> >Glen: From the Star Trek series. The Borg are a science-fiction race
of alien
> beings that had incorporated technology into their anatomy and whose
> technological advances had led them to a state where all members of
this
> collective could communicate via sub-space transmission by simple
> thought.
> They operate purely as one.
> The idea is interesting to me in relation to democracy because, on
the
> one
> hand, democracy celebrates difference of opinion but on the other is
> designed to unite us in a common objective of bettering humanity
(or...
> bettering the One).
There is a number of explorations of such ideas as "the hive mind".
Frank Herbert (of Dune fame) explored the idea in the short story of
Haestrom's Hive, portraying it as a horror scenario.
I think the approach taken here mistakes the nature of "individual"
versus "community" portraying them as though they are polar opposites.
In actual fact, humans achieve their sense of "individualism" within
"community" - they co-arise and are mutually interdependent. I don't
see this changing. Technology makes possible both new expressions of
community (see www.casoc2000.com.au) and of individuality. It is the
stearing here that's important.
> Gerry: This concept of the Borgs operating as one is also of interest
> to me. Have you read any of Howard Bloom's stuff on the memes? It's
a
> lot like the Borgs. Only it applies to our culture as a group rather
> than as individuals. And as far as democracy operating for both
> similarites and differences, I really don't have a problem with this
> idea. Actually I see this "both" as the new paradigm.
Bloom is a very limited use of this concept, and is racially biased
against Arabs (and religiously biased against Islam). A far better
treatment is Susan J. Blackmore and Richard Dawkin's treatment in the
Meme Machine.
I quote from the excellent reviews at amazon.com
Richard Dawkins gave us ``memes,'' the cultural analogue of genes;
Blackmore gives us memes in spades - humans as meme machines. For
Dawkins (who writes a foreword to this volume), the meme is a metaphor
for the ideas, myths, customs, works of art and science that are passed
along in human cultures as unitary and competing entities. In
Blackmores formulation, they have become real and serve as an
explanatory tool par excellence. Selfish memes, like selfish genes, are
interested in their own perpetuation and so, in tail-wagging-the-dog
fashion, have guided natural selection (via genes) to favor big brains,
development of language, religion, sexual selection, altruism,
urbanization, etc. The operation that makes all this memetic evolution
possible is the human ability to imitate. In some ways, it's
entertaining to follow Blackmore's train of thoughteven anticipating
how she can shape memes to show why we like to gossip or why we love
sex. She's a good writer, and her enthusiasm is infectious (like the
memes themselves, which she and other memeticists liken to viruses).
It is interesting that meme theory is very close to Shopenhauer's
Theory of the Distributed Mind, adopted by Ludwig Wittgenstein as a
cornerstone of his philosophy.
> Glen: The only way for democracy to truely take place would be in
fact
> to set up
> such a Borg-like system. As well, I am starting to believe that this
is
> our
> ultimate future, where the individual is unimportant and whose sole
> purpose
> is to serve the collective as a whole. The analogy is similar to how
> heart
> cells first start by beating individually to their own erratic rhythm
> and
> then they eventually learn to beat together as one larger unit. The
life
> and
> death of any individual heart cell becomes unimportant because the
> heart
> itself continues to beat.
True, Glen, human society continues although I die already. I don't
see it as the individual as unimportant in societies that stress a
collective community. Societies that go in this direction are
defective, less creative, less adaptive than those which stress both
individuality and community. I feel you are responding to the
nightmare polarity I spoke of above.
A good example of this nightmare is the Lords Prayer given by Stephen
Pinker in his "Language Instinct" showing the shifts in English across
the centuries!
> Beginning with the internet, humanity is itself becoming a sentient
> being.
>
> Gerry: Yes, I certainly agree. And with a meme type society, perhaps
> democracy in its true form can occur. Actually this sounds like a
very
> exciting idea in this idea-less time. I think it's time that we
forget
> our individual selfish pursuits and think in terms of the "total
> heart". What I'm about to ask is a vey peculiar question but at times
> do you feel as though the internet has a mind and being of its own?
> Gerry
I would adopt the view with Peter Russel that rather than humanity
becoming a sentient being (an anthropocentric viewpoint), what we are
really seeing is "the awakening Earth" and Gaia (the living Earth
itself) becoming a sentient being. The 6 degrees of freedom already
links us into a meme machine whose complexity rivals that of the human
brain (there are a maximum of 6 links in the chain between any two
people on the planet, or any two cells in the human central nervous
system). As general systems theory and complexity theory shows us we
are witnessing an autopoetic entellechy, in which a new kind of
organisation (on a planetary level) is emerging. What effect this will
have on the future of language is anyones guess.
I suspect we will all become trilingual:
(a) Speaking a language of place - dialects and languages tied to
natural bioregions
(b) Speaking a language of global communication - modern English is
moving to take this role (as previous discussions have suggested)
(c) Speaking a language associated with specific professions - as
scientific developments continue to occur.
As a bumper sticker I saw said "Monolingualism is a Curable
Disadvantage!"
Thanks for an interesting subject
John