How many robots does it take to run a grocery store? [Tom Scott]

In digging into whether the hive/hivemind is one robot or many, and whether our gut bacteria are part of us, Tom has basically stumbled into the illusion of the self as a distinct thing from the rest of reality.

The idea that we all have (numerical) personal identities, and not merely qualitative identities, is very appealing to most people. I think that's the largest reason the concept of a soul or individual spirit is so widespread - we want to be able to create a hard-line division between us and the rest of reality. But that division is imaginary.

Whether we consider it to be one robot or many, or whether we consider our gut bacteria to be part of us or not should then be a matter of pragmatic semantics. Instead of asking "is the division there/real?" we should ask "is this imaginary division useful?".

For the case of the hive/hivemind, I think it might make more sense for a repair technician, for instance, to think of each physical unit as a separate robot, but a developer for the hivemind might find it more useful to think about the whole system as a single entity.

This video fails to answer the question how many X's does it require to screw in a light-bulb.

HN do you agree with Tom Scott's definition of a robot?