Could I hope for swarm intelligence to lead to collective consciousness?

I recently decided to revisit an older scenario I came up with, Ant-hill world, but I have been hitting roadblocks, both old and new. One of the bigger roadblocks is the evolution of such an odd multiple bodied animal.

On of my current thoughts are related to Swarm intellegence, which is the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems, typically consisting of a population of simple agents interacting locally with one another and with their environment, often through pre-programmed instinct. The agents follow very simple rules, and although there is no centralized control structure dictating how individual agents should behave, local, and to a certain degree random, interactions between such agents lead to the emergence of "intelligent" global behavior, unknown to the individual agents. One of the best known examples of Swarm Intelligence are Ant Colonies.

My hope is that these swarms evolve into a collective consciousness, the theoretical perfect organism. The only real problem lies in the fact that the real world equivalent of a collective consciousness can only be found in very simple organisms. After reading a little for into ant behavior and discovering Swarm Intelligence, I have a new hope.

Is it possible for the Swarm intelligence of ant colonies to advance into a kind of single collective mind? If this is possible, what evolutionary pressure would support this?

posted about 8 years ago

Uncle Tres‭

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