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.

Democracy And Supermind

It's hard to argue with the goal of democracy, which is to set things up for the benefit of the population at large. It's easiest to define democracy in terms of what it isn't. It is not tyranny, not slavery, not corrupt or injustice. The idea is as old as the Biblical prophets but attempts to implement it are very modern. There is no reason to assume they will succeed.

The problem comes with the assumption that a group of people organized as a democracy can make the best decisions by somehow "putting their heads together" or voting. The connection between the goals of democracy and the means is so confused in people's minds that many assume that "voting" is virtually synonymous with "democracy".

A bit of research will quickly dispell this idea.  In fact, elections are a mud-slinging match specifically intended to distract voters from issues that actually affect them.

As long as we have the idea that good decisions can be made through the ballot box, we are vulnerable to emergent super-minds that make very bad decisions. Decisions not in the best interest of the general public.

The emergent "core" of support for Donald Trump in the last US election is a case in point. That core was conjured out of nothing - cobbled together with bumper stickers, unfocused anger, and empty promises. Yet, that supermind is now busy ripping apart the world's largest "democracy"

We are beginning to see the importance of superminds, although we lack the vocabulary to describe them. The Trump "core" cannot be described as the sum total of a few million deluded individuals.
To a great extent, it came into existence through the Russian campaign to "fan the flames" of existing discontent, resulting in a bonfire that surprised everyone. Putin and company understand the supermind but perhaps misunderstand the fact that a supermind is not under the control of those who conjure it into existence.

As Amartya Sen points out, superminds (whose breath of life is identity) are dangerous and violent.

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Some previous thoughts on democracy here. That discussion would have been greatly helped if it took into account Sen's ideas about identity. Identity politics is poison.