What is "Supermind"?

This blog started three years ago as "Dragon Theory". I was particularly taken by the "corporation", a legal "person" with rights powers vastly exceeding ordinary persons. Then and now, I consider the "corporation" to be a threat to individual rights and freedoms.

I was also inspired by the ultimate evil in the Star Trek series: the Borg. As time went on, I became more curious as to how people are assimilated into "the dragon".

By 2017, assimilation had become my focus and I changed the name of the blog to "The Programmable Ape". I had come to look beyond the mass phenomena like the corporation to see that humans are uniquely engineered to be "assimilated". Our language is a way of "programming" us. This involved a subtle change in outlook. What does it feel like to be programmed? Is it possible to have a thought, experience or perception that is not deeply colored by the thoughts of others?

"Assimilation" as an isolated, evil phenomenon, was beginning to make less sense. "How to Think" put the final nail in the coffin. "Thinking" is a social phenomenon. In fact, we can't think for ourselves.

Yikes!

Is it possible that all aspects of "mind" are social? This went against the prevailing theory that "mind" was something going on in a brain. Surely you need a brain to have a mind, but could you have a mind without people around you?

I was studying a lot about the brain at this point. It was plain that big sections of the brain were devoted to language. Damage to this part of the brain could result in the inability to form thoughts, let alone express them. Another interesting find is that any part of the cerebral cortex (or all of it) can be destroyed without loss of consciousness. This goes against the hand-waving conclusion that "somehow" our sense of self arises in the cortex - usually imagined as some kind of computer. Damasio restores the old idea that fundamental "I" (core consciousness) is a phenomenon of the brain stem, which is intimately involved in "images" created in the cortex. It's just one step to realize that these "images" are, to a great extent, socially created. At a deep, intimate level, our minds are shared.

All this combined with my long admiration for the book "Surfaces and Essences", which explores the nature of analogy as the very basis of thought. Intuitively, I regarded the cerebral cortex to be in the business of analogy-making. Language itself, based on analogies that were mostly made by others was where our "minds" live! 

Finally, I looped back to the "dragon" perspective.  Our "minds" are shared - we think and experience the world only by participating in "superminds". The "dragon" had lost its body, but its mind was real and all-pervasive.

Is "supermind" alive? This lead me to check out other forms of life. It seemed to me that "supermind" was a bit like the "wild west" genetic world of bacteria. Each of us is an individual in the sense that we experience a unique package of "supermind" ideas and influences.

"Identity and Destiny" brought back the ominous nature of "assimilation", drawing attention to the fact that our "identity" defines who we imagine ourselves to be. In many cases, this is total fiction. "Identity" is also behind the most brutal aspects of human nature.

That's the current status of the idea. There is a certain consistency all the way back to 2015, with the idea connecting to a broad range of insights by others while blowing off the quirky "dragon" language and even the "programmable ape". It has become a meditation on who we are from a rather surprising perspective.