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.