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If there were no hive mind, then there would be nothing assessing Tigurius from the void, he wouldn't have seen an immortal hunger, he would have just seen the chattering of giant dinosaur locusts with guns that shoot beetles.

Gestalt

ge·stalt
   [guh-shtahlt, -shtawlt, -stahlt, -stawlt]
noun, plural ge·stalts, ge·stal·ten  [-shtahl-tn, -shtawl-, -stahl-, -stawl-] ( sometimes initial capital letter ) Psychology .
1. a configuration, pattern, or organized field having specific properties that cannot be derived from the summation of its component parts; a unified whole.
2. an instance or example of such a unified whole.

... the Hive Mind is the sum of the Tyranid life-forms. It is not an individual creature or being.

Think of it as a cloud-based AI system, formed by the processing power of a series of linked servers and systems. A single one of these servers is not the AI, but, working together and sharing information, this server cloud creates an AI.

@kain: Not at all.

Think of a room full of people all talking loudly at the same time. As long as they are constantly saying different things, it's just noise. Now imagine they are all saying the same thing. And then they become aware that they are all saying the same thing so they try to say it at the same time. What was noise before is now a coherent message. In the case of the tyranids, "we are hungry!" What you have is a group of agents with similar goals and they will probably work together to achieve those goals. But that does not mean there is some entity beyond them forcing them to say "we are hungry." It could be that way but there is nothing published by GW that says it definitely is that way.

I never said that it was an external entity forcing them to say so. I'm saying that to a moderate extent the Hive Mind has become detatched from the individual tyranids. Every Tyranid connected to the Synapse contributes to it. In essence, it's a giant brain with each individual synapse creature being a neuron and non synapse creatures being the little stringy things. The goals of the individuals are unimportant as they are drowned out by the will of the whole, which is to eat and evolve. But that whole is very much capable of "coldly assessing" someone capable of viewing the whole of that web and not suffering spontaneous cranial decompression, better known as "your head asplode."

The thing doing the assessing is a billion trillion tyranids all at once, in communication with each other, not a agent "over and above" them. To the extent that we can say our identity is different from the firing of neurons, Tyranids are not like brains.

Whether the identity really is distinct from the hundred billion neurons that comprise a human brain is something of a point of contention in neuropsychology. It might be separate, it might just be the result of some psuedo-democratic process.

Neuro-science isn't really the issue; we're just talking metaphors. We tend to see ourselves as something other than just the sum of chemical reactions in the brain. For the sake this discussion, lets just call that the "spirit." My take on the tyranids is that there is no "spirit." The hive mind instead refers to how the tyranids behave rather than what they "want" to do. For example, the hive mind is a hive fleet attacking a world. It is not some thing that decides to attack a world. Going back to ants: ants don't have any awareness of the concepts of procreation or survival. They simply do these things, or attempt to do them. And they have no awareness of the concept of cooperation and labor-division. These things simply occur. I think this is what GW is trying to invoke with the tyranids.

Right, and so it is with the Tyranid. We've no definite source declaring that the Hive Mind is an individual or simply, to a human mind perceiving it, an utterly emotionless alien intellect taking notice of it.