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 ...