The purpose, and true value, of Critical Theory is not to reveal the Truth, but to suggest new ways of thinking about it. Its a lot like art, even if you are a blues musician, you can learn much by listening to Bach. And most important, you can’t say ahead of time just what it is you might learn, if anything. You cannot predict the future by studying the past, but at least you won’t get blindsided as often.

And BTW, although the results and discoveries of mathematics have little to do with one’s intuitions, the same cannot be said for the very human activity of doing mathematics. A lot of human mental processing is carried out subconsciously. As in a game of chess, you learn to trust your intuition; it has a way of predicting, more often than not, which strategies are likely to be successful, and which ones will probably lead to dead ends.

There’s a lot to be said for studying the thought of those who did not rely as much as the moderns on rigorous objective analysis. You don’t have to agree with them to take away something of value. After all, they were there first.

Non-historians, otoh, seem to eagerly pursue them. The issue, of course, is that if one actively looks for patterns in the infinite eddies of complex systems, it can be very easy to superimpose yourself, whether it be your expectations, your fears, etc.

One of many things I always liked about math is that the story told by the numbers never made any accommodations for my subjective expectations. Simplified things. If I was wrong, math would tell me as much to my face, expectations and fears be damned.

When I studied geography, I was exposed to an entire school of 19th century geographers who claimed they could see evidence of this sort of higher-level organization in the spatial distribution of transportation networks, land use, settlemnt patterns, regional development and hierarchy etc. Look up Central Place Theory, The Propagation of Innovation Waves, and Mackinder’s Heartland Theory for some examples. One of these guys, Mahan, still is taught in the US Naval Academy as self-evident truth. The Nazis were notorious for using this kind of academic wool-gathering and navel-gazing to justify their own racial and political theories. They published enormous quantities of nonsense, studded with footnotes of course, to give an air of legitimacy to their superstitions and prejudices. This is just one of the reasons why this kind of speculation is now officially frowned upon in academia, even though it is as common now as ever.

How much of this is just the result of our ability to detect patterns in nature that don’t really exist, and how much of it comes from true hidden structures and processes revealing themselves, is a matter of debate–or even of ideology.

Still, there is no doubt that extremely complex systems seem to arise naturally from just a handful of a basic rules. It certainly happens in the hard sciences. The individual components of social systems may be able to suspect this, but are they really in a position to truly understand it? Individual ants and termites seem totally ignorant of their group behavior. The Queen doesn’t consciously run the hive, but without her it soon falls apart.

There are all-encompassing theories (many of them competitive and contradictory!) in Anthropology, Sociology, History, Political Science and Economics that make the same sort of claims. It could be argued that all the social sciences are an attempt to formalize and define patterns that can just barely be glimpsed by those who make up the individuals of a collective. Who’s to say how much of it is real, and how much an artifact of our own minds? This is not the sort of question that can be settled by assembling a few footnotes and factoids or appealing to “scientific method”. (One of my pet peeves on this board, remember?) And come to think of it, isn’t the human brain itself a complex unity based on the interaction of very simple components?

Civilizations, whether of ants or men, are complex structures which share, at least superficially, many of the characteristics of living organisms. There’s a gold mine of ideas here for science fiction writers, just waiting to be worked. And perhaps fiction is the appropriate place where ideas of this sort can be explored. It may be a bit premature yet to call this “science”.

“Empire of the Ants” was a clever story, where H. G. Wells supposed that, in a small, common hive, ants were bugs, whereas in a mega-hive covering several miles, the conglomerate of that hive was indeed a genius.

However, I must admit I have often been annoyed by the 10% capacity meme, it’s almost as absurd as the old rhubarb about scientists “proving” bumblebees can’t fly. We already know they can fly. Scientists have to prove how they do it, not if. That kind of thinking is what you’d expect from people who don’t like science, who mistrust it, and are envious or afraid of those who can think scientifically. Its their “proof” that being ignorant and superstitious is better than being rational and logical.

No doubt, the brain is a remarkable machine, one whose capabilities are still mostly a mystery to us, and capable of processing information on many different levels. I find it much more astonishing that we can drive an automobile, listen to radio, hold a conversation, and eat a cheeseburger all at the same time. And you don’t need to be all that smart to do it.

Besides, even if we were able, under extraordinary circumstances, to greatly increase the cognitive ability of the brain, that doesn’t mean we would be capable of telekinesis, teleportation, telepathy, time travel, invisibility or exceptionalism.

Come to think, I’m stating to wonder if intelligence is a survival trait anyway. It may be useful to individual success under certain circumstances, but at the species level it probably is a drawback, not an asset. Any positive advantages intelligence confers on an organism is probably nullified by its negative effect on its environment.

If intelligence were all necessary to success, ants and termites would be geniuses.