The premise of " Dragon Theory " is that we get "assimilated" into intelligent machines - social structures based on mechanical rules - thereby losing our fundamental humanity. The assumption of Dragon Theory is that this "assimilation" is a "bad thing", even a dangerous thing. Perhaps even a threat to the continued existence of human beings on the planet. On the other hand, I have a thread of reasoning in Diary of a Christian Skeptic  that recognizes that there is little or nothing in my personal "meme world" that doesn't come from other people, many of which can be identified by name. According to this picture, my mind is simply a kind of eddy, through which the memes of mankind flow. According to Zen, there are no borders to the individual mind. Properly speaking, the mind is infinite and contains "reality". The mind of a modern intellectual "contains" a lot more "reality" than the mind of an educat...

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. Revision of "mental" constructs as a result of self-reflection. 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 ...

" I think, therefore I am ". So began Descartes in his attempt to build a comprehensive picture of reality, starting with what he knew for sure. Like many philosophers, he pretended to mimic the newly-discovered certainty of Mathematics.  Descartes was barking up the wrong tree and his "axiom" instantly hit a dead end. Strangely enough, there are more than a few mystics, philosophers and neuroscientists who would doubt even Descarte's "axiom". The "self" may turn out to be an illusion. In the Universe we happen to inhabit, there is no sure path from "simple" to "complex". We need to start somewhere else. That's good news, since it turns out that we all know a Hell of a lot more than we thought we did. As Descartes realized, it's all uncertain to some degree, but that need not stop us from exploring an uncertain world. After all, we don't have an option. We learn very little about our minds by comparing them to ...