I’ve been putting some spare cycles into thinking about humanity as a superorganism lately. At times, it’s hard to not think about. I am hardly well read on this subject, let alone authoritative, so please take the “thinking aloud” that follows with the proverbial grain of salt.
What the hell is a superorganism
In simple analogy form: you are to your cells as humanity(a superorganism) is to you, or as a huge colony of ants is to each individual ant.
Ground-back
Long ago, somewhere in the universe, multicellular life arose. It has some inherent advantages over single celled life, namely the ability of cells to specialize and perform unique tasks. If you’ve been to an introductory economics class, you will have heard about how specialization is doubleplusgood productivity-wise, so these little multicellular buggers often found themselves among the fittest. Hence, they survived.
Many of the parts of you that make up “you” are specialized cells, which perform very specific tasks. So much so that when you cut these pieces out they don’t really make sense. You don’t have specific control over individual cells in your body — you can’t tell cell 23 from the left of your thumbnail, 8 rows deep, to “heal up now” or to “go fetch a drink”, but clearly an individual, comprised of trillions of cells, manages to perform on a macro scale.
Human Groups
Now consider groups of people. Imagine taking a biologist’s fine-tooth comb and organizing and categorizing them: religious groups, national governments, municipal governments, big businesses, little businesses, clubs, volunteer organizations, guilds, militaries, educational institutions, health institutions, transit commissions, unions — I could probably sit here and keep naming organization types indefinitely.
Then you could classify them by size, age, purpose, shape (leaders, branches, etc). And then you could likely figure out a timeline of them – for example, tribal organizations (now endangered) evolved in some places into local municipal governments, which were precursors to national governments. There’s a complex web of interconnection and some organizations exist strictly to feed off of others, some organizations compete for the same resources, and some organizations even seem to eat other organizations.
The obvious point is that an organization is directly comparable to a regular biological organism. They typically have centralised command groups, communications/action channels, and often what appears to be a collective will. It’s pretty damned cool.
Think about it
This is where it gets interesting. When considering this, two natural directions arise: first that humanity as a whole likely counts as an organism unto its self, and by thinking about it as such, you may be helping it to take the first steps toward becoming a truly self-aware being. The second is that you, a self-aware being, have just provided enough evidence (for non-biologists) to sit back and freak out over the notion that your actions are not yours, but are merely the collective will of your trillions of constituent cells.
The problem of “you”ness aside (we’ll leave that for buddhists to ponder at the moment), I’d like to turn to some questions that arise out of this topic.
Identification
What would a self-aware human organism look like? I think that the entire planet as a being only became a possibility very recently (in the past few decades), when communication speeds and quality became so great. Each individual bit of humanity has a significantly higher capacity for awareness of the state of the whole with access to the internet.
What else would there be, though? Could we, as the constituents of this organism, even recognize it fully? Perhaps there are ingredients needed beyond communication and specialized internal organs; what are they? That’s one I’ve been thinking about a lot: what remains to be made, done, or thought that will help the whole of humanity to realize itself?
Esotera
The last thing that I want to bring up is what our communication is in this model. When I write this and store it somewhere, is that “part of the memories” of this larger being? Are the memes which rise above the background noise this creature’s ideas? Imagine telepathy between two superorganisms — or imagine if that’s what’s going on in our own heads! Billions of voices crying for attention and building off of each other, and the rare virally successful notion in the populace of your mind becomes a joke you tell, or your plans for lunch.
I’m especially curious going forward, as we store our thoughts electronically instead of simply speaking them, we’re making them long term accessible to vast amounts of the group — maybe that sort of internal access is part of achieving awareness.
Conclusion
This was pretty rambly, and frightfully shallow, but it got the collection of questions I’ve been juggling straightened a bit. It helps to dump these things so that later, I can come back and build upon it. A reasonable bit of this thought (this time around) was inspired by a great little story about a man who meets god on a train. It’s quite entertaining — I’m not sure how people with strong religious convictions would regard it, but it asks (and poses sensible answer possibilities to) a lot of great questions.
To conclude, I suggest taking a moment to attempt to regard the whole of humanity. The vast billions of people across the world, eating and waking and dying and laughing and sharing at every given moment. The collection of all of us, together, as a thing that wants and survives — how long will it live? If we don’t know why we exist as individuals, imagine the difficulty in answering why it exists! And that all-time-favourite, is it alone in the universe? It’s great food for daydreamy thought.