X-Message-Number: 25606
From: 
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 15:54:50 EST
Subject: super-organisms etc.

Robin Helweg-Larsen has commented on hive creatures such as bees and the  
analogy to cells in organisms or neurons in brains. 
 
Hobbes ("Leviathan") and others have talked about human societies as  
"superorganisms," and sometimes people speak of memes in societies as  vaguely 
similar to genes in organisms. 
 
But these analogies can be misleading.
 
In terms of effectiveness or efficiency, clearly the society is superior in  
some ways, the individual in others. But our concern is consciousness,  which 
is entirely a different kettle of fish. A hive, or a society, or an  
electronic brain with neuron-equivalent parts, might behave as though  it were 

conscious, but that proves nothing. The Turing Test is baloney. It can  walk 
like a 
duck and quack like a duck and still be a decoy. 
 
Qualia are specific (although still not analyzed) physical phenomena, and  we 
don't know for sure whether they can exist other than where we know they  
exist, in mammalian (and possibly other) brains. There are no qualia in a  

tribe--only in the individuals. There are (probably) no qualia in a single  
neuron, 
either. 
 
One of the defects of thought experiments involving disassembly-reassembly  
is the assumption that one could (for example) excise a neuron and replace it  
with an inorganic functional substitute. The assumption behind the assumption 
is  that the only important activities of a neuron involve signal input and 

output.  In other words, it is tacitly assumed that a neuron is basically just a
 switching device, and one kind is as good as another. This assumption is  

unjustified, or at best unproven. If the self circuit involves a standing wave
and many neurons acting together, then a quale may be irreducible and  
indivisible. It is true, or very nearly true, that "you can't be a little  bit 
pregnant," and a similar remark may hold for qualia. 
 
Robert Ettinger
 
 
 
 


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