> - Have you ever looked at a cloud of gnats?
>
> I mean, have you ever stopped what you are
>doing, observed the cloud, and studied the way
>that it moves, for at least several minutes? If
>you do get a chance, ask yourself why the cloud
>almost seem to act as if it is one decentralized
>creature, instead of a hundred independent ones.

I've heard it's actually easier to understand social and hive animals such as bees if you *do* think of them as making up one bigger organism rather than being a hundred or a thousand or 20,000 (in the case of bee hives) independant ones.

You could think of humans as a collection of millions if independant organisms (cells) working together (and this definition isn't just a completely arbitrary one--human cells pass every test for being "alive" and could easily be classed as organisms in their own right), but it's infinitely more useful to think of a human as one organism and the cells as pieces of that organism. Like a human cell, a honeybee cut off from the hive will soon die. It will continue to attempt to do its job to the best of its ability, but without the hive that job is meaningless.

So it may well be with gnats that thinking of a gnat swarm as one organism is much more useful than thinking of it as a collection of a thousand individual organisms. How do they communicate? How do they coordinate their movements? Well, how do our cells do it? Cells communicate and coodinate by passing chemicals, or electrical signals, or simply by being designed to react in a similar manner to certain stimulus (how do white blood cells know to swarm a harmful bacterium?)

>If our own brains are really conglomerations of
>neurons (which are cells, and individual
>organisms in their own right) - and these neurons
>send signals back and forth between each other -
>and this process forms the basis for our own
>human consciousness - then is it possible that
>each individual gnat is playing a similar role to
>that of a neuron? Does a gnat become part of
>something greater when it is a member of the
>cloud? How is free will impacted when a gnat
>joins a cloud?

It's entirely possible, but I don't think gnat swarms are "intelligent" in any meaningful way. However, the idea that a swarm of gnats is "smarter" than any individual gnat itself is makes sense, and even the idea that the whole is smarter than the sum of the parts--after all, a human is pretty "smart", but each individual cell isn't "smart" at all. Each individual cell shows zero human-level intelligence, yet the sum of the parts equals one organism with human-level intelligence, namely a human.

>
> - Have you ever wondered how a honeybee can
>explain the location of a flower by dancing in a
>figure 8?

The whole "six dimensional figure" thing seems a little misleading. My admitedly cursory research into this subject appears to indicate that the bees are using other variables such as local magnetic field and angle of the sun and things like that, and the result is something that can be interpreted as a six-dimensional graph. But there doesn't seem to be any indication that the bees actually see or experience extra spatial dimensions beyond the normal three we're used to.

You could plot a "six dimensional" graph of the location of something using the three spatial dimensions, the temporal dimension (time), and two other varibles (such as local magnetic field strength, temperature, ambient noise level, or really anything you're equiped to measure that doesn't change haphazardly or too quickly) that would help you zero in on the object. So you could say "Leave the house, go straight to the end of the block (first dimension), turn right and go another block(second dimension), enter the building there and go upstairs to the third floor lobby (third dimension). At ten o'clock (temporal dimension), the UPS guy will arrive. You'll know he's the right guy because he smells bad (first variable) and your package will be cold from being frozen (second variable)" to help a friend zero-in on a frozen pizza you shipped him overnight.


> - Have you ever worked in a fast-food
>restaurant?

You can ask a lot of nurses and doctors, and many of them will tell you more babies are born at the full moon than at any other time, even though no scientific study has ever shown a real correlation. It's selective memory. You remember the rushes and not the times when you got two customers every ten minutes in a steady stream. Statistically, you're GOING to see clusters of customers, and times when you get no customers. It's not people being psychic, it's just probability and statistics.

-- Dave