Holy shit that was amazing O.o

Saw that before. I wouldn't say collective consensus, but a whole bunch of nearly identical critters which share nearly all of their DNA. They aren't intelligently directed, it's primarily instinct evolved over time.

Practically one individual with many fingers, all distributively controlled by the same program.

Yeah, "consensus" probably implies too much rational thought and an intent to agree. They're more like birds, flocking together or flying in a V because that's the behavior that emerges from their relatively simple individual impulses.

I think another example would be one layer further down. In humans, billions of individual simple life forms sharing the same program with a fair amount of communication generate something that at least resembles rational thought.

http://bpp.sourceforge.net/pounds.html

Think of life as programs. Most life is done at the first level, bacteria, etc.

Most multicelled life has a preprocessor # step where they have components that are programmed, then another layer that those programs generate.

Those ants are ## lifeforms, two steps of preprocessor to generate their result.

You could argue that human society is a ## construct of our DNA as well. 6 billion copies of the # program running with a whole lot of external storage.

I like to play with this stuff, but I still think that free will and freedom are important. I think that our DNA won't allow a society to remain operational indefinitely if it doesn't respect those things.

That's like, whoa.