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> 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

> 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.

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.