What is a superorganism?
Wikipedia definition:
A superorganism is a colony of individuals working together to produce a phenomenon governed by the community, the phenomenon including any activity "wanted by the colony" such as collecting food or choosing a new nesting site1. It is a sociobiological concept according to which a social organization, like a community, transcends the biological organisms which compose it.
Originally used to define the colonies of eusocial animals (ants, bees, termites), the concept of superorganism is also extrapolable to human society, it allows explanations particularly relevant to the social phenomena observed, in particular as regards the ecology and the helplessness of societies as regards the implementation of real measures allowing the safeguarding of the biosphere.
This notion also allows, through cybernetics, to bring a new look at phenomena such as suicide in our contemporary societies (which is rather awkwardly approached by psychiatry), as well as politics, economics, and social phenomena in general.
An interesting article from Jean Paul Baquiast On the question:
Are superorganisms endowed with consciousness?
Howard Bloom doesn't really question the consciousness skills that superorganisms might display. However, as soon as one is in the presence of a group of animals or men, one is tempted to lend it at least primitive forms of consciousness. Is it an anthropomorphic type of illusion? On the contrary, do societies not effectively have the possibility of maintaining collective consciousnesses more or less close to what individual consciousnesses are? We have seen (see Chapter 3) that the higher consciousness, almost exclusively (it seems) characterizing humans in society, was intimately linked to language. Primary consciousness is different. It is a property of the body in situation. It expresses the unity of the organic ego within the different external and internal perceptions that inform the nervous system. But it is not accompanied by self-awareness. It is found in more or less sophisticated forms in all animals (if not more widely still).
But human superorganisms are made up of men who are capable of language. They have the possibility of transmitting symbolic information enlightening the other members of the group on some of the contents of the primary consciousness. The enunciation of conscious content by a speaker leads to responses from his interlocutors, so that gradually mirrored exchanges are built up, which become more complex over time. We have previously indicated that the initial transmitter is led to become aware of its existence as an I, by assimilating to those to which it is addressed and which respond to it. The characteristic I of the higher consciousness would thus have been constructed during the exchange. You can see it in everyday life. The model of me around which my higher consciousness is organized is constantly built by the information I receive from the outside world. What my interlocutors tell me about myself, the models that third parties offer me and more generally everything that I see or read, I apply to myself. This is why memeticians are, as we will see, tempted to consider that the I is nothing other than a complex of memes or memeplexes, in permanent reconfiguration, thanks to which all of my references take on meaning. conscious. Can these mechanisms contribute to the birth of a collective consciousness which is not only made of a kind of average of individual consciousnesses?
Whether it is a bacterial colony, a swarm of bees, a pack of wolves or humans living in a territory to which they are attached, social super-organisms have a certain coherence. This makes it possible to analyze them as organisms instead of considering them as occasional groupings of isolated individuals. Everyone obeys complex social rules, most of which are still mysterious in the eyes of scientists. They are in any case not organisms comparable to that of an isolated animal, with its anatomical characters and its physiological processes increasingly identified by science. There is no reason, however, to deny them the ability to consciousness, at least to primary consciousness which seems inseparable from any organized biological constitution. But the bodily bases and neurological substrates of such primary consciousness are obviously not those which neurologists attribute to the primary consciousness of the individual animal or human organism. They must be sought on a case-by-case basis, this being all the more difficult since it is logical to postulate that the primary consciousness of a swarm of bees is not that (at least in the forms, if not in its logics of a human village community.
We could obviously avoid any difficulty by eliminating the hypothesis that such disparate super-organisms may have primary consciousnesses possibly comparable to that of man. But we would then miss out on the many opportunities to study and perhaps better begin to understand collective behaviors that would otherwise be inexplicable, such as panics. We would no doubt also deprive ourselves of the possibility of better understanding the primary human consciousness.
If we limit ourselves here only to human groups, can we make the hypothesis that studying them using the acquired knowledge of the studies of individual primary consciousness carried out by neuro-physiologists can bring different and more instructive elements than those provided by sociology or social psychology? Ranging from a single couple to all of humanity, these human groups are so varied that it seems difficult to observe some common substrates allowing the emergence of a collective primary consciousness. But there are certain areas where traditional sociology remains short of explanatory theories, such as the collective unconscious (1), the impulses of crowds ranging from aggression to adhesion without nuance, and many other phenomena which reveal the existence of a "physical" social body located in time and space. This body would be determined by factors other than the genetically programmed reflexes of individuals, but it would adopt well-defined states of which the supposed collective primary consciousness would be both the emanation and the coordinating agent.
Sociobiologists, as we will see, hypothesize that most collective unconscious behavior is caused by the genetic heritage of individuals. This would be the case, for example, with aggressiveness which obeys ancestral reflexes aimed at defending the territory. Geneticists, for their part, are now reluctant to make the link between a particular gene and a specific behavior, especially if it is not individual but collective. They suspect multiple relays which cannot be analyzed with current tools. Explaining a crowd reaction such as panic by the influence of genes controlling flight reflexes in individuals would be a bit quick. It would be like explaining an individual's flight reflex through the control system of one of his muscle groups. We must therefore seek a more global mechanism. Consequently, vast fields of investigation are now open, which will lead to better study how the primary consciousness manifests itself in individuals, animals included, then to investigate if such manifestations are found at the level of groups. An affirmative answer could suggest the existence of a true collective primary consciousness.
Extract from his book:"For a strong materialist principle" which I highly recommend reading! (Jean-Paul Bayol editions).
