On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 4:51 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:
The colony as a whole exhibits far more intelligence than one individual > bee does. ... The nature of bee colony intelligence is totally alien to > human intelligence. > Perhaps. But there is at least one way that human intelligence might be similar to the pre-programmed naturalistic intelligence of bee colonies. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/opinion/sunday/why-we-believe-obvious-untruths.html The authors argue that people know much less than they imagine and must rely upon specialization and a cognitive division of labor with other people in order to "know" things outside of the narrow scope of their direct experience, such as why the earth revolves around the sun or how cancers form. Because humans are excellent at blurring the boundaries between what they personally know and what is known by people in their immediate and more distant networks, they imagine themselves to know much more than they really do. In this sense, they are a lot like the bees, which are not all that smart on their own. Eric