![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trusting humanity
Jul. 22nd, 2005 07:24 pmI went down to the book signing last night with my niece Lois, to hear and see Neil Gaiman. It was well worth it. He seems a very nice guy along with being a brilliant writer. I also had the great pleasure of meeting the owner of Pulp Fiction bookshop, who had organised the event. What a wonderful person he is! In the car on the way down and back I chatted with Lois on various topics and, as always, I was impressed at the perceptiveness and agility of that young mind (she is 15). In the waiting audience of people I struck up a conversation with a lovely young woman named Lucy, who is a librarian (and yes, she was sexy -- all librarians are, aren't they?).
On the way back from the event Lois and I were talking about a lot of things and at one point we discussed the puzzle that is consciousness. She has a theory about it that she was unable to explain -- she was struggling for words to explain her concepts. Her thoughts sounded similar to some of the recent philosophic discussions I've heard about why we are altruistic -- that we have more than just genes invested in each other. In a real sense we share some degree of consciousness and feeling. I'm not sure if that was what Lois was getting at. Hopefully she'll write it down so that I can read it later.
We touched on the point of the hive mind -- how a colony of ants is smarter than any single ant. I should have mentioned to her that this is true, to some degree, of humans too. There have been plenty of examples where groups of people are smarter than the individuals, like those big bottles containing hundreds of objects and people have to guess the number of objects, or people have to guess the weight of some object; no individual is very likely to get it right, but it generally works out that the group as a whole tends to get it right.
Most people start to become upset with this line of conversation because it sounds like I'm beginning to say that communism can work or that individuals are not as important as the "borg". We have been subjected to constant and endless barrages of propaganda against groups of people being as worthwhile as individuals; that groups are dangerous and not to be trusted. But I got to thinking about this. All the occasions where groups became dangerous that I could think of were when a crazy individual controlled a group -- those were not examples of the group mind at work, but of domination of the group by a single power-hungry mind. That is clearly dangerous.
A great example of the group mind is the free market. Economists and libertarians love to talk mystically of the "invisible hand of the free market". The group mind shows itself, paradoxically, when the individuals are at their most free and unconstrained. Another example of the group mind is the open source movement. Another is the development of wiki projects which are popping up everywhere these days, like the very cool Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.com) -- rapidly becoming the world's largest, most complete, and most flexible encyclopedia.
I keep getting the feeling that a fresh wind of change is growing. If we are lucky it just may blow away the lies about how we need to trust this or that authority figure to lead us out of our problems.
Maybe the solution will be if we just learn to trust humanity.
On the way back from the event Lois and I were talking about a lot of things and at one point we discussed the puzzle that is consciousness. She has a theory about it that she was unable to explain -- she was struggling for words to explain her concepts. Her thoughts sounded similar to some of the recent philosophic discussions I've heard about why we are altruistic -- that we have more than just genes invested in each other. In a real sense we share some degree of consciousness and feeling. I'm not sure if that was what Lois was getting at. Hopefully she'll write it down so that I can read it later.
We touched on the point of the hive mind -- how a colony of ants is smarter than any single ant. I should have mentioned to her that this is true, to some degree, of humans too. There have been plenty of examples where groups of people are smarter than the individuals, like those big bottles containing hundreds of objects and people have to guess the number of objects, or people have to guess the weight of some object; no individual is very likely to get it right, but it generally works out that the group as a whole tends to get it right.
Most people start to become upset with this line of conversation because it sounds like I'm beginning to say that communism can work or that individuals are not as important as the "borg". We have been subjected to constant and endless barrages of propaganda against groups of people being as worthwhile as individuals; that groups are dangerous and not to be trusted. But I got to thinking about this. All the occasions where groups became dangerous that I could think of were when a crazy individual controlled a group -- those were not examples of the group mind at work, but of domination of the group by a single power-hungry mind. That is clearly dangerous.
A great example of the group mind is the free market. Economists and libertarians love to talk mystically of the "invisible hand of the free market". The group mind shows itself, paradoxically, when the individuals are at their most free and unconstrained. Another example of the group mind is the open source movement. Another is the development of wiki projects which are popping up everywhere these days, like the very cool Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.com) -- rapidly becoming the world's largest, most complete, and most flexible encyclopedia.
I keep getting the feeling that a fresh wind of change is growing. If we are lucky it just may blow away the lies about how we need to trust this or that authority figure to lead us out of our problems.
Maybe the solution will be if we just learn to trust humanity.