We humans, being what we are, having evolved the way we did, are predisposed to believe certain things about life that are not necessarily true. My poster child for this is the belief that minds are strongly bound to bodies. They are in us, of course, but it is not necessarily so. Douglas Hofstadter explored this in GEB in the character of Aunt Hillary, who is an intelligent ant colony.
Taking this one step further, we are predisposed to believe that minds exist only at one level of the abstraction hierarchy, but this too is not necessarily so. Our digestive tract, for example, has a pretty substantial number of neurons [1]. There is no inherent reason why, for example, an organ in an organism could not possess a mind of its own.
Once you entertain both of those possibilities, there is a third idea that naturally comes up: your mind might not be at the top of the abstraction hierarchy. It's possible that you are just an organ in a distributed organism that actually possesses a fully fledged mind of its own. The idea that, say, corporations are people, could be more than just a metaphor. It could be literally true.
The idea that society itself may be a living intelligent organism is fascinating. It's not a revolutionary idea in nature, (eg: the portuguese man o' war is composed of multiple animals), but when it is applied to human society, it feels mystical. I think this is because our ability to comprehend and interact with the macro level makes human organization feel more artificial. But if the rules of game theory/economics make society inevitable, could it not also be a natural process? Do we individuals control society or does society control us?
Its a bit long but I thought it was completely worth the read. It proceeds in a very gradual series of steps to make the point that societies could very well be conscious :)
And/or a composition of multiple minds. McGilchrist argues that the conflict between these two hemispheres has shaped Western culture since the time of Plato, and the growing conflict between these views has implications for the way the modern world is changing.
Another extension is that Gods are distributed software installed in the hardware of believers. Aquinas seemed to believe essentially this. Gods exist and act via humans in the same way that human minds exist and act via human.
That seems improbable. Aquinas was a Christian, specifically, a Catholic, so he believed in Jesus and the Trinity. On that view, there are no Gods, there is just the One God, embodied in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The idea that "Gods are distributed software installed in the hardware of believers" is not just wrong on that view, it's non-sensical.
Now, I can certainly believe that Aquinas believed that God (singular) acts in humans in a similar manner that human minds act in humans in that both God and human minds (souls) exist in some non-material realm and act on material human bodies in some mysterious way. But that is not the same thing at all. Software does not exist in some spiritual realm that is separate from material reality. There is nothing metaphysically mysterious about software. There is something essentially metaphysically mysterious about God, and almost certainly on Aquinas's view, about minds as well. I am far from being an expert on Aquinas, but I would be shocked to learn that he was not a dualist.
You're right that Aquinas would have rejected the notion that gods are software installed in the hardware of believers, but he was not a dualist - he advocated a kind of hylomorphism that doesn't map neatly onto contemporary philosophical categories:
Software in some sense does exist in a spiritual realm in the same way Aquinas talked about "incorporeal beings". You can't hold or point to software or souls or gods. You can hold and point to hardware and bodies.
Of course, I have no idea what Aquinas actually believed. I just find his conclusions around the existence of "incorporeal beings" and "souls" to be consistent with the emergent-agent idea we're talking about.
For instance, in a very un-catholic view, Aquinas argued that - to some extent - animals and even plants have souls in this way.
Software does not exist in any spiritual realm, it's just that the word "software" refers to a state rather than a system. There is nothing "spiritual" or "mystical" going on there. It's completely mundane physics. You can't point at software for the same reason you can't point at sleep or death or urgency. It's just a quirk of natural language that we overload nouns to refer to both systems and states.
I absolutely love your writing BTW! I wasn't aware of it before today. It's really derailed my whole workday. It's fun to discover a new author like this, thank you for responding to my comment :)
I don't mean to argue that anything spiritual/supernatural is going on when I'm talking about an emergent god agent here. I'm arguing that gods are in the same ontological category as individual human minds are. I'm sure most religious people, Aquinas included, would need quite a lot more mysticism to be injected into the idea before they would recognize it as their own.
I don't fully believe it, to be honest. Mostly because I have no way of testing it or experiencing it. But, it's a fun idea and it's fun to imagine how my own little caricaturized model of Aquinas' mind might find some things to agree with. As far as I can tell, he was a person that desperately wanted a cohesive model of the "full stack" of things. Unfortunately for him, the best understandings at his time were pretty rough by today's standards.
It is. I remember listening to some AI or neuroscience podcast in 2019, it was an interview where one guy made a digression about religion being an internal control system which may be common and shared by people and works on mind level - the opposite, external control systems we make because people don't belive (in the same), so the first one doesn't work for them but CCTV (over them) does.
This reminds me of the cybertician Gordon Pask's idea of m-individuals and p-individuals.
> A p-individual is a psychological individual and an m-individual is a mechanical individual. So an m-individual is a body and a p-individual is a mind. But it’s saying that one person, one body, one brain even, does not have just one person in it, one p-individual – one persona, to use that dramatic term. What it says is that we can take on different roles, which clearly we can. So as someone who draws and as someone who listens I am not the same persona, I’m a different p-individual in Pask’s terms but in one m-individual, but I can also have – incidentally for instance in a group action I can have a lot of m-individuals that become one p-individual. So this is one of Gordon’s clever inventions: The distinction between the m-individual and the p-individual. What that allows is that if I have a room with seven people in it, all busy working at something together, you know, and just lost in that thing where we’re working together, you have seven m-individuals forming one p-individual – one psychological individual that is getting on with the work. And that’s the experience that we have. [1]
Also some interesting related ideas in an article named "The Autonomous Cognitive Agency of Social System" in a book called The Practice of Thinking by Marta Lenartowicz and Weaver D.R. Weinbaum (2022).
There’s about 2000 years of Christian theology that reject the idea that you and your body are strongly bound. In fact, there’s a great deal written about how your body is, in fact, in conflict with you (your “flesh” acts against the will of your “spirit”). Gnostics went as far as believing they were so separate that nothing done by the body had any affect on the self. No only that, but there is a higher abstraction that we no longer have direct access to.
Hinduism and Buddhism (and others) that teach reincarnation also see the self as separate from the body.
It reminds me of a Robert Jastrow quote: “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
Post-modern philosophy often seems a lot like Java developers. Reimplement good ideas because they were written in a different framework.
> There’s about 2000 years of Christian theology that reject the idea that you and your body are strongly bound.
I meant that in the sense that your soul and your body are in some sense matched for one another, not that they cannot be separated. But your soul cannot (or at least typically does not) enter a different body than the one it started out in, at least not during your tenure here on earth.
Well, yeah, I have no proof that it is literally true. I've never had an actual conversation with a corporation, only with the individual humans it comprises. I don't even know what having a conversation with a corporation would even look like.
IIRC, there was a study that found that when humans are presented with a sufficiently short-lived stimulus, there is correlated localized activity in the brain (ie, the visual processing areas for a sight) but not globalized activity - and the subject is unaware of the stimuli. But when the stimuli is presented for long enough, there is globalized activity - and the person is aware.
It looks like 'becoming aware of a thing' has a lot to do with non-local inference that could involve other unrelated subsystems (which is the main idea in Baar's Global workspace theory, IIUC).
> I've never had an actual conversation with a corporation...
So if you've talked with a support person, maybe you have? If it was a simple issue, the corporation maybe wouldn't be 'aware' (though it could later remember it in the form of chat logs or support tickets).
But if it was a difficult issue? Maybe you got tech support? Maybe your issue found it's way into some team's backlog? Maybe it even changed a product roadmap.
Maybe we talk to corporations all the time - it's just weird fitting the interaction into our mental models of 'conversation'.
Taking this one step further, we are predisposed to believe that minds exist only at one level of the abstraction hierarchy, but this too is not necessarily so. Our digestive tract, for example, has a pretty substantial number of neurons [1]. There is no inherent reason why, for example, an organ in an organism could not possess a mind of its own.
Once you entertain both of those possibilities, there is a third idea that naturally comes up: your mind might not be at the top of the abstraction hierarchy. It's possible that you are just an organ in a distributed organism that actually possesses a fully fledged mind of its own. The idea that, say, corporations are people, could be more than just a metaphor. It could be literally true.
[1] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi...