John wrote:
>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.
Well it doesn't have to be a "horror scenario". Often when people try to
predict what may happen in the future, they always go for the horror story
and tales of Armageddon. The past isn't wrought with horror and neither is
the present. So the future shouldn't be either. It's simply both good and
bad, heaven and hell. The future gives us alot of answers and alot of
problems. I'm not a doomsdayer.
>I think the approach taken here mistakes the nature of "individual"
>versus "community" portraying them as though they are polar >opposites.
Hmmm, but I wonder. For an individual to exist in a community, he has to
follow its rules and is therefore, automatically bound by it to some degree.
The community is hardly bound by the individual except in a collective
sense. So the individual really becomes less and less able to make change
alone. The individual becomes more and more meaningless and incomplete.
>In actual fact, humans achieve their sense of "individualism" within
>"community" - they co-arise and are mutually interdependent.
We are still bound by our community. In an extreme example, I can't go
around wearing nothing but a woman's teddy in the streets. And this is
hardly harmful to anyone save my reputation. However, these kinds of rules
show that really, individuality is a dying breed. As time goes on, the
community will have greater and greater control to enforce its rules
(whether rational or insane) and the individual will have less and less of
an ability to fight it without arousing a sizeable majority of the community
on her/his side. Of course with greater control, this could get difficult.
With the advent of genetic alteration, it will become very easy to alter
someone's personality from birth so that they have a strong tendency to obey
and to not cause alot of trouble to the community (kind of like what is done
in bee hives with hormones).
>Technology makes possible both new expressions of community (see
> >www.casoc2000.com.au) and of individuality.
Hmm, the jury's out for me on that.
>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.
Gee, I'll think about that one. :)
>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.
Well, not exactly because humanity, as a sentient being, lives on a ball
called Earth but is not bound by it. Eventually, humanity must spread out
into space in order to continue to survive (otherwise our sun will hit
supernova and we'll all be fried). Thus Earth being seeded with life and
being home to a movable humanity, isn't a sentient being but an "egg" or
nursery to humanity until it eventually leaves to seed again.
>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.
Gee, those words you been usin' are mighty fancy words. You ain't a city
slickah ah you? :P Anyway, as usual, I have an opinion. I've never read
about general systems and complexity theories but I do know that there is
definitely a consistant and recursive pattern to evolution. The evolution
can be shown in the growth of a human being.
Of course, we start out as individual cells that eventually specialize and
organize more and more until finally, a being all its own is born from the
individual cells that contributed to it. In turn, this being becomes part of
a larger evolution where as time goes on, a human will increasingly have the
need to be specialized and be part of a stronger and stronger organization
until finally, humanity itself is "born". Then it goes on, because humanity
will propogate its "species" until finally there will be a whole slew of
humanities across space. Some will rival each other and fights between
humanities will ensue without doubt but eventually even here, the many
humanities will come together, specialization and organization will occur
and finally a "superhumanity" will result.... ad infinitum or until the
universe collapses in on itself (which it won't because we live in a
steady-state universe, duh! But I digress).
>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.
Hmm, that's true. English is already part of global communication. Try
finding resources in French on the net. C'est une cauchemare!
- gLeN
______________________________________________________