The Super Person

Draft. I need to polish and add references to the books mentioned. This is offered to friends for commentary with apologies for its rough form.

It was [corporation] that first impressed me with the idea that a group can and should be treated as a person. [] drew attention to the way the corporation exists only for its own benefit (profit) and, incredibly, shareholders can sue the board of directors or remove them if the board behaves in any other way. The corporation is a legal "person", able to own property, sue and be sued. Most people regard this as a "legal fiction" but [] drew my attention to the fact that, if the corporation were indeed a human being, that human would be a psychopath.

Subsequently, I learned from mindfulness and Zen to question the naive idea of the "self". In this line of thought, some maintain that the self doesn't exist at all. It certainly can't be found on brain scans. Some notable public figures such as [Sam Harris] insist, apparently on the basis of neurological findings, that the self doesn't exist. However, other lines of inquiry explained below, lead me to suspect that we should not be looking for the "self" between our ears, but out in the world around us -- most notably in our human connections (culture, society, language) but, in the world in general. To be sure, we need a brain to experience anything but is evident that the brain is not enough to build a "self".

Once we start looking for the "self" beyond the physical limits of the experience and brain of the individual human being, we quite naturally run into the idea that perhaps the "self" is somehow shared.  At this point, we start to venture beyond the realm of what is we might call "common sense". We must tread cautiously.

In his classic [Surfaces], Hofstadter reveals the critical role that analogies form in language and thought in general. Whenever we venture into describing something new, we are bound to compare it to something we already know. We make an analogy. I suspect that this capability gives us a strong hint about what our cerebral cortex is doing: detecting similar situations. However, Hofstadter points out that some analogies are better (more "essential") than others. With this in mind, in the following, I will use a few analogies more or less "tongue in cheek", keeping in that analogies can be misleading as well as informative.

The aim of my deliberations has been to flesh out the original insight in [Corporation]. In what sense can we say that the Corporation is "alive" or that it has a coherent "self" analogous to our own?

I have been greatly helped by a number of books that each contribute insight into the issue. 

• [Scale] provides a brilliant analysis of the rules of scale that govern size and metabolism in animals. The crucial point is that all animals are made up of cells that are quite similar and have very similar metabolic requirements. As the animal scales up, the number of cells increases and the metabolic requirements of the animal increase, but not linearly. In a word, there are efficiencies of scale. Coming back to our main issue, I look for ways that organisms made up of human components scale. Are there rules and metrics to look for? Of course, humans and cells communicate in very different ways, but [] encourages me to look for something as rigorous as possible. In fact [] attempts this when he looks at cities and corporations.
• [Emergence] provides a difficult but insightful view of "emergence" in physics. We are looking for emergent behavior in human organizations - possibly behavior that has no analogy in the humans that make up the organization. 
• [Connection] provides insight into the role "connection" in human society, especially introducing some network concepts that apply to the network as a whole rather than any property of the individuals that make up the network.
• [WTF] provides a more nuanced view of the Corporation and, indeed, any group of people, including groups empowered by "Artificial Intelligence". This perspective highlights the "fitness function" that drives the group. It turns out that there are other fitness functions besides profit, including, for example, growth and increasing stock price which lead to quite different behavior in the corporation. The matter is even more complex when we look at other types of groups, such as nations, which are considered in this book [].
• [Weapons of Math Destruction] takes a deep dive into fitness functions of "algorithms". While the focus is on AI, the discussion is really about reducing the fitness function of a group to rigid rules. This can happen without computer assistance.
• [] provides insight into how groups make decisions. In practice, groups are controlled by "deciders". Most members are "assimilated", providing skills and human effort in service of the group but providing little if any input to the overall behavior of the group. The "executive" provides the analogous function of the prefrontal lobes of the brain, which drive human behavior.
• [Behave] provides a deep overview of the factors that actually determine human behavior. It is detailed enough to test the validity of our core analogy. Do organizations make decisions the way humans do? Is there some reason they seem so stupid, doing things that no member of the group would do if he or she acted alone? To put the question another way, should we see organizations as machines that are often less than the sum of their parts from an ethical point of view?
• [Illusion of Knowledge] shakes the reader free of the impression we all have that we know a lot of things that are really buried in our environment, implicit in our language and offered up to us in a way we can use them without understanding them in the least. Our smartphones are obvious examples, but devices as simple as a doorknob illustrate the same point. Our conscious experience floats on a vast sea of communal knowledge gained over thousands of years of human experience. We know a lot less than we think we do. Knowledge, in fact, is almost entirely shared.

To begin, we observe that human organizations generally follow a fractal structure - boxes within boxes. The best example of this is military organizations which have followed the same structure since the days of the Mongols. At the "top" of the hierarchy we have the "general staff", a small group of a dozen or less that controls multiple groups, each with its own "staff", all the way down to the platoon level of a dozen or so individuals trained to act in concert with each other under the control of an officer, who represents the final "executive committee" for just those soldiers who know each other's names and who live and fight together.

I see this as analogous to the human body which is, to a great extent, modular.  I'm also reminded of the fact that "working memory" can hold only 6 to 10 items in attention at once - perhaps the precise reason why groups of this size tend to be more productive than larger groups.

Putting these two ideas together, I look to understand the "metabolism" of groups in terms of a small "executive" controlling a small group of sub-groups. This is a trick of computer science, where a large, complex structure can be analyzed by a repeating (recursive or fractal) simpler group. In this respect, [] is particularly helpful.

On a larger scale, we need to consider the way humans interact. I have always regarded two things as fundamental: language and money. I will refrain from using "money" too literally since money is often a poor measure of "value" (the actual medium of exchange) and "money" is a surprisingly elusive concept in actual business decisions [see WTF]. Of course, there are many other ways that humans connect, including sex, family and simply living in close proximity. Sometimes, simple network ideas [Connect] apply to any generic connection. In other cases, it makes a difference exactly what information is flowing back and forth between the executive members or between the executive and lower level organizations.

Organizations generally operate in a legal framework that can make a huge difference to what kind of organizations and what kind of "fitness functions" are possible. However, it does seem that we can say a lot about human organizations that applies across a swath of legal environments.