But I think the word you’re looking for is “god”. In the “Bicameral Consciousness” sense—these egregores you refer to are gods that speak to us, whose words we know. There’s another word, zeitgeist, that refers to something like the same thing.
If you look in your mind, you can find them; just look for what you think the gods would say, and they will say it. Pick a topic you care about. What would your enemy say about that topic? There’s a god, right there, speaking to you.
Mind, in a sense, they are not a civilization-spanning entity; they’re instantiations, individual, unique, and varying. Just as there isn’t a single English Language, but rather hundreds of millions of subtle variations on the same structure, inhabiting hundreds of millions of minds. They don’t coordinate nearly as well as you’d think; frequently people with different instantiations of what we might think of as the same overarching creature will branch, and start fighting with each other.
They’re each part of the myriad simulations each of us run, constantly, of how the world works.
Also—they rely on concurrence, on feedback. If we collectively stop thinking about them for an hour, many of them will easily die. And we have something like an immune system against them—boredom, the search for novelty, something else—we get tired of zeitgeists, we move on to another. Like a pandemic, they have a shelf life, at the end of which they either end, or turn into something harmless.
I think this is a useful abstraction.
But I think the word you’re looking for is “god”. In the “Bicameral Consciousness” sense—these egregores you refer to are gods that speak to us, whose words we know. There’s another word, zeitgeist, that refers to something like the same thing.
If you look in your mind, you can find them; just look for what you think the gods would say, and they will say it. Pick a topic you care about. What would your enemy say about that topic? There’s a god, right there, speaking to you.
Mind, in a sense, they are not a civilization-spanning entity; they’re instantiations, individual, unique, and varying. Just as there isn’t a single English Language, but rather hundreds of millions of subtle variations on the same structure, inhabiting hundreds of millions of minds. They don’t coordinate nearly as well as you’d think; frequently people with different instantiations of what we might think of as the same overarching creature will branch, and start fighting with each other.
They’re each part of the myriad simulations each of us run, constantly, of how the world works.
Also—they rely on concurrence, on feedback. If we collectively stop thinking about them for an hour, many of them will easily die. And we have something like an immune system against them—boredom, the search for novelty, something else—we get tired of zeitgeists, we move on to another. Like a pandemic, they have a shelf life, at the end of which they either end, or turn into something harmless.