starling murmuration

[Simon Adams]

Has anyone ever watched starling flocks swarm around, or a big shoal of fish moving in a similar way? There seems to be a way in which the group forms a single entity. I can’t imagine any way this can be done through any kind of physical signalling, or else it would be messy - especially when they change direction.

I wouldn’t claim this as evidence of idealism, but it’s difficult even to imagine what a physicalist explanation would look like? With migrating birds and homing pigeons the theory is that they use the sun/moon/earth’s magnetic field, so maybe there could be a mechanism where the flock has it’s own EM field, and each individual ’feels’ the change of direction together. As far as I’m aware no one has been able to find any evidence for anything like this, but it was also be an extremely sophisticated and sensitive mechanism to evolve with arguably little selective benefit.

Instead if you imagine there is a connection in the group at a consciousness level, where the murmuration is a kind of synchronised dance where the urge to move is shared, this seems a far more natural explanation?

I was reminded of this by this recent photo where the murmuration briefly turned into the shape of a bird. I think the bird shape is a coincidence, and its murmuration itself I find amazing, but it’s still a great catch;



Here’s a video of it slowed down at this point;

[SanteriSatama]

Such beauty. Thanks for sharing.

[Lou Gold]

Has anyone ever watched starling flocks swarm around, or a big shoal of fish moving in a similar way? There seems to be a way in which the group forms a single entity. I can’t imagine any way this can be done through any kind of physical signalling, or else it would be messy - especially when they change direction.

I wouldn’t claim this as evidence of idealism, but it’s difficult even to imagine what a physicalist explanation would look like? With migrating birds and homing pigeons the theory is that they use the sun/moon/earth’s magnetic field, so maybe there could be a mechanism where the flock has it’s own EM field, and each individual ’feels’ the change of direction together. As far as I’m aware no one has been able to find any evidence for anything like this, but it was also be an extremely sophisticated and sensitive mechanism to evolve with arguably little selective benefit.

Instead if you imagine there is a connection in the group at a consciousness level, where the murmuration is a kind of synchronised dance where the urge to move is shared, this seems a far more natural explanation?

I was reminded of this by this recent photo where the murmuration briefly turned into the shape of a bird. I think the bird shape is a coincidence, and its murmuration itself I find amazing, but it’s still a great catch;




Here's a nice review of the physicalist explanations.

For the bird shot, I think it's projection rather than either coincidence or synchronicity.

OTOH, I believe there is much to learn about swarm behavior where Idealism can offer important insights. Beating one of my favorite drums, I would add that this seems to be more about collective structure (for example, an entity as a current or harmonic resonance) than about individual free will.

[Simon Adams]

Yes I agree the bird shot is just coincidence. It’s definitely possible that someone will find a feasible physical and mechanistic explanation for how the birds are able to synchronise like that, and of course you can’t trust our intuitive sense of these things. You can also argue that it’s something that evolution selected for, an instinctual flight training program, a gathering in large numbers to reduce overall vulnerability to predators equivalent to wildebeest migrations etc.

But you can also go too far the other way. Whatever mechanistic explanation we can come up with, you are always going to loose an essential part of the story of what’s happening once you take it down to physics and chemistry. I’m not sure where you see harmonic resonance at work here, but there is definitely a sense in which the flock is ‘moving as one mind’, more like a piece of music than anything with an explicit purpose.

[Lou Gold]

Oh, I was offering the physicalist view, not defending it. One evolutionary explanation is that it's flock evasive behavior against raptors. The harmonic resonance would be that once the behavior 'works' evolutionarily, it becomes a set habit. I'm not defending these views, just offering them. Personally, I think the starlings are having fun riding the energies and making the moves that might be impossible to attain or sustain as an individual bird.


Pieces of music generally have a clear purpose, such as building greater harmonies out of many voices or, once again, play for the sake of play. Jacob Collier has explained in interviews that his musical development never included practice, just play. With the pygmies, it's pretty obvious.

[Martin_]

Not as cool, but i think you get the point:


[bbvideo]
[/bbvideo]

[Martin_]

essentially, these 3 rules are enough to simulate this behaviour:

• Separation – Steer to avoid crowding others
• Alignment – Steer to maintain a direction similar to others
• Cohesion – Steer toward the average position of local flockmates

Add some realistic flight dynamics to that and you're done.

This illustrates the point that even if the flock - in an ontological sense - is a single unit; if you want to predict its behaviour, you can get really good accuracy by treating the flock as a set of individual birds with individual rules of engagement.

[Simon Adams]

Not as cool, but i think you get the point:

Yes I could watch these for ages. As Lou said they do just seem to be having fun

essentially, these 3 rules are enough to simulate this behaviour:
Separation – Steer to avoid crowding others
Alignment – Steer to maintain a direction similar to others
Cohesion – Steer toward the average position of local flockmates
Add some realistic flight dynamics to that and you're done.

Yes and simple rules can make amazing patterns, just look at the Mandelbrot set. But they change direction pretty quickly, and it’s not as if there is a single leader they can all follow. It seems to often involve many (eg. thousands) of them (on a leading ‘edge’) all deciding to go, say, left at the same time. I’ve not watched them slowed down so maybe one does something different first that they’re all very sensitive to, but it doesn’t seem like that from a distance.

It would be interesting to try find an algorithm for swarm drones along those lines which they each independently execute, would maybe help to understand the how, even if the why lives in Wittgenstein’s “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”

[Simon Adams]

PS: it looks like they have started trying to replicate it with independent drones. Nothing like as impressive as the centrally controlled drones, but it’s a start. It will be interesting to see if they can get anywhere near to what the starlings do (without cheating such as sending information about planned changes, having reaction times at a different order of magnitude etc)

[Soul_of_Shu]

Speaking only to the formation of the humongous bird image, as if by some magical alchemy, manifesting out of a vast confluence of inter-being bird-bound alters, one can't rule out the kind of Jungian synchronicity that BK alludes to in DJM.