I wrote this piece back in 2016. At the time, I was concerned by the way humans self-organize into predatory entities. Of course, these entities are "alive," consisting of living humans. But in the big picture, these entities exhibit their own life. In my terminology, back then, they were "dragons." It's 2024. Time for an update. There is a "flip side" to this theory. It's about how humans are assimilated into this machine. It turns out that assimilation is easier for most of us to understand since intelligent machines are (for most of us) a subject of Science Fiction ("AI"). In fiction, "AI" is presented for dramatic purposes as something super-human and implacably opposed to human life. "Real" AI is something else entirely. It presents a real and present threat precisely because it is poorly understood. Most of us are familiar with the concept of assimilation. We take it for granted that "social" animals fo...

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? "...

The original title of this blog was "Dragon Theory", which referred to my idea that humans create organizations that are alive in some sense and, in another sense, are machines like other human creations. There is a "flip side" to this theory. It's about how humans are assimilated into this machine. It turns out that assimilation is an easier thing for most of us to understand, since intelligent machines are (for most of us) a subject of Science Fiction ("AI"). In fiction, "AI" is presented for dramatic purposes as something super-human and implacably opposed to human life. "Real" AI is something else entirely. It presents a real and present threat precisely because it is so poorly understood. The concept of assimilation is quite familiar to most of us. We take it for granted that "social" animals form entities (herds, swarms, flocks, schools) that have a behavior all their own - behavour that cannot be described solely...

It may be said that whether or not a corporation is "alive" is a matter of definition. I find it quite easy to make the necessary adjustments. But we are still left with our doubts about the analogy. We expect a living thing to be "like" us - especially to have something we call consciousness. Consciousness is a slippery idea. For most of us, it refers to the experience we have of inhabiting the world. It is subtly connected to the phenomenon of attention . A vast amount of my behaviour is obviously controlled by my brain but not in a conscious way (I don't need to think about how to walk down the street, drive a car or decipher letter patterns while I read). Consciousness (attention) is about what I do need to "think about". This distinction is made in " The Ravenous Brain ", a very readable source for those looking for an update on the current status of research into how the brain works. In summary, the function of "attention" or ...

If we're lucky, the first person we encounter in our lives is our mother. We naturally generalize to recognize other moving shapes as like our mother but not our mother. We have all experienced the difficulty of calming a baby who refuses to accept the attentions of anybody but his mother. This leads me to a claim that may seem odd: We discover our mothers before we discover ourselves! But we are "hard wired" to assemble the meme of "self" pretty early. These fingers and toes are "my" fingers and toes. When you watch a baby, you can see this is a discovery , not a "brute fact". But the "hard wiring" of the motor cortex establishes a predictable link between the perception of the body and the ability to move around body parts. Thus is born "me" (the object in the world) and "I", the one who seems to "be me". One of our main jobs in the first two years of life is establishing an iron-clad link between ...