After writing it, I felt that this post was a bit "over the top". I thought of deleting it, but decided to leave it in, since it actually does connect to many of other ideas. It's just that I don't think our situation is quite this dark. I've got to stay away from Russian novels ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs We really should give a nod to Maslow's attempt to visualize the human situation in terms of "needs", which are almost the same thing as "values". Let's discuss Maslow's ideas - assuming that we somehow manage to "value" what we "need". My general impression is that Maslow's summary is somewhat misleading. It tempts us to over-simplify human motivation and overlook the fantastic complexity of these "needs". Once we shift to "values" and unpack the "...

Back in 1969, I appeared in Grenoble, France, eager to start on my Ph. D. in Computer Science at what was then the leading IBM research center in Europe. It did not go well. At the time, the idea of "Time Sharing" on a computer was in its infancy. Very few people had access to the big mainframes using slow text-only terminals. Yet, I imagined a time when everyone would have access to the same computer system. All of human knowledge would be accessible. People could share their projects and extend that knowledge together, online. The group mind of humanity would be implemented in a vast computer network. In short, I imagined the Internet. World Wide Web 3.0, a bit beyond what we have now. Artificial Intelligence (my field) played a big role in this vision. I called it the "Spirit System". The idea quite literally blew my mind. Weakened by days without sleep and culture shock I had the first of my numerous "nervous breakdowns". My hopes of an academic career...

One intuitive obstacle to the idea of the super person is our own sense of being "one" person inside our skulls. While this is not directly relevant to the idea of the super person, it may help to think more clearly about how realistic this idea of the unitary self is. This leads us into he fascinating and controversial area of "consciousness". I usually consider this subject as overlapping with 2 others, namely "attention" and "working memory". Attention and working memory have the advantage that they can, in some sense, be located in the brain by fMRI scanning - correlating the areas of the brain that are active with reports or experiments on the subject. These studies suffer from the common assumption that the area of the brain that "lights up" is "responsible" for the function in question. It is more accurate to say that the area that lights up is involved in the function - part of a circuit or system that correlates with...

In everyday speech, "I" and "we" mean different things. but the boundaries can be fuzzy. To our ear, the "Royal We" is somewhat comical - the Queen seems to be bound by custom never to use "I". Yet, historically, the Crown is, in some sense, the personification of the state. The Queen is, in some sense, always plural. In everyday life, we are often presented with an individual claiming to represent something larger than themselves - sometimes an annoyingly vague group, as in " we don't allow blue jeans on the golf course". Many, if not most, of the important decisions in our lives are made in cooperation with some kind of "we". "We" decide to get married, hopefully to a person our respective families will accept into the family "we". On the job, we work with others in teams, often on jobs that are initiated behind closed doors by shady high-status individuals. If we serve in the military, our team work...

When we introduce a new type of living entity into our lexicon, there is a temptation to spread some scientific fairy dust over the idea with a discussion of evolution. I will resist the usual trope of explaining how groups are "adaptive" and how they arise in chimpanzees. To me, such discussions seem to use evolutionary ideas in a circular and ultimately uninformative way. Instead, let's just look at how groups compete, survive and spawn other groups. We will leave aside the issue of whether membership in a group is "natural" or "adaptive" to the human "component". In passing, I must observe that membership in particular groups (such as ISIS) can be very far from "adaptive" to the one who joins the group. He'd be wiser to stay home. Groups live and die by rules of their own. The structure of a group can be viewed as a "meme", which, according to [Dawson] has evolutionary tendencies of its own. For example, the structu...