26 ms·

Humans are not unitary individuals but superorganisms

197 points by cjg 11y ago

kmonad 11y ago
This is really cool. Our bodies are essentially battle fields with different replicating agents struggling for control and a "place" in the future. Any cooperative "agreement" is loose and subject to change at any point (for example cancer), and those offspring stem cells invading a mother's brain: mind-blowing (no pun intended).
- vanderZwan 11y ago
  > Our bodies are essentially battle fields with different replicating agents struggling for control and a "place" in the future. That's just another metaphor, and you have to be very careful with your choice there. To paraphrase Lakoff & Johnson[1]: the metaphors we use shape the thoughts that we understand through them. A very common one is thinking of arguments as war ("his viewpoints got attacked but he defended them well", etc). Imagine what would happen if we think of arguments as a dance? [1] http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3637992.html http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3637992...
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    Yeah it's like when Dawking wrote the Selfish Gene. He spend some time talking about that the genes weren't in fact selfish it was just that they acted as if they were.
    - vanderZwan 11y ago
      Exactly. Denis Noble wrote a perfect counter to the trap of thinking that this metaphor often leads to (although not in Dawnkins himself). In The Music of Life[1] he invert the metaphor: instead of us being "lumbering hulks, slaves to our genes", our genes are captives of our bodies, depending on our choices to keep existing. Noble's point was that you could neither prove nor disprove one to be more accurate a metaphor than the other, despite having the total opposite interpretation. I'm not saying kmonad's explanation is wrong, just that it's dangerous to not be aware of the underlying metaphor. [1] http://musicoflife.co.uk/ http://musicoflife.co.uk/
      - ThomPete 11y ago
        I actually think it's much more important to realize what metaphors are exactly because they are derived through language which by default is framing our perspectives and is limited in it's ability to express more complex reality. (Hence a picture is worth a thousand words) I always look at language as a reduction of reality not a one to one relationship with reality. I.e. we as pattern recognizing feedback loops notice some phenomena and then try trough language to express it. But because we are limited beings and our language is limited in expression we end up only expressing perspectives rather than truth. This could, I believe, also be one of the reasons why we have such a hard time finding a way to describe QM and general relativity in a unified manor. Our language really doesn't do well with paradoxes. The exception is in zen-buddhist philosophy that actually are much more accepting of paradoxes (wisdom lies in paradox) But thats another discussion. The primary point I am trying to make is that this reduction of reality leads to our perspectives and can both provide clarity but also trap us in a certain way of thinking.
        vanderZwan 11y ago
        I think you would really enjoy reading the works of Lakoff & Johnson I mentioned earlier, if you haven't already :D > I actually think it's much more important to realize what metaphors are exactly because they are derived through language which by default is framing our perspectives and is limited in it's ability to express more complex reality. (Hence a picture is worth a thousand words). I agree with everything you say - but I would like to give an opposing view to the "derived from language" bit. It's very likely to go in the other direction! One thing Lakoff & Johnson discuss - especially in their later work - is how our metaphors originate from our physical senses and our body (look up "embodied cognition" and "conceptual metaphor"). In short, they argue that we derive fundamental metaphors from the embodied experience, and inject what would otherwise be a otherwise purely symbolic language with meaning through a complex web of metaphors.
        ThomPete 11y ago
        Yes you are of course right. I am using metaphor more literally than they are.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      > Yeah it's like when Dawking wrote the Selfish Gene. Dawkins.
      - ThomPete 11y ago
        Yeah typo thanks. Too late to fix it.
  - anon4 11y ago
    Relatedly, on the subject of words: Twitter recently changed their favourite icon from a star to a heart. I've heard several people decry it as making it easier for stalkers to sexually harass women, because the new system lets them send hearts. Even though the functionality is exactly the same, some perceive it as more sexual and intimate now.
  - kmonad 11y ago
    I don't know about "our arguments", but "battle" describes much better what is happening in the context of my comment than "dance". And indeed, shaping the way we think about what's happening in our bodies as "battles" was exactly what I intended to convey, risking the inevitable misunderstanding that comes with any analogy. Of course I do not mean to imply any form of intentionality, only the inevitability of competition, or "battle".
    - vanderZwan 11y ago
      I understand where you are coming from (and personally think our conversation is more like a dance). Like I said: I don't think your analogy is wrong, just that there's a big risk of ending up with false expectations without realising that is a misapplication of the analogy. Like you mentioned, projecting intentionality where there is none is especially likely. I can give a clear example of a mistake like this: based on Paul Ewald's TED talk[1] I once was talking about the evolution of lethality in diseases with some friends. They are all highly educated, some of them doctors as well. Turns out, the less a disease depends on its host to find new hosts to infect, the more lethal it tends to be. The reason is that the mutations that maximise reproduction - even at the cost of the host's life - have the advantage over less lethal pathogens. This gives it a clear short-term advantage, but of course it does not work in the long term because it runs out of hosts. And yet some of those friends insisted that this did not make sense because it would not be in the best interest of a disease to maximise lethality, thinking in terms of intentionality that is not present in evolution. [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_ewald_asks_can_we_domesticate_germs?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_ewald_asks_can_we_domesticate...
richmarr 11y ago
I agree that humans aren't simple unitary individuals, but calling us "superorganisms" kinda devalues the word. If we're superorgansisms then so are cats, dogs, mice, birds, and anything else that relies on bacteria for digestion or has reproductive complexities like chimerism. This would probably include ants... making an ant colony a superorganism of superorganisms, so we'd need a new word for that. How about we figure out which species are unitary individuals and give them a word? Mono-organisms or something.
- dvanduzer 11y ago
  The fact that we don't know whether to consider a virus as "alive" or "non-living dynamic thingamabob" pretty much shreds that notion of atomic organisms. There is no Platonic ideal of the word "superorganism" to worry about here. There's Aspens[0] and Ants[1] alike, and plenty in between. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspen [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buggers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buggers
  - adrianN 11y ago
    I'm pretty sure that the accepted definition of "alive" includes having a metabolism, which viruses don't.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  No species are unitary individuals. No, really, there's no such thing. Everything alive is part of one ecosystem, and the only thing that really evolves is the ecosystem itself. Don't agree? Completely disconnect any apparently unitary individual from the planetary ecosystem and see how long it survives. This has practical implications, especially for extended space flight. It turns out to be extraordinarily difficult to build a functioning and stable micro-ecosystem. Thinking at the species level is almost no help at all, because what actually happens is that chemicals, energy, and information propagate through the system space, and modify each other. We don't have good models to describe what happens at that level, which makes it very hard to build or maintain systems that are stable. The Origin of the Species was a huge improvement on biblical creationism, but it would be disappointing if it was the last word on biological systems.
netcan 11y ago
This is a sort of pattern. (1) We create categories and concepts that rely on categories: molecules, organisms, species, galaxies; water, rebecca, potatoes, multiple personality disorder. (2) We use those categories to describe and understand things, engineer and theorize using them. We have evolution and chemistry and potato salad recipes. (3) Then we discover that these categories aren't really real. They're real, like, but not really real, you know what I mean. Tasmanian devils are being decimated by a contagious cancer. A mutated cell in some devil reproduced until it was lumps, then the devils bit another delve in the face (they're not nice animals) and some of that cancer jumped into another one and spread. Now, that cancer has outlived his maker and is going around spreading in the world with complete disregard for the concepts of organism or species and behaving like a bacteria, virus or somesuch. Instead of spreading normally like the rest of the devil by sexy with other devils it jumps into the other devil's face (sometimes during sex, they are not nice animals). Maybe one day it will evolve into our replacement. Maybe it will find symbioses with sheep and become a beneficial gut fauna (it is a taste devil after all). We make up these categories for convenience. They are not obligated to comply.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  The posterchild for categorization failure is 'species'. The closer you look at what a species is the more nebulous it becomes.
  - samuel 11y ago
    Most of the models that we use everyday are "leaky abstractions". They are useful in most contexts, but they get fuzzy at their boundaries. My favourite example is the "chicken and egg" problem. The difficulty of it is to define what a chicken is, everything is trivial afterwards. The answer, IMHO, is that "a chicken" was born from an egg put by a "non-chicken".
    - dTal 11y ago
      It seems to me that difficulty is not so much defining what a chicken is, but what a chicken egg is - is it an egg laid by a chicken, or an egg a chicken hatches from?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
pessimizer 11y ago
The fact that people are living with only a single brain hemisphere (or less) with relatively little difficulty has always been enough to make this real for me. I can easily imagine a hypothetical scientist slicing half of my brain out and transplanting it into another body, and that body acting as a new individual. It's only the constant feedback and proximity of my parts that makes me feel unitary.
amelius 11y ago
What is of course interesting, is that these organisms, when working together, can create things such as the experience of pleasure. This makes me wonder what kind of experience could arise if humans organize into a single "meta" organism, and if the "lower" individuals would experience anything of the meta-experience.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  > This makes me wonder what kind of experience could arise if humans organize into a single "meta" organism, and if the "lower" individuals would experience anything of the meta-experience. Have a look at a stadium full of people watching a football match. It really does from some angle look as if there are two giant organisms. Or nation states at war as observed on a map (the latter reminds me of amoeba moving around).
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    >> if the "lower" individuals would experience anything of the meta-experience. > Have a look at a stadium full of people watching a football match. It really does from some angle look as if there are two giant organisms. Moreover, if you look at the phenomena like "the wave" (aka. Mexican wave), it seems that the "lower" individuals do experience something more in such a group than they do in small crowds. I've heard that being in a big crowd can in some way override individual instincts and reasoning patterns.
b6 11y ago
Really interesting subject. I'm more like a forest than an animal! If humans are higher-order animals on top of cells and bacteria (us not caring much about them and them not being aware of us), are humans also the cells of some super-er animals? Apparently the Buddha said that one of the characteristics of reality is that there is no such thing as "you", no unchanging entity that could be called the perceiver of all these perceptions. I guess we're like the boat whose parts are all replaced over time.
- mikekchar 11y ago
  You could imagine that "you" is simply an artefact of memory. Because it creates a sense of continuity, it is an easy place to create a barrier outside of which is "not you". If you could remember other people's thoughts, how would it affect your perception of yourself? Just as a neuron acts in concert with other neurons, but does so independently, so do we act in concert with our surroundings. If not for our memory, that creates identity, how are we separate from the rest of the universe? Though having said that, there are many other explanations which people believe in very strongly. I'm not attempting to challenge those notions. I'm just musing out loud.
  - andyl 11y ago
    Where does the memory reside? What is it that 'remembers'?
- Natanael_L 11y ago
  Looking at ants, one might consider that to be the case.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
  > are humans also the cells of some super-er animals? Humans are starting to look slightly more like eusocial insects the last few hundred years than they did previously. I see quite a few sterile worker drones around lately (they congratulate themselves on being DINKs and "childfree").
- sooheon 11y ago
sageikosa 11y ago
Kind of a fluffy piece to me, but that might be because as I write this, I am looking up on my shelf with "The Selfish Gene" sitting underneath "The Extended Phenotype".
- abandonliberty 11y ago
  It's the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect at full force. Meanwhile many comments in this thread remind me of this bit by Paul Graham: If you're a database expert, don't build a chat app for teenagers (unless you're also a teenager). Maybe it's a good idea, but you can't trust your judgment about that, so ignore it. There have to be other ideas that involve databases, and whose quality you can judge. Do you find it hard to come up with good ideas involving databases? That's because your expertise raises your standards. Your ideas about chat apps are just as bad, but you're giving yourself a Dunning-Kruger pass in that domain.
Aardwolf 11y ago
"A very large number of different human and non-human individuals are struggling inside us for control" Interesting article, but I think it should be careful with exaggerations like this, "a large number of humans" is something entirely different than "possibly one if you had a born or unborn twin"
dandare 11y ago
Vague statements, low information density. Dislike
ommunist 11y ago
Very shallow article, but very good problem raised into public attention. But rumours about Toxoplasmic pandemia in Britain are grossly exaggerated. Also our unique relationship with parasites like worms are not even touched. UPD: more than 80% of Japanese people (living in Japan) have worms untreated and Japanese people life expectancy is dramatically better than in any other nation.
snowwrestler 11y ago
It's arguable that all organisms today are superorganisms. Try to grow a plant in inert soil without bacteria, for example. You probably have to go back 3.5 billion years, to the dawn of life, to find organisms that did not depend on any other organism to grow and/or reproduce. And maybe not even then; it's possible that early life arrived on Earth from somewhere else, on a meteorite or comet.
- ZeroFries 11y ago
  Go further back than life to molecules and the same is probably true. Everything is a holon.
jcromartie 11y ago
And not just humans, all life is this way.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
The way all organisms depend on the ecosystem for their basic function paints human-made self-replication in a different light. I used to think that we'll reach the proper level of nanotech if we learn to make machines that build themselves pretty much from the scratch. Throw a rock in, out swarm of robots go. I used to think that's how nature works. That it eats atoms or simple molecules and then spews out organisms. But it turns out, nature is cheating. There are things that human cells can't make. We depend on other, smaller organisms to make them. For instance, we can't make vitamins ourselves, we need to source them from outside. It turns out that even for replication, cells need to have proper prefabs available in the environment. For instance, we're swimming in nitrogen, and plants can't use it anyway because it's not in a proper form. Which means that if we want to copy this ability, we need to just focus on "vitamins". That is, all the hard-to-make stuff that requires large-scale, high-tech industry to be produced. If we can tile the area where a robot operates with universal microcontrollers and accept that as a part of its environment, then the problem of self-replication becomes much easier. There's a big volcano^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfactory operating somewhere, pumping out those small prefabs, and robots are "eating" them and incorporating into themselves and their children. Yes, it's cheating. But nature cheats too.
- anon4 11y ago
  So make many different kinds of specialised robots that work together in a symbiotic relationship.
- ZeroFries 11y ago
  I like to think of nature as taking over object generation where stars left off (and some more duns mental object builders before stars). You need nature to create high order objects and elements and to combine them in novel ways.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    So in this line of thinking, we are taking over where the nature left off - since our mind-driven changes are orders of magnitude faster and more efficient than evolution, we're the dominant force of invention now.
purplerabbit 11y ago
On "meta-organisms," which several have mentioned... It's not a stretch to think of human groups who act in a coordinated way as meta-organisms... In fact, we do it every day. "Google" does not exist -- it's a coordinated group of people acting as a corporation. Even though they're spatiotemporally discontinuous, these organisms seem to be obviously real, even though this leads to some observations that sound really pagan. These entities (like Google, or governments) exert their own wills and controls over our actions and environments... We're basically their subjects. If you're right-brained at all, try visualizing these entities. It can make for some interesting impressions :) Oh, and on terminology: I think it's fair to refer to ourselves (or any higher-order but spatiotemporally continuous organisms) as "super-organisms." I think of higher-order, spatiotemporally _discontinous_ organisms "meta-organisms"
- k__ 11y ago
  I'd consider groups of humans as organisms too. To me the prison system of countries feels a bit like the cancer prevention in bodies. I mean, it even got something like auto-immune problems, you just have to look at the USA.
PaulHoule 11y ago
Ron Hubbard was right...
vetrom 11y ago
Yay, another vague Toxoplasma gondii article with vague statements and suppositions.

197 points by cjg 11y ago

This is really cool. Our bodies are essentially battle fields with different replicating agents struggling for control and a "place" in the future. Any cooperative "agreement" is loose and subject to change at any point (for example cancer), and those offspring stem cells invading a mother's brain: mind-blowing (no pun intended).

vanderZwan 11y ago
> Our bodies are essentially battle fields with different replicating agents struggling for control and a "place" in the future. That's just another metaphor, and you have to be very careful with your choice there. To paraphrase Lakoff & Johnson[1]: the metaphors we use shape the thoughts that we understand through them. A very common one is thinking of arguments as war ("his viewpoints got attacked but he defended them well", etc). Imagine what would happen if we think of arguments as a dance? [1] http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3637992.html http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3637992...
- ThomPete 11y ago
  Yeah it's like when Dawking wrote the Selfish Gene. He spend some time talking about that the genes weren't in fact selfish it was just that they acted as if they were.
  - vanderZwan 11y ago
    Exactly. Denis Noble wrote a perfect counter to the trap of thinking that this metaphor often leads to (although not in Dawnkins himself). In The Music of Life[1] he invert the metaphor: instead of us being "lumbering hulks, slaves to our genes", our genes are captives of our bodies, depending on our choices to keep existing. Noble's point was that you could neither prove nor disprove one to be more accurate a metaphor than the other, despite having the total opposite interpretation. I'm not saying kmonad's explanation is wrong, just that it's dangerous to not be aware of the underlying metaphor. [1] http://musicoflife.co.uk/ http://musicoflife.co.uk/
    - ThomPete 11y ago
      I actually think it's much more important to realize what metaphors are exactly because they are derived through language which by default is framing our perspectives and is limited in it's ability to express more complex reality. (Hence a picture is worth a thousand words) I always look at language as a reduction of reality not a one to one relationship with reality. I.e. we as pattern recognizing feedback loops notice some phenomena and then try trough language to express it. But because we are limited beings and our language is limited in expression we end up only expressing perspectives rather than truth. This could, I believe, also be one of the reasons why we have such a hard time finding a way to describe QM and general relativity in a unified manor. Our language really doesn't do well with paradoxes. The exception is in zen-buddhist philosophy that actually are much more accepting of paradoxes (wisdom lies in paradox) But thats another discussion. The primary point I am trying to make is that this reduction of reality leads to our perspectives and can both provide clarity but also trap us in a certain way of thinking.
      - vanderZwan 11y ago
        I think you would really enjoy reading the works of Lakoff & Johnson I mentioned earlier, if you haven't already :D > I actually think it's much more important to realize what metaphors are exactly because they are derived through language which by default is framing our perspectives and is limited in it's ability to express more complex reality. (Hence a picture is worth a thousand words). I agree with everything you say - but I would like to give an opposing view to the "derived from language" bit. It's very likely to go in the other direction! One thing Lakoff & Johnson discuss - especially in their later work - is how our metaphors originate from our physical senses and our body (look up "embodied cognition" and "conceptual metaphor"). In short, they argue that we derive fundamental metaphors from the embodied experience, and inject what would otherwise be a otherwise purely symbolic language with meaning through a complex web of metaphors.
        ThomPete 11y ago
        Yes you are of course right. I am using metaphor more literally than they are.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    > Yeah it's like when Dawking wrote the Selfish Gene. Dawkins.
    - ThomPete 11y ago
      Yeah typo thanks. Too late to fix it.
- anon4 11y ago
  Relatedly, on the subject of words: Twitter recently changed their favourite icon from a star to a heart. I've heard several people decry it as making it easier for stalkers to sexually harass women, because the new system lets them send hearts. Even though the functionality is exactly the same, some perceive it as more sexual and intimate now.
- kmonad 11y ago
  I don't know about "our arguments", but "battle" describes much better what is happening in the context of my comment than "dance". And indeed, shaping the way we think about what's happening in our bodies as "battles" was exactly what I intended to convey, risking the inevitable misunderstanding that comes with any analogy. Of course I do not mean to imply any form of intentionality, only the inevitability of competition, or "battle".
  - vanderZwan 11y ago
    I understand where you are coming from (and personally think our conversation is more like a dance). Like I said: I don't think your analogy is wrong, just that there's a big risk of ending up with false expectations without realising that is a misapplication of the analogy. Like you mentioned, projecting intentionality where there is none is especially likely. I can give a clear example of a mistake like this: based on Paul Ewald's TED talk[1] I once was talking about the evolution of lethality in diseases with some friends. They are all highly educated, some of them doctors as well. Turns out, the less a disease depends on its host to find new hosts to infect, the more lethal it tends to be. The reason is that the mutations that maximise reproduction - even at the cost of the host's life - have the advantage over less lethal pathogens. This gives it a clear short-term advantage, but of course it does not work in the long term because it runs out of hosts. And yet some of those friends insisted that this did not make sense because it would not be in the best interest of a disease to maximise lethality, thinking in terms of intentionality that is not present in evolution. [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_ewald_asks_can_we_domesticate_germs?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_ewald_asks_can_we_domesticate...

richmarr 11y ago

I agree that humans aren't simple unitary individuals, but calling us "superorganisms" kinda devalues the word. If we're superorgansisms then so are cats, dogs, mice, birds, and anything else that relies on bacteria for digestion or has reproductive complexities like chimerism. This would probably include ants... making an ant colony a superorganism of superorganisms, so we'd need a new word for that. How about we figure out which species are unitary individuals and give them a word? Mono-organisms or something.

dvanduzer 11y ago
The fact that we don't know whether to consider a virus as "alive" or "non-living dynamic thingamabob" pretty much shreds that notion of atomic organisms. There is no Platonic ideal of the word "superorganism" to worry about here. There's Aspens[0] and Ants[1] alike, and plenty in between. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspen [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buggers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buggers
- adrianN 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure that the accepted definition of "alive" includes having a metabolism, which viruses don't.
TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
No species are unitary individuals. No, really, there's no such thing. Everything alive is part of one ecosystem, and the only thing that really evolves is the ecosystem itself. Don't agree? Completely disconnect any apparently unitary individual from the planetary ecosystem and see how long it survives. This has practical implications, especially for extended space flight. It turns out to be extraordinarily difficult to build a functioning and stable micro-ecosystem. Thinking at the species level is almost no help at all, because what actually happens is that chemicals, energy, and information propagate through the system space, and modify each other. We don't have good models to describe what happens at that level, which makes it very hard to build or maintain systems that are stable. The Origin of the Species was a huge improvement on biblical creationism, but it would be disappointing if it was the last word on biological systems.

netcan 11y ago

This is a sort of pattern. (1) We create categories and concepts that rely on categories: molecules, organisms, species, galaxies; water, rebecca, potatoes, multiple personality disorder. (2) We use those categories to describe and understand things, engineer and theorize using them. We have evolution and chemistry and potato salad recipes. (3) Then we discover that these categories aren't really real. They're real, like, but not really real, you know what I mean. Tasmanian devils are being decimated by a contagious cancer. A mutated cell in some devil reproduced until it was lumps, then the devils bit another delve in the face (they're not nice animals) and some of that cancer jumped into another one and spread. Now, that cancer has outlived his maker and is going around spreading in the world with complete disregard for the concepts of organism or species and behaving like a bacteria, virus or somesuch. Instead of spreading normally like the rest of the devil by sexy with other devils it jumps into the other devil's face (sometimes during sex, they are not nice animals). Maybe one day it will evolve into our replacement. Maybe it will find symbioses with sheep and become a beneficial gut fauna (it is a taste devil after all). We make up these categories for convenience. They are not obligated to comply.

jacquesm 11y ago
The posterchild for categorization failure is 'species'. The closer you look at what a species is the more nebulous it becomes.
- samuel 11y ago
  Most of the models that we use everyday are "leaky abstractions". They are useful in most contexts, but they get fuzzy at their boundaries. My favourite example is the "chicken and egg" problem. The difficulty of it is to define what a chicken is, everything is trivial afterwards. The answer, IMHO, is that "a chicken" was born from an egg put by a "non-chicken".
  - dTal 11y ago
    It seems to me that difficulty is not so much defining what a chicken is, but what a chicken egg is - is it an egg laid by a chicken, or an egg a chicken hatches from?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

pessimizer 11y ago

The fact that people are living with only a single brain hemisphere (or less) with relatively little difficulty has always been enough to make this real for me. I can easily imagine a hypothetical scientist slicing half of my brain out and transplanting it into another body, and that body acting as a new individual. It's only the constant feedback and proximity of my parts that makes me feel unitary.

amelius 11y ago

What is of course interesting, is that these organisms, when working together, can create things such as the experience of pleasure. This makes me wonder what kind of experience could arise if humans organize into a single "meta" organism, and if the "lower" individuals would experience anything of the meta-experience.

jacquesm 11y ago
> This makes me wonder what kind of experience could arise if humans organize into a single "meta" organism, and if the "lower" individuals would experience anything of the meta-experience. Have a look at a stadium full of people watching a football match. It really does from some angle look as if there are two giant organisms. Or nation states at war as observed on a map (the latter reminds me of amoeba moving around).
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  >> if the "lower" individuals would experience anything of the meta-experience. > Have a look at a stadium full of people watching a football match. It really does from some angle look as if there are two giant organisms. Moreover, if you look at the phenomena like "the wave" (aka. Mexican wave), it seems that the "lower" individuals do experience something more in such a group than they do in small crowds. I've heard that being in a big crowd can in some way override individual instincts and reasoning patterns.

b6 11y ago

Really interesting subject. I'm more like a forest than an animal! If humans are higher-order animals on top of cells and bacteria (us not caring much about them and them not being aware of us), are humans also the cells of some super-er animals? Apparently the Buddha said that one of the characteristics of reality is that there is no such thing as "you", no unchanging entity that could be called the perceiver of all these perceptions. I guess we're like the boat whose parts are all replaced over time.

mikekchar 11y ago
You could imagine that "you" is simply an artefact of memory. Because it creates a sense of continuity, it is an easy place to create a barrier outside of which is "not you". If you could remember other people's thoughts, how would it affect your perception of yourself? Just as a neuron acts in concert with other neurons, but does so independently, so do we act in concert with our surroundings. If not for our memory, that creates identity, how are we separate from the rest of the universe? Though having said that, there are many other explanations which people believe in very strongly. I'm not attempting to challenge those notions. I'm just musing out loud.
- andyl 11y ago
  Where does the memory reside? What is it that 'remembers'?
Natanael_L 11y ago
Looking at ants, one might consider that to be the case.
NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
> are humans also the cells of some super-er animals? Humans are starting to look slightly more like eusocial insects the last few hundred years than they did previously. I see quite a few sterile worker drones around lately (they congratulate themselves on being DINKs and "childfree").
sooheon 11y ago

sageikosa 11y ago

Kind of a fluffy piece to me, but that might be because as I write this, I am looking up on my shelf with "The Selfish Gene" sitting underneath "The Extended Phenotype".

abandonliberty 11y ago
It's the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect at full force. Meanwhile many comments in this thread remind me of this bit by Paul Graham: If you're a database expert, don't build a chat app for teenagers (unless you're also a teenager). Maybe it's a good idea, but you can't trust your judgment about that, so ignore it. There have to be other ideas that involve databases, and whose quality you can judge. Do you find it hard to come up with good ideas involving databases? That's because your expertise raises your standards. Your ideas about chat apps are just as bad, but you're giving yourself a Dunning-Kruger pass in that domain.

Aardwolf 11y ago

"A very large number of different human and non-human individuals are struggling inside us for control" Interesting article, but I think it should be careful with exaggerations like this, "a large number of humans" is something entirely different than "possibly one if you had a born or unborn twin"

dandare 11y ago

Vague statements, low information density. Dislike

ommunist 11y ago

Very shallow article, but very good problem raised into public attention. But rumours about Toxoplasmic pandemia in Britain are grossly exaggerated. Also our unique relationship with parasites like worms are not even touched. UPD: more than 80% of Japanese people (living in Japan) have worms untreated and Japanese people life expectancy is dramatically better than in any other nation.

snowwrestler 11y ago

It's arguable that all organisms today are superorganisms. Try to grow a plant in inert soil without bacteria, for example. You probably have to go back 3.5 billion years, to the dawn of life, to find organisms that did not depend on any other organism to grow and/or reproduce. And maybe not even then; it's possible that early life arrived on Earth from somewhere else, on a meteorite or comet.

ZeroFries 11y ago
Go further back than life to molecules and the same is probably true. Everything is a holon.

jcromartie 11y ago

And not just humans, all life is this way.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

The way all organisms depend on the ecosystem for their basic function paints human-made self-replication in a different light. I used to think that we'll reach the proper level of nanotech if we learn to make machines that build themselves pretty much from the scratch. Throw a rock in, out swarm of robots go. I used to think that's how nature works. That it eats atoms or simple molecules and then spews out organisms. But it turns out, nature is cheating. There are things that human cells can't make. We depend on other, smaller organisms to make them. For instance, we can't make vitamins ourselves, we need to source them from outside. It turns out that even for replication, cells need to have proper prefabs available in the environment. For instance, we're swimming in nitrogen, and plants can't use it anyway because it's not in a proper form. Which means that if we want to copy this ability, we need to just focus on "vitamins". That is, all the hard-to-make stuff that requires large-scale, high-tech industry to be produced. If we can tile the area where a robot operates with universal microcontrollers and accept that as a part of its environment, then the problem of self-replication becomes much easier. There's a big volcano^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfactory operating somewhere, pumping out those small prefabs, and robots are "eating" them and incorporating into themselves and their children. Yes, it's cheating. But nature cheats too.

anon4 11y ago
So make many different kinds of specialised robots that work together in a symbiotic relationship.
ZeroFries 11y ago
I like to think of nature as taking over object generation where stars left off (and some more duns mental object builders before stars). You need nature to create high order objects and elements and to combine them in novel ways.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  So in this line of thinking, we are taking over where the nature left off - since our mind-driven changes are orders of magnitude faster and more efficient than evolution, we're the dominant force of invention now.

purplerabbit 11y ago

On "meta-organisms," which several have mentioned... It's not a stretch to think of human groups who act in a coordinated way as meta-organisms... In fact, we do it every day. "Google" does not exist -- it's a coordinated group of people acting as a corporation. Even though they're spatiotemporally discontinuous, these organisms seem to be obviously real, even though this leads to some observations that sound really pagan. These entities (like Google, or governments) exert their own wills and controls over our actions and environments... We're basically their subjects. If you're right-brained at all, try visualizing these entities. It can make for some interesting impressions :) Oh, and on terminology: I think it's fair to refer to ourselves (or any higher-order but spatiotemporally continuous organisms) as "super-organisms." I think of higher-order, spatiotemporally _discontinous_ organisms "meta-organisms"

k__ 11y ago
I'd consider groups of humans as organisms too. To me the prison system of countries feels a bit like the cancer prevention in bodies. I mean, it even got something like auto-immune problems, you just have to look at the USA.

PaulHoule 11y ago

Ron Hubbard was right...

vetrom 11y ago

Yay, another vague Toxoplasma gondii article with vague statements and suppositions.