posted
I realize this isn't exactly a new idea but I suddenly got the urge to talk about it:
The comparison has been drawn between the evolution of multicellular organisms and the evolution of complex human communities. A few billion years ago single celled organisms "discovered" (in a non-sentient, random sense) that they were more productive when they worked together. Eventually their communities developed to the point that no single piece of them could survive on its own. The entire community was necessary to reproduce into another community.
The community became an organism unto itself. Eventually those multi-cellular creatures started developing collective nervous systems that allowed them to respond intelligently to information.
Eventually some of those creatures (let's focus on humans for simplicity's sake) in turn began to realize (probably in a combination of random, nonsentient ways as well as purposeful, intelligent ways) that they were better off in communities than on their own. Their communities in turn evolved until the purpose of individual cells were so specialized that the individuals could not survive on their own. Some specialized in food production. Some specialized in waste removal. And some specialized in leadership - the decision making process of the entire community.
With that in mind, there's a few specific questions I have:
A) Does anyone know what the above theory/idea is official called? i.e. a buzzword I can google to find stuff to read by people who've put more thought into it than I?
B) What I'm really curious is, when does a group of humans working together to make collective decisions become "sentient" in its own right? What exactly is sentience? I recently read an paper about the ethics of artificial intelligence that argued that "amoral artificial intelligences" already exist in the form of corporations. They have goals, often with multiple board rooms and committees who work together to intelligently achieve them.
Just as a human can't really bring itself to care that much about stepping on an ant, corporations don't particularly care about individual people. However, they may end up caring about other multi-human organisms (cities, political-activist groups, nations, other corporations) that they can interact with on a meaningful level.
Is it possible that corporations have achieved self awareness? If so, can anyone think of a way to check?
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posted
Like maybe someday some different kind of being (like a hive mind) would consider individual humans as lowly and unsophisticated as we now consider single-celled organisms?
"Back when the only life on earth consisted of single-bodied organisms..."
Posts: 930 | Registered: Dec 2006
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quote:You might want to familiarize yourself with Dawkins' memetics.
I have. (I actually have a similar question that was based around meme theory but I figured I had enough stuff crammed into my initial post)
quote:Like maybe someday some different kind of being (like a hive mind) would consider individual humans as lowly and unsophisticated as we now consider single-celled organisms?
I'm saying, what if corporations, governments, the internet, etc already ARE hive minded beings? How would we know?
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posted
(And yes, I'm aware of how remarkably useless this question is, but considering the number of times we argue about gay marriage or God or other things that are unlikely to change minds or otherwise benefit our lives in a meaningful way, I figured I'd go for a question I hadn't seen here yet)
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quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: I'm saying, what if corporations, governments, the internet, etc already ARE hive minded beings? How would we know?
In the sense that these entities react to stimulus in characteristic ways, are composed of dynamic elements that constantly reinforce the whole, defend themselves against destruction through evolution, and continue to grow in strength and size, then they already exist as knowable entities. That doesn't mean they're sentient- a single celled organism is still a million times more complicated on the microscopic level than a corporation is at the macroscopic scale.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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quote:That doesn't mean they're sentient- a single celled organism is still a million times more complicated on the microscopic level than a corporation is at the macroscopic scale.
How do you measure this? And notice that information content is not equal to sentience; a perfectly random string is more complicated than a human brain.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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quote:I think perhaps you're getting a bit caught up in the parallels between organisms and corporate organizations.
Try thinking of dissimilarities as well.
Honestly I think they're pretty damn similar. What is a multicellar organism but a bunch of smaller organisms that have started working together and specializing? What is a human community but the exact same thing? The differences (mostly that humans are individually sentient whereas single-cells probably are not) I think make it even more likely for sentience to develop.
That said, my feeling is that most human communities are probably not sentient by virtue of them not being complex enough (I believe sentience is a byproduct of certain types of complexity. The Emergence article that is linked is relevant there). Orincono's point, that corporations are nowhere near as complex as even the simplest animal brain, is I think more meaningful.
The biggest question (which has gone unanswered, but honestly I haven't the foggiest notion of how to answer it so I'm not exactly disappointed if no one else does either) is how you'd actually check for this phenomenon. It's an interesting idea, but it doesn't become a useful theory until it can be proven false. "What criteria can we look for to determine sentience" (or sapience) seems like a question that should be useful outside of hypothetical discussions of corporate sentience.
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quote:What is a multicellar organism but a bunch of smaller organisms that have started working together and specializing? What is a human community but the exact same thing?
Not many human (or other multicellular animal) cells are capable of surviving on their own for more than a few hours. Individual humans can survive for years on end outside of communities.
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quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: "What criteria can we look for to determine sentience" (or sapience) seems like a question that should be useful outside of hypothetical discussions of corporate sentience.
It's certainly an important question in ethical matters dealing with animals, aliens, and sentient machines.
Part of the problem is that we insist that we are different than machines/other animals/etc because we are self-aware and yet we cannot precisely define anything that only self-aware beings can do in principle (I tried to phrase that differently, I really did ).
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quote:Not many human (or other multicellular animal) cells are capable of surviving on their own for more than a few hours. Individual humans can survive for years on end outside of communities.
I'm curious (I do not know the answer) - what is the actual life expectancy of a typical cell? My assumption is that cells have a much shorter life expectancy than a human, so it's not really fair to compare them.
I'm not sure we have any solid data on how long humans typically last when you drop them in the middle of the wilderness. (It's not the sort of experiment you could ethically conduct). I'm sure some of us could make it, but I think more and more of us, especially in the more industrialized countries, would be pretty screwed. Most of us don't have hunting skills or know which berries are safe and which are not.
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quote: Part of the problem is that we insist that we are different than machines/other animals/etc because we are self-aware and yet we cannot precisely define anything that only self-aware beings can do in principle
Little Fuzzy by H Beam Piper was completely about that. Piper's theory was that sapient beings differ from others in four main ways.
1. We are capable of thought not limited to sensory data.
2. We think conciously and are aware that we are.
3. We use symbols. We think in connected sequences and generalize.
4. We can imagine.
I'm a big fan of the book, crazy 60s anachronisms and all. (The computers are a hoot.) I think if I were faced with determining someone else's sapience or proving my own to an alien observer, those are the key points I'd aim for.
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quote:Originally posted by AvidReader: Little Fuzzy by H Beam Piper was completely about that. Piper's theory was that sapient beings differ from others in four main ways.
posted
Of those 4 criteria, only "thinking consciously and being aware of it" and "imagination" cannot be faked. Of those, only imagination is something that we can see evidence of externally.
A team of artists working collaboratively can generate ideas greater than they could individually, and those ideas can take on a life of their own. This gets back to Meme Theory, which brings up another question... can an idea become sentient? Unfortunately, if all 4 elements are required for true independent sapience, we probably wouldn't be able to know.
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posted
Those "key points" raise so many issues though, especially if they are meant to differentiate us from animals (I suppose that's kind of what you're getting at, correct?)
How do you know we are capable of thought not limited to sensory data? If you were born in a completely silent, dark room, with no stilmulation whatsoever, would you be able to think anything? What if everything we have ever thought does come directly from our sensory data -- even if it is so complex that it seems to be independant thought? How would we ever know? How do we know we are really self-aware? What exactly is it that we are aware of? How do we know that what we are aware of has anything to do with reality? And can we prove that animals aren't self-aware -- especially elephants, dolphins, and chimps, who all pass the mirror test? Are we sure that some animals are not capable of number three? And isn't number four the same as one?
As rules for defining sentience, they are very loose and questionable. I think one way to come closer to the answer is to evaluate the brains and behavior of animals, as well how different those animals truly are from humans (based on DNA). I think I read it some book, maybe a book by Carl Sagan, where the idea was brought up that maybe human consciousness and self-awareness is only an illusion, based simply on a staggering level of complexity of thought.
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posted
I actually do not consider us distinct from animals. I think most animals at least have the ability to think, feel, and be aware of themselves. I'm sure that several species have some degree of imagination.
I also agree that "capable of thought not limited to sensory data" is not a good rule. The last three points I know I possess, but I definitely have not imagined anything that wasn't a combination of things I had already seen or previously imagined.
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posted
Justice is based on things you can see and feel? Compassion is based on how someone else looks or smells? And those are just ideals.
We don't just think about things. We also think about ideas.
I'm not saying we don't need sensory data to learn from. But I don't think Helen Keller only started to be a person when Annie Sullivan taught her to sign. It's a necessary step to put any other knowledge in context, but we are more than just what we see, feel, taste, touch, and smell.
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posted
Corporations definitely act in a rational, intelligent fashion. To a behavioralist who thought being sentient was nothing more than acting in a sentient way, that might be enough. The trouble is that we don't think corporations have a mind or consciousness. They may "think" in the sense that they process information, but they don't experience that thinking as any sensation. I think that is an essential criteria for sentience, so without it I don't think corporations can be considered sentient in any real sense.
Then again, there is no test for that. We just assume other people have conscious minds because they are similar to us. Maybe corporations do have conscious minds too and we just don't know it because they seem to be such a different sort of thing than a human being.
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quote:Originally posted by AvidReader: I'm not saying we don't need sensory data to learn from. But I don't think Helen Keller only started to be a person when Annie Sullivan taught her to sign.
Would she still have been a person if she had been deprived of all *five* or her senses, not just two?
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posted
Hard to say. It's true that "Justice" is an idea that can exist independent of sensory input, but I also think that without sensory input it's not an idea that could imagined. If Hellen Keller couldn't at least feel pain and experience happiness, then no, I don't think there's much point in treating her as a person. Maybe from a "humans are inherently better than other things" perspective, but in my moral framework I'd consider even an animal, even one with limited cognitive development, to be carry more moral weight than a person who can't experience anything.Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
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quote: It's true that "Justice" is an idea that can exist independent of sensory input, but I also think that without sensory input it's not an idea that could imagined.
I completely agree. My point was that we're not limited to sensory data like animals. We build from it to concepts that only exist as ideas. Personally, I think that's a pretty significant difference.
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posted
I do not think that's true, actually. Consider 'justice', surely an abstract concept if ever there was one. The word has synonyms, to be sure, like 'fairness' and 'even deals' and whathaveyou, but to explain the concept to someone unfamiliar with it, these would be useless. At some point you would have to resort to sensory experience: Explain that fairness is for everyone to get the same amount of pie, that its opposite is for one to go hungry while another throws out food, and so on. In other words, precisely the way we teach children what justice is. Ultimately justice is grounded in the experience of watching your classmates share candy while you don't get any, and perhaps in hearing the teacher say "I hope you brought enough for everyone". Later on we may be able to manipulate 'justice' as a single concept, just as we multiply numbers by memorising a lookup table rather than counting out X rows of Y every time; but this is an optimisation. The underlying concept is sensory.
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posted
I think Avid's point was that most animals CAN'T reach that level, where they manipulate and understand things on an abstract basis. I'm not sure that most humans actually DO understand things on an abstract basis (my recollection from psychology class is true abstract reasoning is actually somewhat rare)
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posted
Spider Robinson wrote a few books where due to his favorite conceit--telepathy--we do become a single Uber-human organism, then go out across the galaxy looking for alien Uber-organisms to meet, itneract with, fight and/or mate with, and ultimately create an Uber-Milkywayling organism, etc, etc.
That said, don't forget that blood cells do not try to be, and can not physically be brain cells. Cells have physically evolved into very specific cells.
People have not.
Sure some specialize in food production. Others specialize in Governance. But some do both. And some who are in Waste Disposal wish and work to be the Brain Cells.
Now once we get Genetic Engineering down to the point that we produce people to fit specific roles, (short people with good night vision for mining, etc.)then we can talk about Corporate or Cultural Sentience. Until then, not so much.
Posts: 1941 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
We could always give potential hive-minds like corporations or whatever the Turing Test to answer the question are they sentient. I mean, no need to reinvent the wheel.
I actually do think societies are headed that direction, as they evolve better and better internal systems to find talent and educate and direct it to the function where it can do the most good. Right now the world is wasting 2/3 at least of our most important asset, human ingenuity, by not educating or even properly feeding and clothing all the people in the developing world, and not getting them hooked up to the internet where they can innovate effectively and we can learn from their ideas. We need to get that accomplished as a bare minimum. Then better systems for sorting and training people into roles in society in which they can become extremely productive, as well as find deep fulfillment, need to be devised and implemented.
I've given quite a bit of thought to all this, in fact. In order for humanity to avert our own extinction, we're going to have to function better as a team overall. We have to become one, in many crucial ways. Of one mind and one heart. The LDS among us know this state as a Zion society. It is, in key ways, an organism and not just a city. Think about it. The law of consecration is what cells use in a body, since all the cells take the nourishment they need, and contribute to the acquisition and metabolism of food as their situation allows.
Another way to think of it is that we're all one family. Families, like bodies, share resources freely, and all work for the good of all. I believe this analogy is also a good one, and it too occupies a large part of LDS thought about the future of humankind.
Of course, I see myself as playing a role analogous to a brain neuron in such a collective body. But doesn't everyone? From where will we find the analogs to intestinal linings or foot soles? These callings won't be so popular, I wouldn't think. That's just one problem of many.
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