The Mind of a Dragon

By Wayne Brown
The "Dragon" blog plays with the idea of an emergent property of human organizations that creates a super-organism, "alive" in many respects.

In Hofstadter's "Mind's I", (page 192) he sketches what, according to his theory, it would take for us to talk about something to have a "mind". It turns out to hinge on what H. calls a "representational system" - one that dynamically reflects what itself is "about". This has two aspects.

  1. Revision of "mental" constructs as a result of self-reflection.
  2. Revision of "mental" constructs as a result of perception - the special case of memes that more or less directly attach to events outside of the organism.
It seems to me that governments and corporations qualify on both counts. Condition (1) is basically the condition that a discipline such as "Management Science" exists. Places like the Harvard Business School constantly pump out memes that are "about" management. Governments constantly re-organize themselves and reflect on concepts such as effective leadership and efficiency.

The second criterion is satisfied by the observation that human organizations arrange themselves to respond to the way they see their environment. For example, we have a "defence" department that arranges itself into units such as air forces and motor pools.

Continual reorganization of society to better manage its affairs could be seen as a the society's "thought process". It is emergent, in the sense that H. points out, since the end effect does not simply the sum of the wishes of the "components" (human beings), but is something else. This is most clearly exemplified by the possession of nuclear weapons, an "idea" that emerges from the idea of defence but is a huge threat to individual citizens. 

This critique also undermines the concept of democracy, which, at bottom, claims that the political organization somehow can or should reflect the "sum" of the hopes, wishes and needs of the citizen.

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