Hi. This is Rina reporting from the 31st century.
The current state of research on hive minds brings into my mind a curious fallacy that used to be fairly common in the science fiction of the 20th and early 21st centuries. A “hive mind,” as is well known, is a conscious entity comprised of multiple brains (or similar processing units), similar to how a brain is comprised of neurons. In science fiction of a millennium ago, it was common to assume that the individuals making such hive minds would be very similar to one another (a la the Borg in Star Trek), sort of like an image of the people in a totalitarian state.
But nothing could be further from the truth. If all neurons in a brain were alike, the brain would not have been able to function. For example, there are excitatory neurons (those that encourage the other neurons to fire) and inhibitory neurons (those that discourage the others from firing). If all neurons were excitatory, for example, they would have synchronized within seconds, firing in perfect unison with each other—the ultimate and never-ending epileptic seizure. The inhibitory neurons introduce complexity into the brain’s function. But if all of them were alike, it wouldn’t have been much, either. There are many different kinds of inhibitory neurons. But it is even more important that they all do different things, firing in patterns that continuously change, creating tremendous complexity. In other words, it’s not only important what they are but how they behave themselves—that is, quite differently from each other.
Indeed, according to the Neural Darwinism approach (pioneered by the Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman in the 20st century and conclusively proven a couple of decades later), the brain works by the evolutionary principle, the neurons competing for a chance to fire. At a somewhat higher level, neuronal ensembles are working in parallel, like many teams working on the same problem until a winner is selected. High variety is crucial for this to work, otherwise there wouldn’t have been many options to choose from.
Hence, if a brain cannot work with all neurons being the same, what can be said about a hive mind? Only that it too would require tremendous diversity among its individual members, likely of a higher degree that what we have in the most democratic societies. Indeed, they are not yet diverse enough to turn into hive minds, now are they?
P.S. Look at me. I am a personette, an aspect of an entity that is the closest we’ve got in the 31st century to a true hive mind. The variety of traits and opinions among my kind is astounding, higher even that that of the spaceship crew we’re each assigned to. Honestly, sometimes I feel too bored with our embodied partners, wishing we had more of our kind to get busy with.