The Hive Mind

I seem to start all my posts with a personal anecdote, and whatever our universe really is, it seems keen to ensure that this post is no exception. To explain, the owners of the converted townhouse in which I live employ a maintenance worker, who has something of a reputation for sticking his nose in where it’s neither welcome nor invited. Other residents have reported minor thefts, items that mysteriously move from one location to another in their absence, and so on. In effect, he’s regarded as a bit of a snoop. These are, I must stress, merely rumours. I myself have never had any cause for concern. That said, given the subject matter of this post, and the rumours about the individual concerned, I had to restrain myself from laughing out loud when I bumped into him just a few moments ago. I was making my way to the local Co-Op again (oh how we love those who ‘co-operate’) to buy some of life’s bare necessities (tobacco and chocolate) when I turned the corner to see him large as life and sporting a ‘CIA’ baseball cap.

In recent posts, I explored connections between the Nazis and information technology and came to the conclusion that our technologies are uncovering an existing interconnected ‘reality’ rather than creating one. In other words, that we ourselves are a technology, individual nodes that access a shared memory space and form part of a single system. Hence our tendency to eat and drink one another’s thoughts. Most recently, this idea manifested itself in a comment I left over at Dr. Cooper’s Lab. Or maybe it’s Dr. Cooper-ative’s Lab. In any case, it seems that others predicted the subject matter of this post in advance, in relation to a suicide at Apple’s campus in Cupertino. If Doc is reading this then I hope he doesn’t interpret my post as a personal slight. I’m using it as an example only because it serves to demonstrate that our zany 3D ‘reality’ makes a mockery of terms such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’.

Cooper thought he was acting on instructions 'from above', when all along he was just following a sequence of programmed instructions determined for him in advance.

Having said that, it would appear that Cooper and I have some form of historical connection. As I’ve said before, Interstellar has significance for me in relation to my personal journey down the rabbit hole. Moreover, in a recent post on my other blog, I suggested that we need to ‘Titan up security at The Lab’. The subject matter of this post was cloning, controlled or directed evolution, and controlled and directed behaviour or ‘bee-hive-iour’.

In the above case, the lab in question exists in Terry Gilliam’s film 12 Monkeys, now remade as a TV series. Here, a maniacal biochemist releases a deadly virus, decimating the human population. The survivors, who are forced to retreat underground to escape the virus and the resulting ‘nuclear winter’ environment, send a criminal named Cole back in time to detect the source of the outbreak, in the hope that a cure can be found. Like Cooper in Interstellar, Cole is trying to ‘save the world’. In Cole’s case, he accepts his ‘mission’ in the belief that his ‘good deed’ or good ‘bee-hive-iour’ will result in the remission of sin, a formal pardon that will wipe his slate clean.

Oddly enough, on another blog I follow a very similar theme has emerged.

Before double glazing, we all had at least one draughty window. Every winter as a child I would play with the frost on the inside of the windows in the morning. Coal fires weren’t automatic. Someone had to get up, build the fire and light it. Until then, the house was pretty damn cold. We had thick blankets and thick pullovers. We survived, thought nothing of it because that was just the way life was. Coal fires don’t light themselves.

To put this in perspective, I need to point out that Doc’s post refers to bees on several occasions, as does my comment. Doc believes there’s a spiritual dimension to what we see ‘out there’, and that in order to combat the ‘forces of darkness’ we must breed, raise, and train children to be ‘soldiers of the light’. After all, providing the Queen with Royal Jelly is what we’re programmed to do and it is ‘good’ to obey our programming. By contrast, I argued that light and dark are simply two sides of the same coin, part of a whole. Ultimately, they cancel one another out. There is neither light nor dark only what ‘is’, and what we know about the ‘is’ is that it is fundamentally unreal. It is everything and yet nothing at all. The ‘it’ in question is IT, and IT is not a network of transistors in black boxes but billions of neurones inside billions of brains.

Anyone even remotely aware of what’s happening ‘out there’ will be aware of the curious phenomenon whereby we all seem to be reading one another’s thoughts. Someone writes a blog post or makes a comment to find that someone else has been thinking exactly the same thing. What does this tell us about our ‘reality’ except that we are all interconnected, and that, on some level at least, we are not isolated individual minds but part of a collective or ‘hive mind’ with access to a shared memory space? Prior to the development of the computer and the internet things just didn’t happen quickly enough for us to see these interconnections. Today, as we become self-publishers who move and share information at light speed, they are evident to those whose eyes and ears have been attuned to what’s hidden in plain sight.

The following article is a prime example. In my comment to Doc, I referred to our ‘reality’ as a massive interactive neural network. Note the ‘spiritual’ nature of the article and the term ‘gargantuan’. It’s no coincidence that Gargantua is the name of the black hole (they’re very massive by the way) in Interstellar.

Similarly, anyone familiar with a certain snack-loving canine should be able to put two and two together and work out who this other bee-related article relates to. It too refers to ‘the lab’, in addition to another well-known figure from the Merovee universe.

Mack, a 2-year-old yellow Lab, joined the team last fall to help his mom, chief apiary inspector Cybil Preston, inspect beehives for American foulbrood — AFB — a highly contagious bacterial disease that infects honeybee brood and, eventually, kills the colony…

“Maryland has a thriving beekeeping industry, and most of our beekeepers have thousands of hives that travel from state to state for pollination,” explains Preston. “It’s our job to make sure that infected hives don’t cross state lines.”

So what exactly do these articles amount to? How can persons unknown to us know what we’re thinking and discussing, sometimes in advance of us actually doing the thinking and discussing? The answer is this: as ‘participants’ in a massive interactive neural network our thoughts and discussions (our ‘shared memory’) are available to other participants and manifest themselves in their thoughts and discussions. More specifically still, when we analyse the articles in detail it becomes apparent that they are, in effect, the system’s version of intelligence briefings. In this sense, they represent the system assimilating information pertaining to its participants.

Sounds barking mad? Consider the nature of the global digital brain we’ve built around us. It too is a whole composed of billions of interconnected nodes we call devices. There are no obvious physical connections between many of these devices, which share information in a way that would have seemed like magic a century ago. The software powering these devices ‘thinks’ in terms of parent/child relationships and ‘inheritance’ between the two. Variables are stored in physical address spaces. Data and code are assigned to classes and structures, are given properties and values, and can be made private or public. Global environment constants and variables can be assigned for the system as a whole. Similarly, the digital brain’s memory is the relational database, which establishes links between data sets by using joins and unions.

As I write this, I’ve just loaded Facebook to find this at the top of the page.

I’ve previously referred to this system as The Score. It seems to operate much like a movie or sound file. If we picture ourselves as actors within the movie, events will appear to happen in a sequential fashion. Yet viewed from the outside, any portion of the file can be randomly accessed. Furthermore, although we might see the file as a single ‘physical’ entity on-screen, it exists only as a collection of magnetic pulses stored as memory on a hard drive, and these magnetic pulses aren’t stored in a sequential fashion either. Rather, a single file can exist as multiple clusters or segments across a hard drive, and a file allocation system pulls all the pieces together. In other words, a file can be stored in a variety of different physical locations or spaces, and as we know from our own investigations into the nature of this ‘reality’, space and time exist as space-time. Movement in space equates to movement in time.

In my view, this explains the seemingly impossible situation described above, whereby someone can pen an article containing details about a comment I’ve yet to write. My own journey of discovery has uncovered many examples where information about myself and others is encoded in articles, books, and films produced decades ago. Doc’s own article demonstrates the point by extracting information about myself in the ‘present’ from articles about a historical figure from several centuries ago. From our perspective in linear time, the mind wants to reject this as a logical impossibility. Yet when we ‘think outside the box’ of the movie frame, it becomes apparent that we are literally not ourselves, in the sense that we are not who we appear to be here in the non-existent ‘present’. We are in fact dotted about all over space-time.

The key issue here is memory and identity. This is a theme explored in Interstellar (Cooper didn’t realise whose orders he was following) and many other books and films: Bladerunner, Memento, The Matrix, Dark City, The 13th Floor, Fight Club, and so on.

The ‘ticking time bomb’ for which there is no Cure.

In September British billionaire John Caudwell (left) announced that his 20-year-old son Rufus (right), an aspiring musician and his ex-wife and daughters have all been diagnosed with the potentially fatal disease. Mr Caudwell believes that the disease is endemic, arguing that if an entire family like his can be infected, the disease must be both sexually transmitted and passed from mother to child.

The ‘infection’ is a virus and the virus is ‘in the Lab(rador)’. To be more accurate, the ‘virus’ is one of these.

In computer terms, a tapeworm is a name for a specific type of invasive virus. On the one hand, this is a massive joke at my expense: I used to have a morbid fear of intestinal parasites. On the other, a tapeworm grows by continually adding fresh segments to itself, and this is a perfect analogy for the way the system appears to operate. Regular contributors on Merovee will no doubt remember me posting multiple comments about the tape from Diamonds Are For Ever. It’s a cheeky little number…

The subject ‘reared its head’ for me only yesterday.

And reminded me of this article about the ‘huge boost’ in ‘cassette sales’…

It’s an interesting headline. The term ‘roll back’ is used in IT to refer to a process of ‘rolling back’ changes made to a computer system, to restore it to an earlier state. As McLuhan always said, fashion is the current-see or currency. To ‘fashion’ is to create and the memories stored on a computer’s hard drive are representations of different voltages. Also, ‘cassette’ gives us a variety of different terms, all of which appear in Doc’s article and my reply to him.

The demonic Christ in Car. Go along for a ride and you’re gonna BURN.

The Ancient Egyptian Ka, the ‘divine spark plug’.

Kaa the Serpent, the ‘Hissed-Oracle’, and our guided evolutionary journey to the urban jungle and the new digital frontier.

And let’s not forget this guy. Maybe he’s just misunderstood?

The message appears to be that the ‘infection’ – the ‘virus’ – grows by continually adding ‘segments’ to itself and is passed on from mother to child. Whatever can that mean I wonder?

What I take from all this is best summed up by Gargantua and two other films.

As Dr Brand said in Interstellar, the ‘problem’ is ‘gravity’…why so Sirius? Maybe life really was made for ‘shopping’?

In our ‘massive interactive neural network’, we’re all Agents of The Program, or rather we’re Software Agents, commonly referred to as a ‘bot’.

I sometimes wonder if there’s a more profound truth hidden in all this. Maybe The Joker is the ‘invasive virus’ that has re-written our system files and dispersed us all over the place, causing us to forget who we truly are? Maybe we’re all walking the time loop tapeworm as a consequence?

So, are we ‘in the shit’ or is it all just a massive joke telling us that everything is, and always has been, OK? That we just need to ‘lighten up’ and enjoy the ride? My money is on the latter, and I’ve been given a money back guarantee…

Facebook is telling me it’ll be amazing…

So let’s forget our programming and stop bee-hive-iouring like bots. As Frank observed over on Merovee, the difference between us and bots is that we tick all the boxes. He was unwittingly referring to the latest ‘Captcha’ systems designed to distinguish humans from bots.

Maybe this digital hell can be fun. Maybe we can do whatever the hell we want, and if that includes tickling the boxes and stroking the purple light sabres then so bee it. 😉