Superbowl Supermind

The Superbowl as an illustration of supermind to be elabourated ...

• Attention of millions simultaneously directed to a football;
• Intention of millions;
• Feelings;
• The role of rules;
• The role of identity;
• Ephemeral nature - supermind is like a hurricane;

Dennett's R&D Department

To be extended and elabourated later. The "blind watchmaker" is a key idea ...

Dennett introduces improved terminology for the "blind watchmaker" - design without a designer. In a way, perhaps our own minds "design" this way - I think Dennett would say so. In this sense, there is no such thing as intention. That's a philosopher's substitute for reality, however: getting excited about a clever distinction that exists in language only.

But it does make sense to ask if all mind, including the blind watchmaker, exist in this space where "purposefulness" seems to be an emergent, after-the-fact phenomenon. "Teleological" descriptions are just another way of describing the situation, leaving us with emergent purposeful behavior not "owned" by any entity.

Evolution Versus Creation

Placeholder for a more detailed treatment ...

The modern emphasis on "evolution" challenges the old creation myths. While "evolution" technically simply means "change", the concept has come to mean:

• slow change over "deep" time;
• change that runs against entropy (increasing randomness), leading to increasing complexity and increasing local order

The idea applies to many areas other than biology. For example, the heavy elements were not always here. They evolved through a process of stellar evolution, death, and reconstruction. These elements, like carbon, oxygen and all the rest are more complex than what was there at the beginning (hydrogen, helium, and lithium) and it took billions of years to form them.

The popular concept that "evolution" is virtually identical to "survival of the fittest" is misleading. The related idea that "life" cannot exist without some kind of "Darwinian" evolution is likewise without foundation. The most we can say is: here on Earth, life can and does change through a process of Darwinian evolution. We know of at least one other way that things evolve: design. We also know that design itself evolves, but by a mechanism of its own.

But all this contrasts sharply with the outright creation of fully-formed organisms (not to mention the Earth itself) featured in virtually all mythical accounts, including Genesis. This places the idea of "evolution" in conflict with the mythology behind all formal religions. This has the awkward effect of exposing the arbitrary nature of these mythologies, leading one to suspect that none of them have any claim to factual accuracy.

Evolution By Analogy

This is a place-holder for a longer article.

The gist of it is that analogy, as outlined in Surfaces and Essences is the way to think of "cultural" evolution - the evolution of the super-mind - that exploded especially in the last 10,000 years. The stage was set by the prodigious growth of the cortex - a tissue best characterized as an analogy-creating machine.