Recent research suggests human brains have about 86 billion neurons (the previous estimate was about 100 billion). Suppose a social insect has 1 million neurons. A community of 86,000 such insects would have the same number of neurons as a human brain, but those neurons would be transported by 86,000 mobile organisms as opposed to one for a single human brain. There are sensory and exploratory advantages to having 86 billion neurons able to move in 86,000 ways as opposed on the one way a single human brain with 86 billion neurons can. On the other hand, a single entity with 86 billion neurons has other advantages (self-awareness?) in information processing and organizing and associating perceptions. If the question were: what can neurons accomplish, is categorizing individuality according to individual mobility the right criterion? Might all the cells collected into a single organism be considered symbionts? Are a collection of individual with sets of neurons in a sense symbionts for the purpose of neuronal processing? Since life on Earth is interconnected, is there justification for viewing it as a connected whole, an idea related to the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock. Is individuality a concept or a reality?
If one animal kills and eats another animal, they appear to be individual and autonomous. Certainly, the sacrificed animal has lost its individuality. But at a collective level, what has changed other than an incremental increase in survivability of the species?
Individuals are temporary. So are species, but the temporary duration is longer. From the perspective of the individual, individuality looms large as a reality. From the perspective of the species, individuality may be irrelevant except to the extent it bears on the longevity of the species.
Ah yes, that question does take me back to my grad school days in the late 1970s. Our philosophy department had a visiting speaker scheduled to give a talk entitled “Agony in the Schools”, which was advertised all over campus. A number of people from the Faculty of Education showed up. To their chagrin the talk was about functionalist theories of mind, and in order to criticize functionalism, the speaker focussed on whether a school of fish in the same functional relationships as neurons in a brain could conceivably have mental states.
On a similar note: "In the philosophy of mind, the China brain thought experiment (also known as the Chinese Nation or Chinese Gym) considers what would happen if each member of the Chinese nation were asked to simulate the action of one neuron in the brain, using telephones or walkie-talkies to simulate the axons and dendrites that connect neurons. Would this arrangement have a mind or consciousness in the same way that brains do?"
Extracted from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain
I found particularily amusing Ned Block's example in his original article that the havoc wreaked upon the local population when the Yangtze flooded its banks might be likened to a nervous breakdown:
Ned Block (1978). "Troubles with functionalism". Minnesota Studies in The Philosophy of Science. 9: 261–325.
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