[ExI] The Chess Room

JOSHUA JOB nanite1018 at gmail.com
Mon Mar 1 22:50:25 UTC 2010


On Mar 1, 2010, at 10:59 AM, Spencer Campbell wrote:
> Crowds make a perfect example of how this works. Put enough people in
> one place, direct their attention toward a single thing, and the mob
> mentality sets in. This is merely disconcerting when the mob-mind is
> focused on some physical phenomenon (music concerts, comedy clubs),
> but it can become outright dangerous when it gets an idea (protests,
> riots). Angry mobs are, somehow, angrier than the sum of their parts.
> 
> Organizations of all kinds illustrate the concept on longer time
> scales. Microsoft seems to have its own dysfunctional personality,
> distinct from its constituent owners and employees. The willfulness of
> nations is well-documented; even in a democracy, which has no
> consistent "head" to speak of, the nation as a whole continues to have
> predictable behavior and preferences that distinguish it from every
> other nation.
I hate crowds, political rallies, etc. precisely because they undermine the independence of the people in them, and make them behave irrationally, as in your angry mob example. People behave differently in them, and as you mentioned, it is (very) disconcerting.

But are they minds? I mean, you can view them as such, via analogies, but the overall system is controlled by the choices of the individuals. There are, for good or ill, patterns which seem to hold in groups, but that is quite possibly more a result of statistical averaging over many different actions by the people concerned. You can say mobs have intentions, and corporations have personalities, but I think they are of a different character than your regular old "mind" like we humans have. When we have a thought, it is, in the context of our mind, a single entity. We might have many thoughts on a given issue, ideas about what to do, beliefs pulling us in different directions, but those are all, in our experience, entities separate from the others. In the context of our Overmind (whether it be a mob or a corporation), any such thoughts are composed of the individual fickle thoughts of people, all interacting in different ways. They are compositions, rather than discrete things.

Perhaps that isn't really where the major difference is though (I'm fuzzy on that one). But the real crucial difference, is that this Overmind cannot exist without its parts working, but the parts CAN operate without the mind. And that isn't the case with, for example, our minds. Our minds are dependent on our brains, but if our neurons are working in a way which makes mind impossible (as in a seizure), they cause damage and die (or at least, risk death). And, at the very least, that is why, even if you can say there are such things as these "minds of minds" or whatever you wish to call it, they are derivative of our minds, and can't properly be said to have rights, as we are independent from them and have rights. Only in such a situation (where these composite minds have no rights) would I be comfortable in claiming they exist. That's my personal bias, ideologically.


Joshua Job
nanite1018 at gmail.com






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