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

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