4 ms·

This resonates heavily with me. It's an intuitively interesting idea. I do have one issue though (emphasis mine): "a living system maintaining both a higher le

by 3np 5y ago

This resonates heavily with me. It's an intuitively interesting idea. I do have one issue though (emphasis mine): "a living system maintaining both a higher level of internal cooperation and a lower level of internal conflict than either its components or any larger systems of which it is a component." So say there exists some form of higher-level individual that where we can be considered as components. Does its existence suddenly revoke our individual-ness? I don't see why that should be, why it has to be exclusive. The flatworm and the neoblasts can be individuals at the same time. ...But then the definition is meaningless. It'd be great to make it weaker without breaking it, so to say

deleted 5y ago
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mistermann 5y ago
> So say there exists some form of higher-level individual that where we can be considered as components. Does its existence suddenly revoke our individual-ness? I don't see why that should be, why it has to be exclusive. The flatworm and the neoblasts can be individuals at the same time. A far out way of considering it is in the context of greater humanity and the various pesky problems within it like anti-vaxxers, climate deniers, child deaths due to malnutrition, war, lack of genuine (non-illusory) empathy, etc.
- munificent 5y ago
  I've had this weird thought stuck in my head over the past few months as I've been reading "Humankind" and watching the horrors of politics and the pandemic: The idea of "human nature"—good and evil—makes a hell of a lot more sense if you think of humans as a colony species where each tribe is a single individual competing against others. It's not so much that humans are uniformly capable of both good and evil. It's that what we deem "good" is mostly how we treat our own tribe and what we call "evil" is how we treat others. It's like trying to decide if an arm mostly good or mostly evil because it washes its own body and strikes other people. Those actions are fundamentally different—on incompatible moral levels—because the former is done to the arm's own organism and the latter to another. It may not even be meaningful to try to aggregate how we behave to our in-group and how we behave towards our out-group into any unified metric.
  - mistermann 5y ago
    May I offer an alternative/supplemental approach: rather than thinking of the situation from the perspective of a human within a tribe, analyze the system from the perspective of an ~alien who is outside the system. Treat it like a standard systems analysis exercise: isolate, decompose, and abstract the various objects within the system. So what was formerly a person, is now an agent running a sophisticated yet obviously hilariously flawed biological neural network, running on top of a similarly flawed set of data...and so forth and so on. I find that from this perspective, all the pieces start to fit together the more you think of it. Not only does what we are living through increasingly make sense, after a while it starts to seem logically inevitable (under present conditions, that is). And once you spend sufficient time on this phase, ideas might start falling out of the sky on how to plausibly rectify the situation.
  - mwcampbell 5y ago
    Do we have any hope of ever treating all of humanity as our in group? Ideally we should treat people who are infected with dangerous ideas not as enemies, but as we would treat sick members of our tribe.
mannykannot 5y ago
I think the fact that we are self-aware makes it difficult (in the "it's not helpful" sense) to revoke our individuality if we participate in something bigger than ourselves. To make such a claim, I think one would have to propose some way, for us to be components of a higher-level individual, that takes away our self-awareness. Philosophy has long held (though not without dispute, of course!) that the world is ontologically divided into 'natural kinds' that have metaphysical significance, but I side with the view that ontologies are merely useful tools in epistemology, subject to modification and qualification as our knowledge increases, and useful in some contexts but not necessarily all. Nothing breaks if we talk about neoblasts being "in a sense" individuals, while also talking about planaria being "in a sense" individuals, so long as it is either obvious, or we make clear, in what sense we mean. There is quite a continuum here: for example, slime molds are even less aggregated entities than planaria. And then there is the aphorism "a chicken is an egg's way of making more eggs."
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  If we imagine that it becomes possible to ‘record’ full sensory experiences and ‘replay’ them in another person: would a collective pour their meager resources into elevating the life, lifestyle, and success of the single experience donor such that the collective can experience a superior life (as a personal state) that would otherwise be unattainable? Mary Lou Jepsen at Openwater talked about her team’s efforts to create that tech in a Long Now Foundation talk back in 2018 https://www.openwater.cc/ https://www.openwater.cc/ https://longnow.org/seminars/02018/oct/29/toward-practical-telepathy/ https://longnow.org/seminars/02018/oct/29/toward-practical-t...
- bobthechef 5y ago
  > I side with the view that ontologies are merely useful tools in epistemology, subject to modification and qualification as our knowledge increases This is incoherent. How can knowledge even exist if there are no natural kinds? What exactly would you be knowing in their absence? One can be mistaken about a particular predication, but knowledge isn't even possible if you deny the reality of natural kinds. Knowledge presupposes universals and universals presuppose natural kinds. I don't even know what is useful about natural kinds if they don't exist. How could you even talk about usefulness in their absence? You've denied the very possibility of even having a measure of usefulness! You seem to be taking a vaguely Kantian view of the world, except that you've gone further by denying that the categories of the mind are fixed AND that noumena are real. Kant himself is incoherent. If noumena are unknowable and all we have are phenomena and some mental schemata, then why posit noumena in the first place? What's the justification? In your case, how would you even make the claim you've made? Look at this statement: "I think the fact that we are self-aware makes it difficult (in the "it's not helpful" sense) to revoke our individuality if we participate in something bigger than ourselves." Putting aside the revolting notion of revoking my individuality like some collectivist (sorry, I'm a person, I have individuality, thanks), who is "we"? Wouldn't that denote at least suggest a genus, if not a species? That's just the beginning. Even if we accept that science reifies some things (which it does; science is to a large degree instrumentalist, but I know that only because I am capable of theoretical knowledge), that still presumes the existence of natural kinds and a broader capacity to know them. Science just becomes a way of organizing data for practical purposes (like laws that classify shellfish as fruit or whatever) and less a theoretical enterprise interested in knowing things as they actually are. The only workable solution is one that assumes the mind can know reality in principle. It can make mistakes, it can be in error, but it is capable of knowing. Skepticism is unworkable and nothing is worse than a kind of domesticated, halfway house skepticism that fails to notice the non-skeptical baggage that's being smuggled in through the backdoor to produce this half-hearted in-between. Either accept that knowledge is possible, or accept insanity. You cannot coherently straddle both.
deleted 5y ago
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by 3np 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mistermann 5y ago

> So say there exists some form of higher-level individual that where we can be considered as components. Does its existence suddenly revoke our individual-ness? I don't see why that should be, why it has to be exclusive. The flatworm and the neoblasts can be individuals at the same time. A far out way of considering it is in the context of greater humanity and the various pesky problems within it like anti-vaxxers, climate deniers, child deaths due to malnutrition, war, lack of genuine (non-illusory) empathy, etc.

munificent 5y ago
I've had this weird thought stuck in my head over the past few months as I've been reading "Humankind" and watching the horrors of politics and the pandemic: The idea of "human nature"—good and evil—makes a hell of a lot more sense if you think of humans as a colony species where each tribe is a single individual competing against others. It's not so much that humans are uniformly capable of both good and evil. It's that what we deem "good" is mostly how we treat our own tribe and what we call "evil" is how we treat others. It's like trying to decide if an arm mostly good or mostly evil because it washes its own body and strikes other people. Those actions are fundamentally different—on incompatible moral levels—because the former is done to the arm's own organism and the latter to another. It may not even be meaningful to try to aggregate how we behave to our in-group and how we behave towards our out-group into any unified metric.
- mistermann 5y ago
  May I offer an alternative/supplemental approach: rather than thinking of the situation from the perspective of a human within a tribe, analyze the system from the perspective of an ~alien who is outside the system. Treat it like a standard systems analysis exercise: isolate, decompose, and abstract the various objects within the system. So what was formerly a person, is now an agent running a sophisticated yet obviously hilariously flawed biological neural network, running on top of a similarly flawed set of data...and so forth and so on. I find that from this perspective, all the pieces start to fit together the more you think of it. Not only does what we are living through increasingly make sense, after a while it starts to seem logically inevitable (under present conditions, that is). And once you spend sufficient time on this phase, ideas might start falling out of the sky on how to plausibly rectify the situation.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  Do we have any hope of ever treating all of humanity as our in group? Ideally we should treat people who are infected with dangerous ideas not as enemies, but as we would treat sick members of our tribe.

mannykannot 5y ago

I think the fact that we are self-aware makes it difficult (in the "it's not helpful" sense) to revoke our individuality if we participate in something bigger than ourselves. To make such a claim, I think one would have to propose some way, for us to be components of a higher-level individual, that takes away our self-awareness. Philosophy has long held (though not without dispute, of course!) that the world is ontologically divided into 'natural kinds' that have metaphysical significance, but I side with the view that ontologies are merely useful tools in epistemology, subject to modification and qualification as our knowledge increases, and useful in some contexts but not necessarily all. Nothing breaks if we talk about neoblasts being "in a sense" individuals, while also talking about planaria being "in a sense" individuals, so long as it is either obvious, or we make clear, in what sense we mean. There is quite a continuum here: for example, slime molds are even less aggregated entities than planaria. And then there is the aphorism "a chicken is an egg's way of making more eggs."

germinalphrase 5y ago
If we imagine that it becomes possible to ‘record’ full sensory experiences and ‘replay’ them in another person: would a collective pour their meager resources into elevating the life, lifestyle, and success of the single experience donor such that the collective can experience a superior life (as a personal state) that would otherwise be unattainable? Mary Lou Jepsen at Openwater talked about her team’s efforts to create that tech in a Long Now Foundation talk back in 2018 https://www.openwater.cc/ https://www.openwater.cc/ https://longnow.org/seminars/02018/oct/29/toward-practical-telepathy/ https://longnow.org/seminars/02018/oct/29/toward-practical-t...
bobthechef 5y ago
> I side with the view that ontologies are merely useful tools in epistemology, subject to modification and qualification as our knowledge increases This is incoherent. How can knowledge even exist if there are no natural kinds? What exactly would you be knowing in their absence? One can be mistaken about a particular predication, but knowledge isn't even possible if you deny the reality of natural kinds. Knowledge presupposes universals and universals presuppose natural kinds. I don't even know what is useful about natural kinds if they don't exist. How could you even talk about usefulness in their absence? You've denied the very possibility of even having a measure of usefulness! You seem to be taking a vaguely Kantian view of the world, except that you've gone further by denying that the categories of the mind are fixed AND that noumena are real. Kant himself is incoherent. If noumena are unknowable and all we have are phenomena and some mental schemata, then why posit noumena in the first place? What's the justification? In your case, how would you even make the claim you've made? Look at this statement: "I think the fact that we are self-aware makes it difficult (in the "it's not helpful" sense) to revoke our individuality if we participate in something bigger than ourselves." Putting aside the revolting notion of revoking my individuality like some collectivist (sorry, I'm a person, I have individuality, thanks), who is "we"? Wouldn't that denote at least suggest a genus, if not a species? That's just the beginning. Even if we accept that science reifies some things (which it does; science is to a large degree instrumentalist, but I know that only because I am capable of theoretical knowledge), that still presumes the existence of natural kinds and a broader capacity to know them. Science just becomes a way of organizing data for practical purposes (like laws that classify shellfish as fruit or whatever) and less a theoretical enterprise interested in knowing things as they actually are. The only workable solution is one that assumes the mind can know reality in principle. It can make mistakes, it can be in error, but it is capable of knowing. Skepticism is unworkable and nothing is worse than a kind of domesticated, halfway house skepticism that fails to notice the non-skeptical baggage that's being smuggled in through the backdoor to produce this half-hearted in-between. Either accept that knowledge is possible, or accept insanity. You cannot coherently straddle both.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]