Swarming Around

On the verge of solstice [1], let’s consider time some more.

Amidst the bees buzzing around here and there, ideas have also been swarming around in my mind.

First and foremost: it seems like swarms never die. Individuals die, swarms live on forever (more or less). Sure, extinction will do in a swarm, but isn’t extinction the exception, rather than the rule?

I recently heard a podcast, in which some sort of well-known physicist (whom I had never heard of before, which isn’t saying much), said one of the questions that often occur to physicists (of the astronomical sort, I guess) is “why is there something instead of nothing?” At that moment it occurred to me that this probably became a fascinating question after the Big Bang. Before the Big Bang, the fascinating question would have been: “why is there nothing instead of something?”

Back to swarms.

Apparently, since some people refer to whatever it is that “swarm intelligence” is supposed to refer to, this “swarm intelligence” (whatever it is) must be a thing. Does that make sense? Or is there perhaps a bee buzzing around somewhere in my skull?

I think I should just give up on any notion of knowledge and rather plainly state that my gut feeling is that intelligence (whatever that is) is based on learning from experiences. Generally, such learning is therefore based on a statistical attitude — as in: “4 out of 5 dentists agree that getting punched in the mouth may very well negatively affect your ability to chew meat”. And also in a less professional manner: letting go of stuff generally results in the stuff falling down, so intelligent beings generally don’t haphazardly let go of stuff they would rather keep (also known as: “hold on to”).

This sort of alignment between “scientific” statistics and “popular” opinions reminds me of the smash hit belief in “The Wisdom of the Crowds”, which was sweeping the globe about two decades ago. I responded with my own “Wisdom of the Language” approach [2] — and there is indeed a point of overlap between the two approaches: the popularity of a language does seem to give it some kind of credibility.