The original post: /r/television by /u/lunar-future on 2025-12-07 10:43:24+00:00.
Throughout the series, the hivemind has consistently demonstrated that it retains the sum total of all human thoughts, memories, and knowledge, (save for the twelve immune). What this implies is that every moral code, every criminal impulse, and every ethical framework — all of it— exists within the hivemind simultaneously.
Despite this, the most recent episode shows that the hivemind follows an extraordinarily strict ethical rule: it refuses to kill even plants for food, surviving only on “windfalls,” as the hivemind describes it. Most of the rules the hivemind has followed so far could easily be hand-waved away as arising from broad human consensus, but this particular position is far more extreme than anything held by the vast majority of humanity.
So how does the hivemind actually form its values? How does it form its governing principles? Are its beliefs the statistical median of all human thought? Are they the most restrictive boundaries imposed by these disparate ethical systems? Could they be the result of internal competition, where certain ideas “win out” and suppress others? Is it a collective synthesis of all human ideas? Or are they being shaped exogenously by whatever alien intelligence first contacted humanity?
TL;DR: If the hivemind contains within it all human knowledge, where do its values in the specific come from? Does this hivemind have a consensus mechanism? Its strict “anti-killing anything” stance seems to be far too extreme for the median human belief, especially when you compare it to its willingness to consume corpses of any variety. What this suggests is either a competition of ideas that produced these overarching principles, or an external influence from this otherwise unknown alien “over-mind” shaping the ethics of the hivemind intentionally.