Den Beste has a discursive (is that a pleonasm?) essay up on ‘hive minds’ and their relation to the Internet.
He points out the role of language in human intelligence, but flatly misses, I think, the key point.
The ability to freeze and store knowledge – first in the form of ballads like the Illiad or Ramayana, then in the form of accounting records (Hammurabi’s tablets), then in the form of written work is itself a huge part of both collective and individual human intelligence, and has been for millennia.Try a thought-experiment. Imagine a human infant somehow raised apart from society and all human works – a wild child. Before that person has been brought into contact with a society, are they fully human?
Part of what makes us human is the fact that each of us stands on the shoulders of giants, to borrow Newton’s phrase. That’s true not only in science and engineering, as Den Beste points out, but in all aspects of human activity – in fact human activity is largely based on taking from and adding to that larger fabric of frozen knowledge.
We live in a hive mind, and each of us internalizes much of it. If you want to see what it looks like, walk into a good library and look around.
That fact is a part of why we address cultures as a whole – why I believe it is the Palestinian culture rather than a few individuals that must be restrained.
It is also why I think that there is hope; because I know that the wild children that have been found managed to become at least somewhat accultured, and that dark and bloody cultures have in the past become docile.
Okay. “Our objective is to make you docile” is probably not the message we want to communicate to the Palestinian culture, even if we do find it to be dark and bloody. Not unless we want to gratuitously piss them off and ensure there’s no honorable way for their culture to back down and maybe lighten up.
I’m about as pro-culture change as a person can be when it comes to any culture that wants to exterminate my culture, but I’m really hoping we can do it with minimal bloodshed.
Okay, end of pedantry.
Yeah, that was probably (certainly?) a stupid way to say what I meant – “we’d like to make you political (as opposed to violent)” – how’s that?
A.L.
I did mention the fact that my “four most important inventions” improved the ability of humans to communicate information in space and time. I didn’t belabor that point in the article about hive minds because I had dealt with it in the previous one (to which I linked), and as you noted the hive-mind article was already preposterously large.
It seems like I can’t win: my articles are too long, and they leave too much out…
Hi.
“Try a thought-experiment. Imagine a human infant somehow raised apart from society and all human works – a wild child. Before that person has been brought into contact with a society, are they fully human?”
Yes.
SDB –
I think there’s an important difference in emphasis. Until we became time-binding, which started with the oral tradition, none of the other stuff mattered. You’re also more focused on real-time processing, while I’m more focused on history (forwards and backwards)…
A.L.
David Blue –
Why?
A.L.
A.L.,
Because he still has a soul? I’d be very careful about questioning someone’s humanity for cultural reasons…that leads to the dark side of the Force. Being human, even being fully human, has nothing to do with what you know. I think your rhetorical question has scary implications….
Heck, you don’t even have to mention a soul. That child is biologically human in every way. I agree with Sam, what you’re describing is a cultural template over-laying the original hardware.
To put it in web terms, you’re talking about needing a CSS stylesheet to have a fully-functional website, when simple HTML will do. Changing someone’s culture is akin to merely changing the stylesheet. The underlaying HTML isn’t changed, just the CSS. Same way with humans.
AL,
I was taken aback by your question, and by the fact that you seemed to assume anyone who did that thought experiment would say: “Yup, without the proper knowledge, they’re not human.”
I will try to answer your question properly, if you ask it again, “though I do not know the way.”
But first, let me ask you some questions, and try a Shabbat pseudo-answer.
Why do you think strongly pro-life people oppose abortion, and the killing of unfortunate people like Terry Schiavo? Do you think that we all agree in our hearts that they’re not human, but we … just have religious taboos, or sexual hangups or something?
I’m not making an argument with that. I don’t want to argue. I have found arguing over things like abortion never does any good, it only ruins friendships. I’m just asking.
Now, here’s my Shabbat pseudo-answer. Indulge me, because it’s the day for it, OK?
Personally, I would like my heart to weigh lighter than a feather in the scales of justice. I would like to be righteous. Hey, everybody’s got to want something, right? So I would like to be more, rather than less, like the best people. So I study the lives of Holocaust rescuers. Learn from the best, right?
Elaborate reasoning in these matters seems to be a bad thing. If the question is “Why risk your life to save that person?” a typical rescuer would answer something like “Because otherwise he would have died.” Just that, nothing more. People who have the kinds of answers that get respect in classrooms on moral philosophy are poorly represented among the actual righteous.
So:
Q1: “… thought-experiment. Imagine a human infant somehow raised apart from society and all human works – a wild child. Before that person has been brought into contact with a society, are they fully human?”
My answer is: “Yes. Fully human. Precious, and not to be killed.”
Q2: “Why?”
My answer is: “I’d just as soon not go there, though I will try if you ask again, because in that case you must need someone to make the attempt. But I think that if you no longer needed an answer to that question, it would be better for you than any answer I or anyone else could give you.”
If that sounds like an attempt to strike a tone of moral superiority or whatever, it’s not meant that way. Shabbat peace, OK?
Yikes. Didn’t mean to open the eugenics/abortion door, sorry – lack of thought on my part.
OTOH, I do believe that it is in the intersection of biology and socialization that we find what makes people different than other animals…
…which presents obvious and sticky moral issues, which I need to think through with a little more care.
A.L.
There is a difference between an emergent intellegence and a collaborative one. The example of engineers and scientists on the net is an example of how when people collaborate the result is often much better and faster than any individual. But the goals of the individual collaborators have to be aligned for it to work, and the resulting group behavior is some mix of the individual goals.
A hive mind would consider its individuals dispensable, in a way that goes beyond simply calling for sacrifice in the name of the whole. The individuals don’t matter beyond being computational elements. Each individual’s goals are unrelated to the goals of the hive. My neurons are going about their business, and I have no idea if they have ambitions of their own or not. It is simply a side effect of their aggregate behavior that I exist.
If the internet becomes a hive mind, we as individuals would have no way of knowing if or what it was thinking until we established a common language. The mind of the internet would be as alien to us as from another planet. We would probably find it easier to communicate with chimps, because chimps would better understand biological concepts.
SDB:
“It seems like I can’t win: my articles are too long, and they leave too much out…”
That’s not a bug, that’s a feature! Good writing answers questions and raises new ones.
Jon:
“A hive mind would consider its individuals dispensable, in a way that goes beyond simply calling for sacrifice in the name of the whole. The individuals don’t matter beyond being computational elements. Each individual’s goals are unrelated to the goals of the hive.”
Does this have any resonance with the cult of martyrdom being cultivated within militant Islam? Or for that matter the ethos instilled in most of the effective militaries through history that I can think of?
A.L., I think you’re on the right track, but heading the wrong way on it. A “wild human” would still be a human, but he/she would be a deprived human. (Harry Harlow did a lot of early research on socialization models, and it’s pretty clear social animals have minimum social environmental conditions in early development). The Palestinians who danced when the WTC came down were raised in a successful social environment (or hive mind). (Successful in the purely biological sense. The Palestinian social environment is producing a population with a birth rate greater than the mortality rate.) But that hive mind isn’t playing nicely with our hive mind, and our hive mind is finally getting pissed off about it.
I’m getting way too long winded for a comment, but I’ll just say that if you accept that a “hive mind” is a stable emergent property of interaction between independent actors (easy to do) and that a “culture” is an example of a hive mind (more of a stretch) then the way to change a culture is to change the organizing principals that lead to its stable configuration. Fortunately, we have “Democracy! Whisky! Sexy!” in our organizing principals, against “72 virgins after you’re dead” so I have to say I’m long-term optimistic.
But wait, there’s more!
Jon: “A hive mind would consider its individuals dispensable, in a way that goes beyond simply calling for sacrifice in the name of the whole. The individuals don’t matter beyond being computational elements. Each individual’s goals are unrelated to the goals of the hive.” (Emphasis added.)
Just realized I slid right past the central argument here, and this is where it gets interesting. The problem with calling culture a hive mind is that we think of a mind and we think of sophisticated thinking, but if a culture is a mind it’s an incredibly stupid one. I think the much more productive way to think of the hive is as an emergent organism, which tries to do what all organisms do: survive and reproduce. A goal implies a level of self-awareness that a culture can’t have.
What’s important in this view is how the culture survives and propogates. The (incredibly non-intelligent) culture that instills the drive to self-sacrifice for the sake of the culture in the (incredibly intelligent) individual component is instintively protecting itself, regardless of the best interests of the individual. No conscious goal is required on the culture’s part. It lives and dies based on the effectiveness of it’s organizing memes, and how well those compete with other cultures.
Last comment, honest.
Mark – “Does this have any resonance with the cult of martyrdom being cultivated within militant Islam? Or for that matter the ethos instilled in most of the effective militaries through history that I can think of?”
When I first read the above I thought no, the military is an example of a collaborative, not an emergent, intelligence because the military follows the goals of it’s leadership.
But after your second post I think yes, because cultures evolve over time. Those that call for martyrdom, e.g. Islam and to a lesser extent Christianity, have done well. So as an organism the culture does use martyrdom, just as we use sweat to regulate our tempurature. What then is the intelligence of that organism? Does it form tools or have a mental map of its world? Those acts have to be considered seperately from the collaborative behavior of even the leaders of the countries in the culture. For that reason the example of a culture as an emergent mind is very confusing.
A culture could be quite intelligent without us knowing it. It’s components have huge interconnectivity. The bandwidth of people talking is to a rough approximation similar to a 2 Kb/sec of a neuron. But what signal does the hive mind of a culture generate that we can observe? The pattern of terrorist acts perhaps.
The example in my earlier post of talking to a chimp was weak. A better comparison to talking to the emergent intelligence of the internet would be to talk to a beehive. The beehive is simpler than the internet because its components do not collaborate.