Another Look at Dragon Theory

The premise of "Dragon Theory" is that we get "assimilated" into intelligent machines - social structures based on mechanical rules - thereby losing our fundamental humanity. The assumption of Dragon Theory is that this "assimilation" is a "bad thing", even a dangerous thing. Perhaps even a threat to the continued existence of human beings on the planet.

On the other hand, I have a thread of reasoning in Diary of a Christian Skeptic that recognizes that there is little or nothing in my personal "meme world" that doesn't come from other people, many of which can be identified by name. According to this picture, my mind is simply a kind of eddy, through which the memes of mankind flow. According to Zen, there are no borders to the individual mind. Properly speaking, the mind is infinite and contains "reality". The mind of a modern intellectual "contains" a lot more "reality" than the mind of an educated person 200 years ago because the insights of modern science are readily available to reach deeply into the workings of reality itself. This is the result of being "assimilated" into a world that today might be called the "Google World".

This idea can be forcefully illustrated by picking up a dictionary (Do you still have one of those around?) This is a massive list of all the words (each one a meme) that I have inherited just by being born in an English speaking country and subjected to the kind of socialization that is lamented in "Dragon Theory". In fact, Dragon theory explicitly acknowledges the fact that language itself is a powerful force for assimilation, even more powerful than another assimilating meme: the idea of money.

But it's also true that Math, Physics and Philosophy are woven into the culture I'm embedded in. In fact, what aspect of my "humanity" does not owe itself to "assimilation"? Is it no true that the fantastic richness of human experience that is so threatened by assimilation is also due to assimilation? Unlike other animals, human beings thoroughly adapt to their environment and the tools available (both physical and intellectual). A man with an axe is a different animal from an man with no axe. Every tool, every sweeping change to he environment (now mostly "man made") changes what it is to be human.

Turning back to the "Dragon" image of a machine made up of human components, can we not imagine a "meme machine" constantly re-working and exploring its store of memes?  The "thinking" of this machine includes the exponential growth of human knowledge in every field, described in Kurzweil's "Singularity". In this vision, we are "assimilated" into a thinking, dreaming, creating machine that is growing bigger and more powerful by he second. In fact, this "group mind" can't be described as a machine at all, since he creative, human energies of individuals add to produce much more than any one individual could produce. "Dragons" drag individuals to the "lowest common denominator", for example, reducing their lives to a scramble for money. Is it not true that we lament this process precisely because we benefit from centuries of thinking about what is meaningful and worthwhile about human existence? We want the benefits of civilization without surrendering the imagined purity of he "noble savage".

In this context, it's worth remembering "The Real World of Technology" which outlines the intimate connection between technical progress and dehumanization of the individual.

Perhaps it is a mundane observation that "assimilation" is a two-edge sword. We are swept along in the stream of history, constantly being redefined as human beings. Is it possible to step outside this process and say which changes to the definition of "human" are acceptable and which are not?

At the very least, this line of thinking challenges Dragon Theory's pessimistic view of our future as a species.

The Mind of a Dragon

The "Dragon" blog plays with the idea of an emergent property of human organizations that creates a super-organism, "alive" in many respects.

In Hofstadter's "Mind's I", (page 192) he sketches what, according to his theory, it would take for us to talk about something to have a "mind". It turns out to hinge on what H. calls a "representational system" - one that dynamically reflects what itself is "about". This has two aspects.

1. Revision of "mental" constructs as a result of self-reflection.
2. Revision of "mental" constructs as a result of perception - the special case of memes that more or less directly attach to events outside of the organism.

It seems to me that governments and corporations qualify on both counts. Condition (1) is basically the condition that a discipline such as "Management Science" exists. Places like the Harvard Business School constantly pump out memes that are "about" management. Governments constantly re-organize themselves and reflect on concepts such as effective leadership and efficiency.

The second criterion is satisfied by the observation that human organizations arrange themselves to respond to the way they see their environment. For example, we have a "defence" department that arranges itself into units such as air forces and motor pools.

Continual reorganization of society to better manage its affairs could be seen as a the society's "thought process". It is emergent, in the sense that H. points out, since the end effect does not simply the sum of the wishes of the "components" (human beings), but is something else. This is most clearly exemplified by the possession of nuclear weapons, an "idea" that emerges from the idea of defence but is a huge threat to individual citizens. 

This critique also undermines the concept of democracy, which, at bottom, claims that the political organization somehow can or should reflect the "sum" of the hopes, wishes and needs of the citizen.

A Good Place to Start

"I think, therefore I am". So began Descartes in his attempt to build a comprehensive picture of reality, starting with what he knew for sure. Like many philosophers, he pretended to mimic the newly-discovered certainty of Mathematics.  Descartes was barking up the wrong tree and his "axiom" instantly hit a dead end. Strangely enough, there are more than a few mystics, philosophers and neuroscientists who would doubt even Descarte's "axiom". The "self" may turn out to be an illusion.

In the Universe we happen to inhabit, there is no sure path from "simple" to "complex". We need to start somewhere else. That's good news, since it turns out that we all know a Hell of a lot more than we thought we did. As Descartes realized, it's all uncertain to some degree, but that need not stop us from exploring an uncertain world. After all, we don't have an option.

We learn very little about our minds by comparing them to the "minds" of chimpanzees, cats and frogs. If we assume that our minds are "nothing but" two pounds of meat on our shoulders, we succeed in explaining nothing while ignoring everything we know about our minds from first-hand experience.

I'd like to share with you some ideas that I have found helpful in the hope that you will too. My aim is to be intelligible, not necessarily "right" or "wrong" (that's up to you). This turns out to be a key policy for moving forward. Descartes was preoccupied with certainty. He wanted to find things that were absolutely true. Our goal is much more modest: to talk about the ideas we share, whether they are right or wrong. The most important aspect of ideas is that they are shared [4].

We will be wandering through a maze of connected ideas. Feel free to wander. There is no "start" or "end". My hope is that we will gain some valuable experience by wandering around together. Our journey starts where Descartes' left off: by understanding what Descartes meant (or should have meant) by "I and "think" [5].

Historically speaking, great advances are made not by answering the great questions but by realizing we were asking the wrong questions and we need to replace them by new, more productive lines of thought.  What we need is a way to conduct a dialogue that makes sense to all parties, together with a way to understand our differences, especially those differences that seem so important, heated and intractable.

I have worked on many other blogs. While I will probably update them from time to time, this blog continues and replaces two of them. I'll attempt to cross-link the blogs where that seems preferable to copying posts wholesale from one blog to another.

• Diary of a Christian Skeptic documents the long "spiritual" path I took from an early age to the present in search of answers to the "big questions". I no longer consider Christianity or any particular religion to be of central importance, but, being born in a "Christian" culture, I needed to fight my way through the assumptions of this culture that were woven into the my thought patterns from childhood.
• The Programmable Ape documents my struggle to understand social organizations as living things in their own right, together with the way we are "assimilated" into these organizations, often resulting in surrender of humanity to mechanical rules and non-human goals. The current blog will continue to expand this theme, making such concepts as "assimilation" more precise and useful while adding precision to the "dragon" concept itself." I don't think you can understand human organizations simply by understanding the human beings that make them up. It turns out that this is a special case of the futility of reductionism, of which I will have much to say.
• Zen of Value is a related blog - a "work in progress" that is devoted to the study of one meme: value. The "Mind" is a super computer between our ears that can instantly calculate value. Computers and economists work only with money, which is not the same thing at all.

Notes: (I will try to provide comments and important off-page links at the bottom of the topic, like this, to make it easier to verify the links are all working and to avoid too much clutter in he main text).

[1] A detailed biography is supplied [here]

[2] "Mind" is a central topic, introduced [here]
[3] Deleted
[4] This a radical transformation of the way we think of language. It is certainly not "like" a branch of Mathematics and not mainly concerned with "truth or falsehood" or even conveying "information" in the modern sense. Language events take place in the "Universe of Discourse" described by Hofstadter [here].
[5] Douglas Hofstadter helps us out by shedding a bright light on "I", the most important idea of all which turns out to tell us what "you" means and a lot about the "meaning of meaning".

I warmly welcome your comments.