[hermanschaaf]

Douglas Hofstadter used this analogy in his 1979 book, Gödel, Escher, Bach. GEB presents an analogy about how the individual neurons of the brain coordinate to create a unified sense of a coherent mind by comparing it to the social organization displayed in a colony of ants. It's a fascinating book, and well worth the read for the inquiring mind.

[rectangletangle]

This reminds me of how some biologists consider a colony to actually be a single organism, and each individual ant an organ system. The queen could be thought of as the reproductive organs, workers the limbs, scouts sensory organs. It's especially interesting considering that all of the workers are sterile, so fitness is shared, and dependent on the queen.

[thaumasiotes]

> It's especially interesting considering that all of the workers are sterile, so fitness is shared, and dependent on the queen.

That's why it makes sense to think of the colony as a single organism. In the same way, your hands can only reproduce when the rest of you does, in an orderly manner, and we think of you as a unified organism. If hands could bud off independent mini-hands, you might see less cooperation from them over the course of your life.

[anentropic]

nightmares!

[partomniscient]

On a similar, but different tangent is Marvin Minksy's Society of Mind.

"You cannot train a beaver to build a termites nest or teach termites to build beaver dams."

[LazerBear]

GEB is an amazing book, recommended to anyone into CS and logic.