What is "Supermind"?

This blog started three years ago as "Dragon Theory". I was particularly taken by the "corporation", a legal "person" with rights powers vastly exceeding ordinary persons. Then and now, I consider the "corporation" to be a threat to individual rights and freedoms.

I was also inspired by the ultimate evil in the Star Trek series: the Borg. As time went on, I became more curious as to how people are assimilated into "the dragon".

By 2017, assimilation had become my focus and I changed the name of the blog to "The Programmable Ape". I had come to look beyond the mass phenomena like the corporation to see that humans are uniquely engineered to be "assimilated". Our language is a way of "programming" us. This involved a subtle change in outlook. What does it feel like to be programmed? Is it possible to have a thought, experience or perception that is not deeply colored by the thoughts of others?

"Assimilation" as an isolated, evil phenomenon, was beginning to make less sense. "How to Think" put the final nail in the coffin. "Thinking" is a social phenomenon. In fact, we can't think for ourselves.

Yikes!

Is it possible that all aspects of "mind" are social? This went against the prevailing theory that "mind" was something going on in a brain. Surely you need a brain to have a mind, but could you have a mind without people around you?

I was studying a lot about the brain at this point. It was plain that big sections of the brain were devoted to language. Damage to this part of the brain could result in the inability to form thoughts, let alone express them. Another interesting find is that any part of the cerebral cortex (or all of it) can be destroyed without loss of consciousness. This goes against the hand-waving conclusion that "somehow" our sense of self arises in the cortex - usually imagined as some kind of computer. Damasio restores the old idea that fundamental "I" (core consciousness) is a phenomenon of the brain stem, which is intimately involved in "images" created in the cortex. It's just one step to realize that these "images" are, to a great extent, socially created. At a deep, intimate level, our minds are shared.

All this combined with my long admiration for the book "Surfaces and Essences", which explores the nature of analogy as the very basis of thought. Intuitively, I regarded the cerebral cortex to be in the business of analogy-making. Language itself, based on analogies that were mostly made by others was where our "minds" live! 

Finally, I looped back to the "dragon" perspective.  Our "minds" are shared - we think and experience the world only by participating in "superminds". The "dragon" had lost its body, but its mind was real and all-pervasive.

Is "supermind" alive? This lead me to check out other forms of life. It seemed to me that "supermind" was a bit like the "wild west" genetic world of bacteria. Each of us is an individual in the sense that we experience a unique package of "supermind" ideas and influences.

"Identity and Destiny" brought back the ominous nature of "assimilation", drawing attention to the fact that our "identity" defines who we imagine ourselves to be. In many cases, this is total fiction. "Identity" is also behind the most brutal aspects of human nature.

That's the current status of the idea. There is a certain consistency all the way back to 2015, with the idea connecting to a broad range of insights by others while blowing off the quirky "dragon" language and even the "programmable ape". It has become a meditation on who we are from a rather surprising perspective.

Assimilation

The original title of this blog was "Dragon Theory", which referred to my idea that humans create organizations that are alive in some sense and, in another sense, are machines like other human creations. There is a "flip side" to this theory. It's about how humans are assimilated into this machine. It turns out that assimilation is an easier thing for most of us to understand, since intelligent machines are (for most of us) a subject of Science Fiction ("AI"). In fiction, "AI" is presented for dramatic purposes as something super-human and implacably opposed to human life. "Real" AI is something else entirely. It presents a real and present threat precisely because it is so poorly understood.

The concept of assimilation is quite familiar to most of us. We take it for granted that "social" animals form entities (herds, swarms, flocks, schools) that have a behavior all their own - behavour that cannot be described solely as the sum of behavior of the individuals. Application of this idea to humans is, for some strange reason, resisted.

In the case of humans, social structure is more than a matter of simply sticking together for the purpose of hunting and safety. Human societies are intelligently designed. In this sense, they are intelligent machines.

It's also true that the way that humans are absorbed in these social structures (assimilated) is uniquely complex.  In this post, I'd like to focus on the most common and most powerful ways we are all assimilated:

• Being Alive.  To be alive is to actively participate in the Universe. This forces us to divide the world into things useful, things dangerous, "me" and "not me", "mine" and "not mine" ...
• Being Human. Obviously, we all share a human mind and body, making it hard to relate to such things as the immorality of driving species to extinction. We share a mortal time-frame of less than a century. Our senses are dull but our minds are full of speculations that would never occur to an animal with comparable intelligence (such as a dolphin).
• Culture. The most obvious aspect of culture is language, which limits what kinds of thoughts we can share and even the kind of thoughts we can have. Especially in the "West", philosophers have over-emphasize the role of language. Culture includes "technology" which surrounds us, opening all kinds of possibilities but also limiting the way we see the world. For example, if we have a gun, we will tend to use the gun to solve our problems with society. If we have poison, we will use it to exclude inconvenient living things from "our" environment.
• Flocking. The boid hypothesis hold that a great deal of human "group" behavour can be explained by simple rules governing all kinds of flocks and swarms. Deep psychology is not required.

Built on our common humanity and the fact that we are all absorbed into some kind of culture from birth, other powerful forces are brought to bear:

• Mythology. Structures our lives with a complex set of stories that provide a sense of "meaning" and direction (as long as they are not held up to close scrutiny)
• Economics, especially the mythology of money. For the vast majority of human beings in 2017, money (and the need for it) is as real as air.
• Status. Backed by cultural myths, human societies seem to automatically stratify into "haves" and "have-nots" - leaders and followers.
• Brute Force. We cannot overlook the fact that, for most of humanity, there is no choice but to participate in society, even at the most desperately poor and disadvantaged level. When we go to war, most of us are "cannon fodder" with our individuality seen as an inconvenience and obstacle to the functioning of the war machine. On the other hand, when the tools of brute force are placed in our hands, we tend to use them - turning others into objects that exist only to further our personal ambitions. Ironically, such ambitions are themselves a product of assimilation. The oppressor is as assimilated as the oppressed.

All these forces can add up to the dragon/assimilation phenomenon where, for example, young men can excuse the slaughter of "enemy" civilians as "just doing my job". Such mental gymnastics would be completely incomprehensible if we ignored the process that turns a helpless, innocent child into a mindless, expendable component in a war machine.

Consciousness and the Dragon

It may be said that whether or not a corporation is "alive" is a matter of definition. I find it quite easy to make the necessary adjustments. But we are still left with our doubts about the analogy. We expect a living thing to be "like" us - especially to have something we call consciousness.

Consciousness is a slippery idea. For most of us, it refers to the experience we have of inhabiting the world. It is subtly connected to the phenomenon of attention. A vast amount of my behaviour is obviously controlled by my brain but not in a conscious way (I don't need to think about how to walk down the street, drive a car or decipher letter patterns while I read). Consciousness (attention) is about what I do need to "think about".

This distinction is made in "The Ravenous Brain", a very readable source for those looking for an update on the current status of research into how the brain works. In summary, the function of "attention" or "working memory" is to deal with anything unusual by either labelling it as something previously experienced (and moving on) or by "chunking" the new experience by categorizing and pattern recognition, then "filing away" the new "chunks" for future reference. As someone with computer background, I think of these "chunks" as active "apps" - objects that allow for extensive generalization. We used to call these "subroutines", but now the best word might be "types". In any case, the result is that our "chunks" allow us to "think" quite extensively without our interactions with the world entering into "working memory". They are automatic but definitely not "static".

I contend that it's easy to characterize a corporation as being alive and "thinking" in an unconscious manner. This involves running "on automatic", following set rules that admit to no exception. Considered as a live thing, the corporation is very stupid. When we look for an analogue to human attention and consciousness in a corporation, we must admit that it comes from the human beings that control the corporation - especially those in the corporate suite. These people actually pay attention to circumstances and draft new rules to be buried in the corporate mind in the same way that a human learns to ride a bike, then never needs to think about it again. This is especially evident in the case of the military, where some level of creativity is permitted at each level, while the entire organization is designed to operate as a machine with the generals dealing only with exceptions and unusual aspects of the particular situation. The extreme case comes when a human being (President of the United States) decides to initiate a nuclear attack, which will happen entirely automatically about four minutes after his decision. The fact that is entirely automatic (intelligent but automatic) is an essential element of the terror it is designed to provoke in the enemy.

The creative accounting procedures used by ENRON before it blew up were the conscious creation of identifiable human beings, but the "mind" of ENRON extended far from the deliberations of these few individuals. For the vast number of ENRON employees, it was simply a matter of going to work in the office and working out the details. Aside from a few perversions of basic business practices, ENRON was just another corporation.

What, If Anything, Is a "Person"

If we're lucky, the first person we encounter in our lives is our mother.

We naturally generalize to recognize other moving shapes as like our mother but not our mother. We have all experienced the difficulty of calming a baby who refuses to accept the attentions of anybody but his mother.

This leads me to a claim that may seem odd: We discover our mothers before we discover ourselves!

But we are "hard wired" to assemble the meme of "self" pretty early. These fingers and toes are "my" fingers and toes. When you watch a baby, you can see this is a discovery, not a "brute fact". But the "hard wiring" of the motor cortex establishes a predictable link between the perception of the body and the ability to move around body parts. Thus is born "me" (the object in the world) and "I", the one who seems to "be me". One of our main jobs in the first two years of life is establishing an iron-clad link between "I" and "me", controlling "my" body so "I" can walk for example. At a certain point (if we are lucky), all these discoveries are packed away and absorbed into what we experience as "reality". Unless we have a brain injury, it will no longer make sense ask if these hands are "mine".

As we learn to speak, we learn to speak of I, me, mine and what "I" want. At this stage, mother is just another very interesting and special object in the world. Other objects with similar shape and sound may be accepted as "like" mother (a source of food, comfort etc). Objects that are similar but different in alarming ways (different skin colour, loud voice etc) are in a different category of "scary people".

Before too long, we generalize and create a category of "person", which includes "me", my mother and certain entities resembling my mother. It can take a very long time for us to actually attribute feelings and experience like "mine" to other persons (theory of mind). This ability may entirely fail, resulting in a pathological inability to recognize others as persons (Autism and psychopathy for example).

As an adult, we generally recognize a very broad category of human shapes as "persons" who we take for granted have an inner experience like ours. We may even generalize this to animals -- a generalization others may see as the "error" of anthropomorphizing.  Again, this categorization may fail - get it "wrong". We may, for example, regard things with human shapes as not persons if we are taught to do so in the course of military training.

Starting with our mother, we build up memes to model other people. We often make the mistake of assuming that this inner models is the other person. We say, Bob is dishonest, when we really mean, My inner idea of Bob is one of a person who cannot be trusted. Being memes, these models "run" on live brain material, allowing them to have ghostly thoughts and plans. At some point, the oldest of our person memes may accumulate enough related memes to take on a life of her own, even after the original has died. Hofstadter describes this phenomenon at length in "I Am A Strange Loop".

Building from this, we imagine the world to be full of "persons" like ourselves. If we imagine all of these persons (or at least the ones we know and trust) to "believe" in a certain meme, we take this meme as "real", even if it conflicts with our own direct experience. Conversely, we may doubt our own experience if we think it's not shared with other people (that is, our memes of these other people don't include the "belief" that what we are experiencing is real). Thus, we can "believe" in God without evidence or in the face of evidence to the contrary. We can "believe" in the Big Bang with nothing but barely-understood testimony from trusted other persons. We can dismiss our own "peak experiences" (such as oneness with the universe) as "not real" because they are not (perceived as) shared with others.

And then there is "assimilation", which is the phenomenon of absorbing our very selves into a higher meme of society, a nation, a corporation or some "meta-person" I call a "dragon".