does hive mind belong in the ethos category?

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wurmkrank

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I've been thinking about how the hive mind ethos doesn't actually make sense as an ethos. An empires ethos tells us (roughly) what the values of an empire are. So why can't a hive mind also have an ethos? We've seen examples of hive minds in science fiction and its relativly easy to assign an ethos to those hive minds. Take for example the Borg, clearly a fanatic materialist/(I would argue xenophile) hive mind.
So wouldn't it be more accurate that the hive mind would only be a government and trait?
 

Fourthspartan56

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I disagree, it replaces ethos so it makes perfect sense right in the middle of ethos wheel.
 

BlackUmbrellas

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The entire point of the "Hive Mind Ethos" is that it's a sort of clever hack to make a hive mind possible given the upcoming changes to how Ethos and Factions work re: your POPs. The "Hive Mind" Ethos is only available to Hive Mind species and locks you into the Hive Mind government, allowing you to run an empire in which all your POPs share the exact same desires, something otherwise impossible within the new system.
 

DGriffy

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I think it generally makes sense. It would be hard to implement it any other way within the gameplay.

I also have some more philosophical thoughts on it though:

One could ascribe ethoses to various hive minds in fiction but I've always seen the ethoses in Stellaris as values, not descriptions. They are things the society/government/people in question consciously aspires to. I think it is hard to imagine a hive mind that evolved naturally aspiring to these values. There are a few reasons for this and they're all tied to the role of language in providing a space for communicating the struggle between these values.

A naturally evolved hive mind would have no need of language, in the broadest sense – the manipulation of symbols to attempt to communicate meaning. They don't experience alienation from other people in the way that we do. I use these letters to talk here because I cannot know what is in your mind, and you cannot know what is in mine. A hive always knows what it thinks.

Additionally these ethoses are based on one of the fundamental structures of our text-based cultures: Binaries. Meaning in language is predicated on a series of relatives, often binary at the base. In systems of meaning A = A because A ≠ B. For a concrete example, Militarist is functionally the same as saying 'not pacifist'. While other positions exist as a signifier it attempts to be everything its other isn't. Accordingly, a society can only be dominated by people aspiring to be militarist if pacifists exist, if pacifism is an intelligible position within a symbolic system predicated on the alienation of one from the other. A system of discourses (by which I mean patterns of knowledges) that values Militarism can only exist through denigrating Pacifism, and for this to be the case there must be an irresolvable gap between the people holding these positions.

No such gap can exist between the embodied positions of a hive. They have no Other within their own culture. As a result it is hard to imagine this kind of struggle going on in the hive minds Stellaris seems to want to portray. In a species that evolved as a single mind, and as the sole intelligent culture of its planet there would be no ideological struggle, it would be nearly impossible for them to conceive of themselves in the terms given in the ethoses. They're too alien. The Geth could manage it but they're a rather odd example... a sort of bottom-up hive formed of overlapping contingent networks rather than a fundamental link. Additionally the Geth are anomalous because they are software made by a non-hive mind species. They carry the biases and some of the situated knowledge of their creators to some extent. They are a textual culture because they were designed to be understood by a textual culture. An evolved hive has had no such considerations built into its development.

It is possible that a hive could come to see itself through these ethoses via its interaction with other cultures once it is spaceborne, but I think that implies a structural compatibility between the psychology of hives and other species that may not exist. Once learning to speak – in order to try to overcome their alienation from other species – they become their own master signifier, their own anchor of meaning, everything would be processed through the knowledge that they are a hive. They would now have an other but a radically external Other. While Militarism is forever tainted by an element of Pacifism within it, the hive contains nothing of other species within it – therefore the opposition it constructs isn't textual.

In other words, an ethos is an aspiration, an aspiration is an image we have of what we want to be. The desire to do this is in part the result of the alienation that is partially the result of, and partially the cause of, language. We have to imagine others because we cannot know them (and therefore need language to communicate), and we have to have an imaginary version of ourselves because we cannot know the whole of our self (because language is never our own, it places a piece of other within us, reproducing our alienation with other within ourselves).

The hive has no other and so needs no language, as a result it always knows itself and so it has no reason to imagine itself as anything other than what it already is. When it does have to learn language it either finds some way of maintaining its position, retaining its radical distance from other species' somehow. Or the experience of learning to communicate with other species' is highly traumatic potentially leading to a psychotic break caused by the breakdown of its Self. The latter option would obviously be inconvenient for gameplay :p.
 

PAnZuRiEL

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In systems of meaning A = A because A ≠ B. For a concrete example, Militarist is functionally the same as saying 'not pacifist'.
Both of these statements are wrong. A = A is an inherently true tautology, it's not predicated on A ≠ B at all. Even if A = B is true, A = A is still true. And furthermore, ethics in Stellaris are clearly not established in such a way that "militarist" means "not pacifist", because it's possible to be neither militarist nor pacifist.

A hive mind is effectively a single individual, and still capable of interacting with other individuals -- other species. Having something that it values that sets it apart from other species makes sense. Considering that in Stellaris, all pops can have exactly one ethos, I think it would make sense for the Hive Mind "ethos" to cost 2 ethic points rather than 3, and for all pops in the hive mind to always have the remaining ethic you select.
 

BrokenSky

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I disagree that it should replace ethos completely, rather I feel like the hive mind should have an ethos (similar to how pops have one) so it should take 2 points, not 3. They might interact slightly differently with ethics compared to other nations though?
 

BlackUmbrellas

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A hive mind is effectively a single individual, and still capable of interacting with other individuals -- other species. Having something that it values that sets it apart from other species makes sense. Considering that in Stellaris, all pops can have exactly one ethos, I think it would make sense for the Hive Mind "ethos" to cost 2 ethic points rather than 3, and for all pops in the hive mind to always have the remaining ethic you select.
Unfortunately for your argument, Hive Minds cannot interact with other individuals directly at all- hence when Hive Minds auto-purge non-Hivemind POPs they come into control of. The idea of treating individuals like individuals is alien to them, they only really can interact on the level of entire species (hence why they're still able to do diplomacy with other empires, presumably).
 
Last edited:

PAnZuRiEL

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Unfortunately for your argument, Hive Minds cannot interact with other individuals directly at all- hence when Hive Minds auto-purge non-Hivemind POPs they come into control of.
Yes. Currently. That doesn't mean I have to like it or think it makes sense, and I don't. I don't think there's any reason to think that a hive mind would be unable to learn that other species are not hive minds, and treat them as individuals, as long as the central directive consciousness of the hive has an ego. And if it didn't have an ego, it wouldn't be able to tell the difference between itself and things that are not itself, so it's hard to see how it could engage in any form of diplomacy at all.

But ethos and factions and coexistence are one thing.

What I really intensely dislike about hive minds is that the psionic and cybernetic ascension paths are locked off to them, even though both of them are much more plausible ways of constructing a hive mind than the genetic path. Where's my machine consciousness???
 

dying0d

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There are many sci-fi fi hive minds and the seemingly fall into 2 archetyprs: unitarian species, that everybody assumes akin to the Borghese etc, and collective species akin to the Geth of mass effect, who are individuals that communicate at light speed, but are always working toward a singular goal, ie their perceptible will is unified.

In neither case are external populaces excluded, the Geth occupy a region and battle against others for resources and survival, the Borghese wish to unify the galaxy under their model. Very different motivations and reasons behind them.

As far as lacking ethos, since Sci fi generally displays them as goal oriented, ie the bugs from starship troopers wanting to eradicate humans because the humans struck first, the Borg wishing a unified species collective, the Geth wanting to survive and thrive like every other race(they created legion to try and bridge the disconnect between the species and themselves) they all strive to achieve that goal in very similar fashion
 

Te. Kenzo

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Maybe we should be able to made flavoured hive minds...

Hive-mind + materialistic (syntethic)
Hive mind + xenophile (can live with the xenos)

and so on

But I understand what paradox is doing, I like it, but i have to say that is only a particoular flavour of hive mind, an absolute, a some kind of blob, I want to play it. (not very good for 90% of the race portrait in the game)
 

smjjames

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Maybe we should be able to made flavoured hive minds...

Hive-mind + materialistic (syntethic)
Hive mind + xenophile (can live with the xenos)

and so on

But I understand what paradox is doing, I like it, but i have to say that is only a particoular flavour of hive mind, an absolute, a some kind of blob, I want to play it. (not very good for 90% of the race portrait in the game)

Not sure how it's not very good for 90% of the race portraits in the game?
 

smjjames

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I mean... is only a little thought not very important... the portrait are about individuals with no clue about hive mind species, with the exception of fungus and that dark thing on mammal.

So you're saying that the arthropoid/insectoid races are no good for hiveminds? Um, ants, bees, and termites? Though those are eusocial and not quite the hiveminds of Sci-Fi.
 

wurmkrank

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Unfortunately for your argument, Hive Minds cannot interact with other individuals directly at all- hence when Hive Minds auto-purge non-Hivemind POPs they come into control of. The idea of treating individuals like individuals is alien to them, they only really can interact on the level of entire species (hence why they're still able to do diplomacy with other empires, presumably).
It doesn't make sense to say that they can't interact with individuals and they can enter into diplomacy. I also don't think they would have a hard time realising that each individual unit of the other species isn't connected to its other units. They would see it as alien for sure but functionally it wouldn't make diplomacy difficult.
 

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Any sort of hive mind would have encountered other minds of some form - if nothing else ants have rival ant colonies and the like, and Borg-like creatures have absorbed somebody at some point. Diplomacy is not inherently impossible for a hive mind.
 

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Any sort of hive mind would have encountered other minds of some form - if nothing else ants have rival ant colonies and the like, and Borg-like creatures have absorbed somebody at some point. Diplomacy is not inherently impossible for a hive mind.
I suppose it depends on if the hive mind was connected to every organism on the planet it evolved on. When you really think about it, unless a hive mind is the result of artificial technology, it would have to of been there since the first organism. Or else there would be many individuals in a species and then all of a sudden there wouldn't. That would be weird.
 

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I suppose it depends on if the hive mind was connected to every organism on the planet it evolved on. When you really think about it, unless a hive mind is the result of artificial technology, it would have to of been there since the first organism. Or else there would be many individuals in a species and then all of a sudden there wouldn't. That would be weird.

There are a bunch of different plausible scenarios for a planetary hive mind, but the point is that at least *most* of them would have encountered some form of 'other' before. The description posted on the other thread suggests a take-over scenario in which it already understands conscious actors, anyway, so sort of moot.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C5QZ4iBWEAA07ig.jpg:large
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C5QZ4iBWEAA07ig.jpg:large