What's your favorite kind of hive mind, Veeky Forums? Does this chart need anything else added or does it look like I've gotten most of them on it? (This is just off the top of my head, so I don't even know if it's "Correct").
Maybe I just like the Orz, but Overminds are cool.
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I have a race of bug-people that are essentially a Hierarchical Concensus- each member is their own individual, but they are all in contact with each other, and there are different types. An analogy would be that their "queens" act as the race's servers, while the "drones" are all the computers linked to that server. The queens aren't so much controlling the drones as they are acting as an information depository, smoothing communication and the transfer of ideas and decisions between drones.
Hierarchical and Consensus Consciousness for me.
This.
Merged Minds tend to very quickly make for impossible foes without asspull (even Halo had to make the titular Halo rings and exterminatus the entire galaxy to deal with the Flood because aliens so advanced they could build planets couldn't outsmart them once they had enough biomass).
Overminds tend to just leave the players feeling like you snatched victory from them in the cheapest way possible (I do love Bodysnatcher-type villains, but only if they can't easily and endlessly keep shifting into new bodies with no downsides.)
From a narritive perspective Overminds and Hierarchics are the easiest to deal with, since if you can kill the boss the rest tend to either die or at the very least be disabled for a while.
The trouble then is getting to the Queen Ant if it's a Hierarch or even getting access to the Overmind (without being fried) if it's something like a Great Old One.
The C Consciousness from STALKER would count as a merged mind or consesus?
Consensus for me, the Geth are straight up the best part of Mass Effect for me. It is downright criminal we didn’t get more of them
It's not an actually hivemind, but I love using an absurdly strong collective consciousness. It basically has all members of the community act the same way, do the same things, and think similar thoughts without any actual mind to mind contact. It's all just conditioning and cultural power a la 1984. It's fun to extend it even further and say that it's biological for a species to act a certain way.
I love the Merged-Mind, though that is mostly because of my love for the Thing. Though I also really like the Consensus Consciousness. Legion best squadmate!
The kind where everyone uses first person plural.
>Merged mind section.
>This type of hive mind can start out as a simple beast and rapidly turn into a living supercomputer.
>Example- The Thing.
This chart has severely triggered my autism. The Thing was already a sapient being during it’s time as a dog. If left to it’s own devises without any of the film’s cast to interfere or provide biomass the dog-thing would have happily built a scrap-spaceship and either flee to space or infect the world (it’s objectives are a bit unclear whether it’s maliciously trying to eat everything or infecting people in self-defence)
Also,
>The thing.
>Hivemind.
The Thing is a form of bullshit adaptable cell based bio-wizardry, not a hivemind. The Thing cells in a Petri dish do not share communication with the Thing’d people. The Thing cell’s do whatever the hell is in their self-interest (which usually means band together and remain overpowered as hell. Thing’s ‘hivemind’ status only extends to as far as the edge of it’s bodyand even then it’s more like an “Everyone is free to do what they want but logically we should all do what makes the most sense for the overall community (but only when it doesn’t put you on the chopping block)”
>merged mind
Kinda reminds me of STALKER with the whole noosphere and what not, but without an overmind. Well I guess C-Conscious is an overmind in a way, but they'd be more much consensus consciousness.
Consensus Consciousness makes the most interesting of them all, especially when there are conflicting interests.
The whole point of a consensus conscious is that always goes with whatever the consensus is regardless of the risk to the individual. There really aren't conflicts of interest by design. It's not really a hive-mind if there is, it's just a bunch of jack-offs who agreed to vote on things until the vote doesn't go their way.
The Emple-Dokcetic from OA is my favorite hive mind.
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So, what kind of hivemind is Veeky Forums? Is there such a thing as a shitpost-based consensus?
As per OP's picture, the Merged Mind.
not quite, keep in mind the samefags
Bump
Fun thread, I love reading about this stuff.
But as a big fan of "The Thing", I don't think there is much if any evidence of there being any hive mind among the aliens. The aliens seem to coordinate but they also seem to betray one another, which doesn't nessecarily support or debunk a hive mind.
Some of the Dark Horse comics give evidence for a hive mind, like the one setting in Australia. But those settings are pretty different from the films.
Mars loves you.
A different sort of thing, a sort of stand alone complex. Many similar minds united by a goal but not directly sharing information
I've always liked the idea of a race with several independent, gigantic overminds, who all consider themselves single entities and who tend to be territorial and solitary towards each other. When they fight over territory, it looks like a war on a human scale. They have a hard time with concepts like cooperation, any more than you might consider your foot coordinating with your stomach.
Consensus Consciousness, because the monolith can and usually do think and act for themselves, and they've been known to be able to break free from the experiment (like those dudes in CoP)
this is an angle I've taken before.
Basically all the females of the species are either Queens, Warriors, or Workers, with a few others for the sake of biodiversity but ultimately still a generic ant-like hive species.
The males, the drones, were free-willed individuals who are basically aspiring heroes trying to get laid since heroism impresses queens most.
>Does this chart need anything else added or does it look like I've gotten most of them on it?
I think it needs a hell of a lot more examples. I personally am not the most widely-read person, but:
>Merged minds: The Tines (A Fire Upon the Deep), the basilisk nest (Ginny Weasley and the Sealed Intelligence)
>Overminds: The Six Paths of Pain (Naruto)
Also:
>"hierarch", not "heirarch"
>"sergeant", not "seargent"
>"biding its time", not "biding it's time"
Reminder: Hive minds don't have to be permanent. Maybe a bunch of people sign a contract to form a hive mind for a defined length of time.
The Runelords series provides a cool example of a merged mind:
>The gimmick of the setting is that you can use enchanted branding irons to transfer "endowments" of attributes (but only willingly)
>If Alfred gives an endowment of mind to Beatrice, Alfred goes into a coma while Beatrice gets to use his brainpower
>If Alfred dies, Beatrice loses half her memory and brainpower
>If Beatrice dies, Alfred wakes up from his coma and gets half of Beatrice's memories
>If Alfred, Charles, Derek, Ernest, and Fay all gave endowments of mind to Beatrice, and Beatrice dies with an important secret, ACDEF (who collectively hold five-sixths of Beatrice's memories) can try to figure out what Beatrice knew from their jumbled pieces of Beatrice's memories
Same.
I love the hierarchical hive mind from Edge of Tomorrow (yes, the movie) where you have the true mind directing their alpha agents directing the soldiers. It works great in TTRPGs where you are uncovering later after layer of this hive-mind society.
I also love the many takes on the biblical Legion that works as a single entity despite being made of many individual evils.
The other thing I like isn’t listed, but I would describe it as an offshoot of consensus - one where the entity acts as one, but the personalities of all the indidivials are retained and it’s almost a democratic process to make overarching decisions. Sort of like how the robots operated in The Matrix. Mainly it seems to be a computer AI type trope.
Is the Tyranids also hierarchical with genestealers and all?
The Tyranids are the hierarchical one, right?
I like emergent consciousnesses, where nonsapient or barely sapient creatures acting individually turn out to be acting as part of a greater whole, formed and embodied by simple rules iterating in highly complex ways.
Overmind is best for lewd shit
>hasn't understood that hiveminds can be allies and *GASP* you and your own party!
C'mon man, get with the times....
Welp, this post made me happy.
I agree:
The consenstual consciousness is the only one that actually at least RESEMBLES an actual hive organisms, but REAL emergent hive organisms are the actually most fascinating things, hundred times more interesting than any fantasy consciousness bullshit people came up with.
Why do we pretend to draw inspiration from truly fascinating facts of nature, only to immediately remove what was fascinating about them in the first place?
Ye, since if the synapse creatures are taken out the lesser nids that were governed by them regress into base animal behavior as they're cut off from the hive mind
Merged mind or consensus conciousness is probably the closest of those to how actual "hive minds" (or more properly, emergent intelligence) works, where individuals act together like a single entity that is greater than the sum of its parts.
I dislike most fictional hive-minds pretty much always requiring some kind of psychic component to instantly transmit thought between individuals, though. I get why it's necessary, but it doesn't really represent how actual eusocial animals works, and I personally want to avoid invoking "space magic" as an explanation whenever possible.
I've got two different "hive mind" species in my setting:
One is a a typical merged mind type conciosness, formed by sessile tree-like organisms that kind their nervous systems together through their "roots", combining their brainpower to create a single conciousness. Individuals can uproot themselves and act independently, but when doing so they're effectively flesh robots, able to carry out tasks that were "programmed" into them before they separated from the whole, but lack the brainpower to formulate their own thoughs.
The other is a species of hive insectoids where the workers have animal-level intelligence, but will function together by following each others actions and communicating via pheromones so that a group of them acts as one (they don't really share a conciosuness, but simply so "in-tune" with each other that all individuals in a group will think and feel the same way), allowing them to accomplish more complex tasks than they could alone. The queens and drones of the species have human-level intelligence and direct the workers and perform tasks too complex for the emergent conciosuness (which is mostly good at finding the path of least resistance or brute-forcing a problem, but is incapable of doing any form of complex thinking such as formulating strategies or developing scientific theories).
Geth are both "Consensus Consciousness" and "Merged Mind" based on the codex and what Legion says in the Mass Effect series.
Tyranids probably started as hierarchical but currently they are more of an Overmind. Only their overmind no longer needs a physical body to exist.
>What's your favorite kind of hive mind, Veeky Forums?
Skut.
What does this count as:
> Race of robotic / cyber / mechanical beings that are all innately connected to a single database
> Each are completely autonomous and independent
> the shared mind doesn't have its own consciousness
> "Sleep" is just upload time for all information added since last sleep
I had an idea for a Naruto fanfiction story a while ago.
>Middle of the Shinobi World War
>Orochimaru isn't the only person conducting secret experiments on POWs without the Hokage's knowledge
>The Yamanaka are trying to improve their mind-altering infiltration techniques
>They come up with Mind-Body Merge, which (1) permanently evicts the target's soul and mind, and (2) connects the target's body with the user's soul and mind
>The resulting two-person hive mind has only the chakra of 1.5 ordinary people (since half of chakra is generated in the soul and half is generated in the body, and the hive mind has two bodies but only one soul), but their exceptional coordination allows improved performance in collective action
>However, the war ends without Leaf's being forced into a situation dire enough that the Yamanaka need to reveal this new forbidden technique and risk international condemnation
>Fast-forward a few years
>Naruto's first end-of-year test at the Academy reveals that he's a retard
>The clans implore Hiruzen to get him special training as a jinchuuriki; Hiruzen refuses
>At a secret conference, Inoichi reveals Mind-Body Merge to the Ino-Shika-Chou bigwigs, and they come up with a plan: Make Ino use Mind-Body Merge on Naruto, so that a retard won't be in control of Leaf's tailed beast, and the Village won't be pathetically weak in the face of, e.g., Stone's TWO fully-trained jinchuuriki
You're absolutely right, the chart would have been better served using Slivers as an example.
>In the Yamanaka laboratories, there are three living test subjects
>The first one (a man/woman pair) is perfectly well-adjusted (though it often indulges in selfcest); it helps Ino learn the technique
>The second one (three men) has gone insane, and thinks that it is the manifestation of a "God with Many Faces and One Voice" that is destined to rule the world. It originally consisted of two males, but managed to take a laboratory worker by surprise. Currently in "solitary confinement" (with its bodies physically separated but obviously still able to coordinate due to their soul link), it is researching ways to improve the Mind-Body Merge technique (e.g., by making the copying of communal memories between the bodies' brains "mirrored" rather than "striped", to improve redundancy if one body is killed)
>There was a third test subject (two women), but it suffered from multiple-personality disorder, and now each body refuses to acknowledge the existence of the other body
What kind of Hive Mind would the Emple-Dokcetics be?
>The core idea of Emple-Dokceticism is to resolve the tension between the Zarathustran supremacy of the self and one's expansive will to power, and the tenets that sees each individual solely as a function in society through the concept of modular equality. All citizens have interchangeable parts, making it possible to not just link together individuals into temporary or permanent group organisms but also to reconstruct oneself within a wide range. Indeed, in many of the oldest Emple-Dokcetic hives, most individuals are transient assemblages, constructed on an ad hoc basis in response to a specific societal need. Though not all adherents take Emple-Dokceticism to this extreme, it is not particularly rare to find an Emple-Dokcetic community where the mean life expectancy of citizens is measured in days.
>Emple-Dokceticism was first conceived not long after the occurrence of the Gorca Pleroma circa 7511, in which a hivemind of baselines resulted in a blight so aggressive and dangerous that it was only defeated by a swarm of dreadnoughts deployed by Verifex emself, and supported by extensive displacement cannon bombardment. As a result, the denizens of the Lirantiq region have tended to regard the idea of joining any large group of sophonts into a single mind with extreme trepidation. On the other hand unbridled individualism is not desirable for highly social beings. The modular equality solution to the dilemma is to make the individual and the self modular and interchangeable. This lowers or removes the barriers between individuals and enables enhanced altruism and understanding.
>When needed collective minds can be constructed, but they are viewed merely as temporary tools, and dismantle themselves after their purpose has been achieved. Pure individuality can also be achieved, but is also regarded as merely a tool for the will to express itself. The typical state of an Emple-Dokcetic is being an assemblage of parts and subselves of different origins, a tool for the expression of the current transient collective will. In the flow of Emple-Dokcetic society ideas, knowledge and goals flow fairly freely between the different temporary bodies and selves. Instead of having a self as an individual, Emple-Dokcetics view themselves as a transient tool that exists to fulfil its destiny.
>The principles of Emple-Dokceticism do not exist in any clear form, but rather as a large corpus of various entities that developed during the formative years of the Emple-Dokcetic culture. Together they delineate everything from the story of how the ideology developed, to the practicalities of modular living, to the philosophy and ethics of modular equality. This corpus is sometimes called the Dok. The Dok is a pervasive and subtle influence, seldom explicitly referred to but widely known and often implicitly used as a shared cultural context. As the Emple-Dokcetics come into contact with more and more non-Emple-Dokcetic societies, various compilations and collections of the Dok have been produced.
>Emple-Dokcetic government is largely a consensus. Many decisions are simply made by millions of citizen-complexes acting in similar ways due to prevalent views, with no need for any decision process. For issues where wills and views are divided larger minds are formed by interlinking, exploring and debating the pros and cons internally before dissolving into consensus. The Emple-Dokcetics employ free markets, but as the agents blur the line between seller, buyer and government the effect is partially also a planned allocation of resources.
I always liked if the hivemind isn't just presented as some animalistic force, but with a intelligent mind behind it.
Bump
Where does Mars from a miracle of science fall? A group mind arising from a few billion people's minds being telepathically linked together, each one maintaining full individuality, though the group mind can speak through them if necessary. That's my favorite, with the slight change of individuals in the collective being able to jump into other members bodies if their skills are needed.
A mix between Consensus and Merged Hivemind.
Veeky Forums is more of a rat-king type deal.
Sauce?
Y
Bump
I really liked MorningLightMountain from Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga.
This weird overmind creature that had a finite amount of bodies it could control per brain cluster and made more clusters by merging drones. It was just fantastic. But I never got how the species propagated exactly in its earlier stages, I think it sent off a cluster of drones that then found some nice place and then merged for a new consciousness to form. Reading the depictions of the nuclear wasteland of a planet it then controlled for itself was just superb.
Fungoid Hive Minds that infect others and is infected by others. A mutative Hive Mind.
What kind of Hivemind are Slivers then?
They do have a Queen/King/Hivemaster but no generals.
CC and Merged for me
In a hierarch hive mind, what's the ideal span of control? How many subordinates should each member have?
Bump.
They are a Merged Mind, according to the chart.
In the heirarch hive mind are generals individuals who are swayed to serve their queen, or are they slaves as well, just stronger.
So the chart outlines 4 types of hive mind and there's a fair distinction between them but are there other types? What are they?
What are more examples of hiveminds?
I'm currently reading the forerunner series and loving the flood. I'd be up for reading comics or more books on hiveminds.
Dont if there are more, we should start placing types of hiveminds in OP categories: from ants and bees to zerg, nids, slivers and other fantasy races.
That's from the manga Magi. One of the villains has ben possing the body of various members of the royal family for centuries.
>I dislike most fictional hive-minds pretty much always requiring some kind of psychic component to instantly transmit thought between individuals, though. I get why it's necessary, but it doesn't really represent how actual eusocial animals works, and I personally want to avoid invoking "space magic" as an explanation whenever possible.
Ow, you just ruinned most of fantasy hivemind races :(
I like the hierarch hivemind.
Gg, op is on to the pope !
Can you identify the style of mind behind Christians.
Why does everyone assume merged mind style hiveminds always automatically mean it's a super genius? They may have near instantaneous transmission of data and information, but they can't necessarily "pool" their intelligence together. Each member could just be an "individual" that always acts in the interest of the hive. In fact, they may not even have a psychic or mind connection at all, just programmed or influenced to always act in the interest of the hive, similar to real insects.
Even if we argue those shouldn't count; where do zombies and such count in? Zombies don't tend to operate on a hivemind but they all work together and tend to spread infection as much as possible.
Well, in fantasy magic generally is a thing, so having a hivemind formed of telepathically linked individualsfits perfectly fine. It's magic, it doesn't need to work in real life.
But it bugs me when 90 % of SF hiveminds also work viat telepathic space-magic. Not just in settings like 40k, where space-magic (the Warp) is a major part of the setting lore, but even in settings that ostensibly take place in the real world but in the future if a hivemind appears it's has a 90 % chanse of being telepathic space-bugs.
The tyranid "overmind" is a Gestalt of all intelligent tyranids.
bump
Aren't geth more like dozens to hundreds of minds in one body that can also communicate with geth outside thier body
I don't get it what a consensus consciouness is, just people who act the same but are not actually connected?
That's consensus consciousness, not merged mind.
Everyone has the same subconsciousness.
A deep-space setting I'm currently playing in has a race of mechanical lifeforms that can link up to a "Central Mind" to disseminate information and receive orders, though each body is still a unique individual. A little looser than a typical hivemind, but I still think it's pretty neat. One of the current plot threads we're exploring is a new Central Mind with more direct control (closer to a standard hivemind) has sprung up, with the goal of eradicating organic life.
Would a corporation be a mix between Consensus Consciouness and Hierarchy?
What's that supposed to mean?
Everybody has the same "sense of self". You don't think of yourself as "the individual Jeff Skilling, who happens to be an appendage of Enron Corporation"--you think of yourself as "an appendage of Enron Corporation, who can be called Jeff Skilling for convenience but really isn't worthy of a name on his own".
I guess.
>Executives try to make it a hierarchy
>Shareholders try to make it a consensus consciousness
underrated post
Is there even a difference between consensus and merged minds? Seems a bit pedantic.
The latter is generally something like the Tyranids, where you have large amount of individually non-sapient beings that together form a sapient mind (Tyranids are kind off odd, though, in that they also act a lot like a hierarchical/overmind despite tehnically being a merged mind, as killing synapse creatures causes the lesser 'Nids to rever to nonsapient behaviour), while the former is individually sapient beings that are mentally linked.
What kind of mind is Bondrewd?
If I remember him right, he's an Overmind. He's one consciousness that can body-hop and duplicate itself, right?
I don't get the difference in frunction between overmind and cc
To me it seems like the only distinction between a consensus mind and a merged mind is highly dependent on the observer’s definition of sapience.
The way I see it, both are an emergent intelligence comprised of less-intelligent components.
I think so, but he doesn’t really have a main body.
Maybe the Tyranids as a whole operate via hierarchy, but the mind at the top is a merged consciousness created by all but the lowest life forms.
We understood that reference.