In the TV series Pluribus, scientists receive a coded message from space that ends up being a formula for a virus like substance that infects people upon contact. Within a short time nearly all of mankind is infected with a weird hive mind that both keeps people in constant telepathic contact with one another and suppresses individuality. The infected people talk as one voice and appear to be happy and considerate, not willing to harm any living things or the immune individuals who resisted the infection.
As a parapsychology journalist, I couldn’t help but compare that to the actual science. How does this scenario of all of mankind merging its consciousness into a single mind and how does it stack up against what we know of psychic ability and biology? Is it even possible to do something like this?
Let’s get into it:
The scenario given to us in this show necessitates a universe where consciousness is fundamental to reality because telepathy doesn’t exist in a material universe. While the show suggests that EM fields are responsible for the connection, this is a physical impossibility. The human body doesn’t emit waves strong enough to be received over many miles; only telepathy can serve this function because of its non local nature. A conscious universe also adds some dimensions to the telepathy that the show doesn’t and probably never will cover. This also requires the brain to operate as a filter of consciousness, not as a generator of it.
The Brain is Wired for Telepathy
It’s entirely conceivable that the brain could be wired for this kind of massive increase in telepathy. Counterintuitively, you don’t enhance parts of the brain to do this, you suppress them. Psychedelics do this, there are studies of people with specific brain damage and researchers have also induced temporary suppression of the left medial middle frontal lobe and that has been shown to increase psychic ability. But all this comes with serious caveats, which I will address later.
Since the series describes the conversion as reversible, we know that the virus thingy is suppressing, not destroying, that part of the brain. Since psychedelics already do something like this, it’s not entirely out of the question for some sci fi engineering feat to pull this off. The virus thingy also leaves the infected unable to cope with strong emotions. This is a realistic effect of increasing psychic ability. The virus thingy is massively reducing some filtering that the mind normally does, and it could conceivably have a side effect of removing the filtering (aka shielding) that we do with other people when they have strong unpleasant emotions, which could explain the hive’s strong reaction to Carol’s anger and pain.
Pluribus Veers Off into Sci Fi
When it comes to completely suppressing the personalities of all these people and disconnecting their consciousness from their bodies while also enhancing their psychic ability, that’s where things veer off into Sci Fi magic. Humans aren’t designed to operate with a hive mind like termites or bees. (In termites this is called Swarm Cognition. Some informal experiments suggest a psychic connection.) There are very few different types of hive minds in nature and all of those species survive by having a lot of different hives. Most insects, reptiles, birds, fish and mammals are hard wired to have individual agency which means that it’s a fundamental part of the wiring of the minds of most creatures. Hives are a different evolutionary track entirely. The Pluribus virus thingy would have no ancient part of the mind to alter. There’s never been anything there to tinker with.
In the show, the Hive members act like people with individual agency while not actually having it. They retain the memories and abilities of people who are disconnected from their bodies. According to theories where consciousness is fundamental to reality, the brain acts as a filter which means that the hive mind is using billions of consciousness filters, all with quite a bit of variety, as its input and somehow channeling this into a single overarching mind that processes all of it into a single thought pattern. This bit of sci fi magic reminds me of a quote from Time Magazine when Michael Okuda was asked how Heisenberg Compensators worked on Star Trek. He replied, “Very well, thank you.” It’s the same sort of thing on Pluribus.
This is a TV show though, and these things are absolutely allowed because the objective isn’t perfect scientific accuracy, it’s entertainment. What the show accomplishes is that it allows us to see science from a different angle by asking the question, “What if?” And then follow it up with the question, “Is this even possible?” And we can then have a look at what would happen in real life if something like the virus in Pluribus actually did exist and this is where it gets interesting.
Enhanced Connectedness and Telepathy
Does giving people extreme telepathy greatly enhance their feelings of connectedness? Are those things related? Is it joyful? There are people who have had near death experiences and others who have had intense psychedelic experiences who report back these types of experiences and feelings. There are also scientific theories such as Morphic Resonance that explore collective consciousness and experiments that show effects of collective consciousness. The show is not pulling this stuff out of thin air. But people also come back from these experiences with their individual agency completely intact.
The reality of kludging a hive mind onto a human brain is that it would never work as flawlessly as it does on the show if it could be done at all. As I mentioned earlier, humans have no built-in biological mechanism to support that kind of suppression of self within a greater consciousness, and we would therefore expect all sorts of weird reactions to it because a substantial number of people would never completely disassociate from their bodies.
Our consciousness and our bodies are arguably fine tuned for each other and some of the individuals that make up the collective would almost certainly resist the suppression of their agency. This would probably occur without outside assistance.
The show does a good job of showing the downsides of the entire human race acting with one (very passive aggressive) mind. The fate of the entire human race in Pluribus depends on a mind with 100% intelligence and 0% wisdom. (An interesting choice by the showrunners. The Hive cannot harm any living thing. As all creatures require the consumption of things that live or lived to survive, this poses the problem of starvation in the show.)
The Wisdom Problem in Pluribus
It is a problem that people with agency would easily solve, but the Hive mind does not seem to be able to manage it. Wisdom is a holistic, right-brained type of intelligence; it requires the ability to take a step back and see the big picture, weigh priorities and make hard decisions. The Hive mind however, can’t refuse any request from the uninfected no matter how destructive, leading to the conclusion that it can’t use the collective wisdom of the entire human race to perform basic reasoning tasks.
Perhaps the show is deliberately demonstrating a serious drawback of removing consciousness from it’s tether to individual bodies. Or perhaps this collection of individual minds cannot cope with hearing everyone and feeling everything all at once. That is a known problem of connectedness. While a lot of people seek out feelings of overwhelming connectedness, there are a not an insignificant number of people out there struggling to turn it off.
The hive mind is necessarily made up of the minds of all of humanity because otherwise it would not have access to everyone’s memories, experience and expertise. The people are still “in there” so to speak, so it stands to reason that they are going to react in different ways to being part of the Hive.
Now I finally come back to the problem of having truly strong telepathic ability: it comes with some very interesting side effects. Telepathy has no material basis; it is not a signal like EM waves. It appears to be instantaneous and does not appear to be affected by distance or obstructions. This is why current theories are consciousness, not material based. It demonstrates a deeper reality beyond time and space where information, not objects, are fundamental to reality. The reason I bring this up is that this doesn’t stop at telepathy. Precognition, psychometry, mediumship, ghosts and other non physical beings and the like all come into play. The hive mind would be aware of discarnate souls and non human telepathic beings. Once psychic ability is going full blast it’s far more than mere telepathy, it’s the whole ball of wax.
The Real Telepathic People
We have a group of people right now that communicate telepathically with each other. They are non speaking autistic people, who are intelligent, but lack much control over their bodies and whose paths to communication are otherwise very limited. Some of them use spelling boards, (which I’ve discussed in this article) and what they have to say tells us quite a lot about all the things that come with telepathy. This all comes to us via Ky Dickens and her wildly popular Telepathy Tapes podcast.
I think that this is what makes Pluribus popular. It speaks to a reality that deep inside we already know about. On the one hand we want to be part of it, but on the other hand it comes with the existential fear of losing ourselves in it. We are drawn in by the joy of the deep connectedness, but it is also the death of the self. Personally, I am fascinated by this show and its metaphysical implications.
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