UniVerses

This awesome photograph appeared on NASA APOD, showing the milky way: our spiral galaxy

Swarm Intelligence

Each of us was once a single cell

incapable of cogency or thought.

But when our neurons link and synapse gel

we learn to process what we see, and talk.

We’re nothing but a hive of cells, a swarm

whose weird connections form intelligence,

our personality, our wit and charm.

What weaves ideas? How do we make sense?

What force unites the cells within our mind

with knowledge, insights, analytic skill?

Subliminally resonances combine

and network powers inexplicable.

A trillion neural circuits interact

enabling us to dream in the abstract.

What amazing things we have learned in the past hundred years! Perhaps we will begin to understand how highly complex systems transcend their separare parts to form a system whose behavior becomes a higher level being. 

I can think of no better example than you. You're a colony of cells not one of which has a shred of intelligence. Yet some force evolved out of the interactions between all these microscopic cells created a mind that composes thoughts, interprets the world, learns and teeachs.

Thinking is a collaboration of cells that cannot conceive by themselves. That cohesiveness defies the laws of physics, which means that there is a new dimension to the laws we know.

Life is another enigma that shows that the complex system of organic and inorganic moledules can combine to create an organism, a cell, that has transcended its constituents.

We can observe the system of molecules that create a living cell, and we can see the system of cells that make a sentient being. Perhaps there is an even higher level system of which we are a small part. A system that transcends our sun and its neighbors to create an even more sublime intelligence. We are part of it, and yet we cannot conceive of it, any more than one of our cells can know the higher order being it helps create.