the collective mind and consequences for individualism
some boha from southern france. i’ve been having a lot of discussions on individualism, so i thought i would write a bit about it.
previously i provided a geometrical way of looking at minds. this is a very coarse way of looking at it, and it merely shows that my training has highly influenced the way i see things and i’m not trying to establish any theory of everything. but as a tool to analyze individuals and groups, it is excellent in the sense that it frees us from categorization and lets us loose in a multidimensional personal landscape. this personal landscape can be seen as a multidimensional halo streaming out of someone: one paragraph describing each dimension, streaming out and curling itself around that person as if it were long hair, with each strand being that paragraph spelled out. i wish i was a better illustrator. maybe some day i’ll put this into pictures
what i want to explore today is not the personal landscape, but the collective landscape. using the tools of information theory, one can predict that collectives have somewhat unintuitive properties. let’s start with a simple collective of two. if the two individuals share no mutual information, the collective will not be able to surpass the individual capacities, and is equivalent to each one working independently. this is very hard to find, since the laws of nature apply to everything, so at least that would be mutual information. we then have the case where there is some mutual information and equal information. equal information is impossible unless each individual is an exact copy of the other, which is impossible by every current standard (even clones or twins have different environments around them which change their vocabulary). this leaves the in between situation where some vocabulary is common and some isn’t. this shared information is no more than each individual’s vocabulary projected onto each other. for example, individual A has vocabulary { v1, v2, v3 } and individual B has vocabulary { v2, v3, v4 }, if we project the spaces onto each other, we obtain { v2, v3 }, and identify { v1 , v4 } as the information entropy. now, we can look at these two sets as waves interfering. the shared information gets reinforced for the simple fact that it is equal. so one would expect from this that groups will have the common vocabulary reinforced, creating a group trend stronger than the individual trend. but we also have to analyze how the edges (the entropy) interacts. if v1 and v4 are contradictory, they cancel each other out, turning the group into a reinforced version of the already existing individuals but removing any extra information that would allow for constructive development. this would mean that these individuals were better off by themselves rather than trying to compatibilize beliefs, since they can both use v2 and v3 together with their own different sets of information. together, but independently, their picture is richer than together and working as one. but this argument works the other way around too: if their entropy interferes constructively, then the group will be able to represent much more than before (remember that we consider these dimensions as bases for spaces, not spaces themselves). the same way a square is infinitely richer than a line, so is a cube or a hypercube. dimensionality, when interference is constructive, not only increases the capacity of the group but actually multiplies it. by what number i don’t know, but it wouldn’t be too hard to explore how this fits with reality.
but we don’t need to formalize things this way to understand that this already takes place everywhere. we, as a collective human enterprise, already work as i referred. it is impossible for a single human being to build any of the millions of artifacts we have, even simple things like a ballpoint pen. this is not because they are impossible to build, but because they are built collectively, expanding the individual capacity for creativity by combining all these dimensions with each other and creating a collective entity that can represent a richer space than any of its individuals alone. if we go with the ball point pen we can dissect it in several layers and it will feel like a never ending rabbit hole. the obvious question is who designed it. whoever designed it took for granted that paint, metal and plastic are real and available. but where did they come from? it is unlikely that the designer mined the metal and pigments, forged the parts, drilled the oil and so on. what i argue is that due to the limits on each individuals intellectual and physical capacity, it is impossible to build a ballpoint pen as an individual: it would require extensive knowledge in extraction, production and so on. this is obvious, but this hints at the fact that individuality is somewhat of an illusion. i’ll get to this later. what makes the rabbit hole even deeper is that there would be no need for a pen if there wasn’t a need for writing, which in turn expresses a human need to record knowledge. the invention of writing and paper must be included in the total knowledge necessary. but this time, it comes not from other individuals in the chain of production, but from the very social heritage that the designer himself is sunk in. if a culture has only an oral tradition, there there would be no need for a ballpoint pen and for the whole chain for its development. in this sense, the human collective extends not only in the present spacetime (the other individuals that are part of a chain), but also the past spacetime (the cultural heritage that gave the present its information context). in this sense, even a yogi in the middle of nowhere is not alone: he is part of a collective that extends to his own past, with him as a kind of isolated leaf of a giant tree.
this is not accounted for by most systematic analysis, but the framework i describe accounts for it by the simple fact that we are sunk in our own culture, and from it, we collect much of our most important information. for example, we might be a highly innovative poet, but the language and alphabet we write with is the same as the language of the lullabies sung to us as babies, and some words are even the same as the ones sang thousands of years ago. this transmission not between present entities, but also past entities, is one of the main reasons why the individual is little more than a specific rearrangement of the collective vocabulary. in this sense, i do not believe there even is something as an individual in the broad sense (though i do believe in individuals in the physical sense, like walking talking people).
this ties in with my criticism of modern individualism as proposed by some philosophers and economists of the 20th century, such as ayn rand. there is no such thing as an individual without a collective, and there is certainly no such thing as an übermensch without the übermenschen before him (to use the nietzschean term).
take anyone promoting a libertarian ideology (the right wing north american libertarian, not the left wing european ideology with the same name). it is impossible to find anyone standing for that ideology that has ever gone to any real world difficulty (starvation, poverty, etc, not white people problems like having no credit on their cellphone). i argue that this is a consequence of the very socioeconomic environment in which these ideologies occur: they always emerge when the individual is capable of satisfying all his needs and maybe most of his wants without knowing the process that fulfilled these needs and wants. we go to the supermarket, buy dozens of goods, most of which we have no idea where they came from, how they were made or who worked to make them, pay with an entirely anonymous object called money to someone that we don’t perceive as being in any way connected to what we just bought, effectively rendering us (the one with the money) as the origin of the goods themselves. it allows us to confuse our own individual short piece of labor (going shopping) with the incredible collective journey of all those goods (extraction, production, distribution, all of which have at least one face to them, when not hundreds). this broken empathy link is what then creates the isolated, narcissistic modern homo-economicus.
to this day, i challenge any libertarian individualist to live according to their ideology to its ultimate consequences: without any assistance of anyone else. not a distributor, not a salesman, a farmer or a worker. they would certainly starve to death if let loose on this planet. and even ayn rand ended up enjoying her social security benefits. how’s that for philosophical consistency?