Scales

It might not seem like it, but I am not an individual. I am a conglomeration of tiny single-minded agents, each acting according to its own interests (programmed in by generations of differential gene survival). None of these agents know I exist. They are incapable of even conceiving that something like me might exist. And yet, the aggregate of their interactions with each other equals me.

The exact biological identity of these agents is not really important. It depends on exactly what I consider the core of my being and what is accessory. It might be reasonable to treat every cell in my body as a single tiny agent, contributing in its own way to generating me. In any case, the facts are that I am not an individual, I am a group.

As I already said, not one of the neurons in my brain knows that I exist. Not one of the cells in my blood knows that it is helping to keep me alive. Not one of my muscle cells knows it is helping me move. They just selfishly follow their programmed instructions.

At this point, it is worth clarifying what I mean by 'selfish'. Each and every one of these agents is selfish in the sense that it follows its own instructions, and only its own instructions. They do not go out of their way to assist other agents, except if their programmed instructions demand so. A white blood cell may assist other cells by engulfing pathogens, but it has no concept of the implications of these actions. All it 'wants' to do it eat pathogens.

So if these agents can generate my mind as a side effect of their selfish actions and interactions, though they have no concept of doing so, is it reasonable to posit that the same can work on different scales? Treating individual humans as agents, say.

I'm intrigued by the idea that society itself might be conscious. After all, it certainly acts intelligently. The society as a whole is orders of magnitude more intelligent than any individual human within it. In fact, due to the added benefits of individuals working together, the intelligence of the society is greater than the sum of the intelligences of the humans that comprise it.

But can our pedestrian concept of consciousness even apply to something like a society? Can a society be self-aware, for instance. If a system makes predictions of a future state of the environment, with itself in that environment, we might infer that it is self-aware. Society certainly does this, so might it be self-aware?

With these kinds of examples, we are running headlong into the Chinese telephone brain - a well-known thought experiment in the philosophy of the mind.

Suppose that every citizen of China is issued with a telephone and a book of rules. With these tools, each citizen will reproduce the activity of a neuron in the human brain, with telephone calls taking the role of synaptic signals. Obviously, this would be much slower than the human brain, but would the system as a whole be able to think?

Many people have an instinctive bias against even considering the idea that systems outside our own everyday scale might be conscious. We are groups of simpler agents, and there are greater, more sophisticated groups above us. If the groups above us are more intelligent than we are (as their behaviours testify), then why should we deny them the possibility of consciousness a priori?

Perhaps, by drilling down into what we really mean by consciousness and trying to generalise our definitions onto exotic systems, we might discover something surprising about what our own minds really are.

The idea that every individual neuron in our heads might be, in a sense, conscious is ludicrous to us. Perhaps a larger societal mind might find the idea of each human comprising it being conscious to be similarly ludicrous.