, one could make the observation that right now a yet to be concretized collective sentience is attempting to wrest power from the entity that has heretofore existed the most materially for the last half century: the human Ego. The Ego is solar and a dominating force, it is not self-limiting and does not act organismically, but atomistically with linear intent. I see the human ecology as a fascinating arena of organic causality whereby energy is transformed and transmitted from one system to another much like an alchemical transubstantiation. The confidence game begins in the magic runes (currency) and rituals (trade), but also exists in a parallel matrix as quantitative data(market statistics). Both systems nominally emerge out of physical and actual material reality (resources) that ultimately feed into cultural and social belief systems(nations, states, industries). The spent matter of the reaction is excreted as waste(human and industrial) flushed into the sewers or shipped abroad to be recycled. It's remarkable to hear the talking heads on CNBC describe the "market" with the same language one would describe a sentient being-in this case an intelligence that processes current events and acts according to the logic of an internal calculus that remains unknowable to the observer. This astonishing admission, that an element of human civilization acts beyond Reason and is prone to tempestuous and violent fits, should generally remind us that many of the basic assumptions of Modern Industrial Civilization as imagined within the Neo-Liberal ideologies that emerged out of certain lines of Enlightenment thought remain provisional and almost certainly will fail. Specifically, the outside context problem supplied by the very basic reality of resource scarcity should quite soon slaughter the absurd mathematics of infinite exponential growth. It is astonishing and frightening that the general pubic either 1) does not possess the intelligence to grasp this 2)understands but exists in massive denial or 3)has been lulled into a consensus trance by the cultural agents of the Ego (advertising, media). The end result of this bizarre mummery will be the emergence of a new collective will that will inevitably crush the profligate excesses of the Ego. The only question now is how violent or orderly the emergence of this new paradigm will be. There will be far less pain if people are able to understand the causes of this transition rather than just suffer the symptoms. I'm hoping that our codons have programmed within them a plan for properly mitigating and aiding this birth/death process, but I guess there's only one way to find out.

3 comments:

thesecretlivesofcats said...

Wow.They dug them up for research? Or because of that deadly CO2? I guess it was harming a nearby farm? An amazing city nonetheless.

I remember my brother once killing a bunch of ants invading the kitchen and saying, "Sorry to do this guys, but you are just a smaller part of a much larger oraganism."

I reccomend 2 movies if you haven't seen them. "The Hellstrom Chronicle" and "Phase IV." They may be escapist fun but they left me a bit unnerved. The first one has "moxy"....and arguably conned its way into an Oscar category. The second is my personal favorite, that, if nothing else clearly and beautifully labels the 1st, 2nd and 3rd acts of a story. As for the 4th?........?

Anonymous said...

They blasted all those ants with cement! Jesus. They're like: "Wow what a complex and beautiful creature...put on the new age music, and bring in the cement mixer!"
Pretty cool though.

Jacques de Beaufort said...

tsloc
I'll put those on my netflix queue

anon
I also appreciated the irony..