Assimilation

The original title of this blog was "Dragon Theory", which referred to my idea that humans create organizations that are alive in some sense and, in another sense, are machines like other human creations. There is a "flip side" to this theory. It's about how humans are assimilated into this machine. It turns out that assimilation is an easier thing for most of us to understand, since intelligent machines are (for most of us) a subject of Science Fiction ("AI"). In fiction, "AI" is presented for dramatic purposes as something super-human and implacably opposed to human life. "Real" AI is something else entirely. It presents a real and present threat precisely because it is so poorly understood.

The concept of assimilation is quite familiar to most of us. We take it for granted that "social" animals form entities (herds, swarms, flocks, schools) that have a behavior all their own - behavour that cannot be described solely as the sum of behavior of the individuals. Application of this idea to humans is, for some strange reason, resisted.

In the case of humans, social structure is more than a matter of simply sticking together for the purpose of hunting and safety. Human societies are intelligently designed. In this sense, they are intelligent machines.

It's also true that the way that humans are absorbed in these social structures (assimilated) is uniquely complex.  In this post, I'd like to focus on the most common and most powerful ways we are all assimilated:

• Being Alive.  To be alive is to actively participate in the Universe. This forces us to divide the world into things useful, things dangerous, "me" and "not me", "mine" and "not mine" ...
• Being Human. Obviously, we all share a human mind and body, making it hard to relate to such things as the immorality of driving species to extinction. We share a mortal time-frame of less than a century. Our senses are dull but our minds are full of speculations that would never occur to an animal with comparable intelligence (such as a dolphin).
• Culture. The most obvious aspect of culture is language, which limits what kinds of thoughts we can share and even the kind of thoughts we can have. Especially in the "West", philosophers have over-emphasize the role of language. Culture includes "technology" which surrounds us, opening all kinds of possibilities but also limiting the way we see the world. For example, if we have a gun, we will tend to use the gun to solve our problems with society. If we have poison, we will use it to exclude inconvenient living things from "our" environment.
• Flocking. The boid hypothesis hold that a great deal of human "group" behavour can be explained by simple rules governing all kinds of flocks and swarms. Deep psychology is not required.

Built on our common humanity and the fact that we are all absorbed into some kind of culture from birth, other powerful forces are brought to bear:

• Mythology. Structures our lives with a complex set of stories that provide a sense of "meaning" and direction (as long as they are not held up to close scrutiny)
• Economics, especially the mythology of money. For the vast majority of human beings in 2017, money (and the need for it) is as real as air.
• Status. Backed by cultural myths, human societies seem to automatically stratify into "haves" and "have-nots" - leaders and followers.
• Brute Force. We cannot overlook the fact that, for most of humanity, there is no choice but to participate in society, even at the most desperately poor and disadvantaged level. When we go to war, most of us are "cannon fodder" with our individuality seen as an inconvenience and obstacle to the functioning of the war machine. On the other hand, when the tools of brute force are placed in our hands, we tend to use them - turning others into objects that exist only to further our personal ambitions. Ironically, such ambitions are themselves a product of assimilation. The oppressor is as assimilated as the oppressed.

All these forces can add up to the dragon/assimilation phenomenon where, for example, young men can excuse the slaughter of "enemy" civilians as "just doing my job". Such mental gymnastics would be completely incomprehensible if we ignored the process that turns a helpless, innocent child into a mindless, expendable component in a war machine.