It's hard to argue with the goal of democracy, which is to set things up for the benefit of the population at large. It's easiest to define democracy in terms of what it isn't. It is not tyranny, not slavery, not corrupt or injustice. The idea is as old as the Biblical prophets but attempts to implement it are very modern. There is no reason to assume they will succeed. The problem comes with the assumption that a group of people organized as a democracy can make the best decisions by somehow "putting their heads together" or voting. The connection between the goals of democracy and the means is so confused in people's minds that many assume that "voting" is virtually synonymous with "democracy". A bit of research will quickly dispell this idea.  In fact, elections are a mud-slinging match specifically intended to distract voters from issues that actually affect them. As long as we have the idea that good decisions can be made through the b...

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 ...

Whatever problems are faced by human beings, they overcome them by sharing the burden with other human beings. We are all in this together. This is what it is to be human and this is why we are so easily assimilated into the machines that are the subject of this blog. If we solve the problems of life to by getting a "job" or joining the armed forces, we become a cog in a machine with a life of its own. Just as the cells in our bodies do well as long as they serve the purpose of the body, the human cogs are granted the necessities of life, to "thrive" within the constraints imposed upon them by the machine. But is there another way? We are *all* assimilated into culture and language at a very early age. This immediately constrains us to thrive within parameters set by a much larger group, largely without any conscious agenda or awareness of alternatives. We may say, however, that the group created by language and culture is not systematically opposed to the thriving...