Some Hivemind Fallacies

Hiveminds don't make much sense. I love them, but I might love them more if more writers grappled with that rather than handwaving it. Introduction Before anything else, I must note that this is an informal discussion of the topic, hardly a rigorous survey of the portrayal of the trope in fiction. I am unfamiliar with definining examples of group minds --- I don't know the Borg, I'm barely acquainted with the Formics, nor am I familiar with the Flood or the Zerg. I haven't even watched Pluribus. Though I'm ignorance of the influences, I've definitely encountered the influenced. It's difficult to immerse yourself in broader culture without a series that features an episode or recurring minor faction inspired by hiveminds writ large. ; related : - SFE: Hive Minds - Coalescing Minds - In Defence of Hivemind Society ; foreword italic : > Yeah, so my skull's just a coffin for the corpse of my brain\ > Wriggling contents rattled awake by the driving rain\ > Get the night watch on duty, come on lads, man the eyes\ > Light this stricken beacon for some sign of the skies which\ > Whip up a frenzy to rattle the worms to --- A Forest of Stars - "Hive Mindless" Hiveminds began life as specters of horror and antagonism --- humans prize their individual freedoms highly, after all. It's tempting to closely identify the trope with Cold War anti-Communism sentiments, but reviewing its history in SFF reveals that it predates that circumstance (though it could certainly have been exacerbated thereby). When hiveminds are portrayed sympathetically, you're more likely to see them called group minds. This, too, has a long history, dating all the way back to 1930's Last and First Men,^[I am in love with its description of the Martian group mind as "an extremely concentrated and formidable cloud-jelly."] but it arguably extends to any serious engagement with the implications of widespread "telepathy", biological or technological, blurring the lines between brains. Many have a distaste for calling such organizations "hiveminds." Eusocial insects are not psychic, and even the concept of colonies as "superorganisms" has its critics, and so using the term "hivemind" propagates this popular misassociation.^[And I tend to underestimate the impact of this. As experts are wont to do, I readily assume everyone already knows insects don't have hiveminds, so why would there be any confusion? And yet on multiple occasions I've had people take for granted that real hives have hiveminds and needed to be corrected on this matter.] Personally, I'm quite fond of the term "hivemind" --- I think quasi-insectoid aesthetics are awesome, and I'm entirely willing to embrace (reclaim?) purely cultural associations therewith.^[Relatedly, I have an appreciation for dictatorial queens ruling their hives. These days, bug nerds love to tell you that actually, gynes do not have authority over her children and are just a breeding caste --- often effectively enslaved to her workers. And fair enough, that's compellingly alien. But have you considered that the irrestible aura and allure of a god-queen, though?] Likewise, to me the connotations of abominable evil simply adds a delicious flavor --- it's nice and edgy. And others share my taste. Modernly, nerds of my stripe (queer, neurodivergent, and allies thereof) repeatedly find themselves drawn to such tropes and aesthetics. As a teenager, I had read plenty of My Little Pony fanfiction, where the changelings (rather bugly, but more horse than bug) were often headcanoned to possess a hivemind. Of the Hive is the first in a long series where the protagonist becomes a changeling, integrating into their collective and learning about their culture. More recently, I read We Will Evolve, a Metroid fanfic focused on the X parasites, enriching them with deeper lore and more compelling ambitions --- I found it a remarkably gripping read. After completing the first draft of this post, I encountered more examples in older published science fiction.^I really want to mention Peter Watts' Echopraxia, which features group minds by way of cybernetic enhancements --- brain-computer interfaces creating cult-like collectives elevated to incomprehensible efficacy --- but because the text does not portray the interiorities of these collectives, they are irrelevant to this post. However, the prequel short story ["The Twenty-One Second God" indirectly offers a hint to how they tick, for its protagonist was briefly a component in the mind of the largest collective mind ever recorded. Anyway, given Blindsight's whole thematic contention contra-consciousness, it suffices to say that the Firefall series's portrayal of hiveminds is quite probably the opposite of everything I critique hereafter.] I mainly speak of Blood Music, a Hugo award-winning classic a friend had been urging me to read for years.^Ever since they first read Black Nerve and its concept of [ichor.] It's a book where genetic engineering can grant individual cells intelligence comparable to humans, and thus the millions of cells in a researcher's petri dish soon ascend to a level of organization to rival an entire civilization. Admittedly, even mentioning it in this article somewhat spoils its latter plot developments --- in short, it goes full [parasitoid singularity, and humans are all assimilated into the grand noocyte collective.]{.spoiler} Perhaps that's enough to furnish my point. I don't mean to simply recommend good fiction here. I've mentioned these stories to demonstrate that when this post goes on to characterize portrayals of group minds, my target is something more specific than a common denominator of this trope, that of some race of bug aliens, fodder for humans to war against without understanding. So many writers now boldly ask: what if hiveminds were Good, Actually? Sympathy for the Pandaemonium That is to say, I find it's increasingly common to write about group minds and psychic collectives with credulity and sympathy. It goes without further elaboration the appeal of a society where you are never alone and never deprived of understanding nor trust. The question I ask is: does this hold up to scrutiny? Soft science fiction is often guilty of technobabble, a vague handwaving to "nanotechnology" or "quantum wormhole hyperspace," after which the story's conceits are expected to be blanketed in a protective coating of plausibility. Writers of such stories traffic in magic with a veneer of science. Are group minds another kind of vacuous magic? Now, I am a fantasy writer (albeit with ambitions to match hard scifi), so I'm hardly opposed to writing about magic. When I think hivemind, I think telepathy before I think exocortex routing protocols. And when you grant that your group mind is unabashedly magical, it can work however you please. But how they work has implications. Fundamentally, the dissatisfaction I have with group minds rests on two misunderstandings of the world that color how they're portrayed (And a last point that is just a nitpick becomes I'm a sucker for logistics.) For the rest of this post, understand references to a "hivemind" to be referring to a particular type: a united, comforting consciousness. Your sisters and siblings in the hive love you unconditionally and understand you perfectly. What one member knows, the hive all knows. What one member wants, the hive all wants. But the hive does not smother or erase or negate your individuality (that's close-minded ---heh!--- thinking). No, your identity is simply one thread woven into a tapestry of something grander. That is what I consider the general form. Tropes can vary in execution, not all of this needs to be strictly true, each property can get greater or lesser emphasis. But if this sort of describes what a story has going on? Then I'm not sure I actually buy it. Why? Well, it comes down to the two aforementioned misunderstandings. The fallacies I take issue with are one: the idea that ambiguity is a treachery of language itself, and two: the idea that social conflict is a bug, not a feature. Ambiguity's Eternal Regress This first fallacy actually holds for psychic abilities and mind reading powers generally, not just in hiveminds. It's so tempting to view these words of ours as a lossy imprint of ourselves, or to believe that we nurse some well of pellucid intent deep inside of us, with only a small portion of it able to leak out. We easily believe that we are Cartesian commanders, minds dispatching instructions to bodies that are at best imperfect servants thereof. Already we're in trouble here. I would argue it's often the opposite --- consciousness is an illusion, our internalities are a jumbled mess, and performing a truly accurate "reading" of a mind by any reductionist mechanism would be more confusing than just asking the person --- brains are complicated! And the operation of the brain is a matter of feedback cycles, information going both ways. Your "intent" can be just as well be something that arising simultaneous with you expressing it --- or be transformed by the process --- rather than always preceding it. And of course, the conscious processes are but a small fraction of what actually goes into in an organism's behavior. Here, a concrete example. Imagine someone with poor introspection, repressing their emotions so effectively they're genuinely unaware of what they should feel. Someone might read anger into their tone, tension in their body language, but this is all stress they aren't conscious expressing: they would deny they are angry. In this scenario, what should we assume a mindreader receives? Ideally, they might parse out both the unconscious sentiment and the conscious intent, and perhaps even discern the line of repression that demarcates the two. Still, the emotion certainly isn't intended --- the target might even protest this interpretation! I'm belaboring a simple point: we don't un