bookofjustice:
It’s not… very clear? The basic explanation of geth in the codex is that they’re pretty much like Erythro – one geth alone is only slightly smarter than a brick, but ten geth networked together are like a small brain, and a thousand or a million geth are more smarterer. (Possibly exponentially, but I get picky about the definition of “exponentially”. ^_^)
But then you have the fact that when geth talk about themselves they use “this unit” for “I”, suggesting some sort of concept of individuality. You’ve got the story of the long-ago geth who asked its quarian overseer, “Does this unit have a soul?”, freaking out the overseer and the rest of the quarians with the realization that they’d crossed the line to self-aware AI life from really advanced VIs (example of the latter: Avina with her “I am not programmed to respond in that area, my code is limited to information and simple interaction simulations”).
And then you have Legion in ME2, who’s stated to be a thousand-odd geth “runtimes” walking around in a single high-powered body, but who still refers to itself as “this unit” and reports on the consensus decisions of its… internal geth? idek… as if it’s one person delegated to speak, like a jury foreman or something. (I mean, maybe it is, I wouldn’t be surprised if Legion-as-a-multiple-system decided to have only one personality front while talking to organics for convenience. But there’s never any hint in-game that there are other personalities associated with the other runtimes.)
And then in ME3 the Reapers give the geth code upgrades to try and help them wipe out the quarians or something, and Legion gives you a little holo-PowerPoint on how a single geth with these upgrades is smarter than ten networked geth were before; Legion specifically says at that point “I find this growth beautiful, indicative of life”. Then if you broker peace on Rannoch, Legion will try to re-upload the upgrades to the rest of the geth (they were formerly being continually broadcast from the Reaper on Rannoch, uploading and downloading in ME3 are just intensely weird okay), then it’ll say “Copying code insufficient, direct personality dissemination required”, and it’ll disseminate its runtimes to the rest of the geth collective, dying in the process in order to bring the geth “true sentience”.
I am so not up on classic skiffy shit. ;P Hell, I hadn’t even heard of “hive mind” referring exclusively to Borg-type things before – I had it in my head that it also refers to networked “brains” like Erythro. And I’m also not very well up on multiple systems or… lots of stuff. I’d be really interested in any input you might have about the geth, how you’d interpret them from what I’ve said here (bearing in mind that everything, especially ME3, can be changed if the new idea works better).
Well, I don’t know if my definition of “hive mind” is the definition, but it seems to me that any definition of “hive mind” broad enough that a single, ordinary human would qualify is too broad to be useful.
Now that I think about it, I guess you could define a “hive mind” as being composed of pieces capable of independent life rather than intelligence, which would cover Erythro (whose microbes could continue to go about their microbial lives if their connections were severed) but not a human*. Maybe that’s what the Troper was thinking.
It’s interesting that you mention multiple systems, though, because I think maybe that’s why I place more emphasis on consciousness than life in my sense of what “hive mind” means. At a relatively early age (thirteen, which is before I heard of and later read Nemesis), I encountered stuff about multiplicity, and notably grey-area stuff like blurring and median systems. When you’ve talked with both a hive entity (when they’re blurry) and the entity’s individual components (when they’re not blurry)–components that are full people in themselves but only have one body between them, capable of thinking independently but not living independently–I suppose you end up with a definition like mine.
So…hmm. I take it from the fact that Legion’s dissemination was able to carry the upgrades that Legion had the upgrades, and that would indicate that–regardless of whether or not they were before–Legion’s individual runtimes were sapient? I’m not sure if scattering would really count as dying, in that case…if they’re capable of individual consciousness but also of a single networked one, whether it’s dying probably depends on how they view themselves, really. If they think of themselves as primarily a hive entity with the option to operate as independent runtimes, or as primarily independent runtimes with the option to operate as a hive entity. Neither conception would be wrong; it’s up to them to decide which framework they use.
*Well, maybe not a human. Not the brain part, anyway. It remains to be seen how big a role a human’s microbes play.
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Brinens and Things 