Two or maybe three years ago I suggested at a CFAR reunion that close-knit tribes / communities of humans, rather than individual humans, might be 1) alive / thinking in some important sense and 2) the natural unit of moral value. I wasn’t able to communicate my intuitions in favor of this very well (and I still can’t); among other things, I had in mind the tines from Fire Upon the Deep.
I feel like tine-ish levels of cooperation can be achieved in online games (like EverQuest) where everyone knows their role and the role of everyone else. It’s harder to achieve and even to imagine in very dynamic environments with shifting roles.
I’ve done a great deal of high-end raiding (i.e., difficult group challenges, where success relies on perfect cooperation and synergy as well as on individual competence) in World of Warcraft. Based on my experiences, I can say that the comparison to tines, and any suggestion that there is any sort of “group consciousness” in any meaningful way, are severely misplaced.
As you can see, I similarly struggled to communicate my ideas. Probably more than you did, however.
Two or maybe three years ago I suggested at a CFAR reunion that close-knit tribes / communities of humans, rather than individual humans, might be 1) alive / thinking in some important sense and 2) the natural unit of moral value
I am not sure that small groups of humans are complicated enough in their interactions to form a collective mind capable of thought.
It seems like tribe-centered moralities have a poor track record, but that obviously assumes a metric for evaluating moral success that you might dispute.
Two or maybe three years ago I suggested at a CFAR reunion that close-knit tribes / communities of humans, rather than individual humans, might be 1) alive / thinking in some important sense and 2) the natural unit of moral value. I wasn’t able to communicate my intuitions in favor of this very well (and I still can’t); among other things, I had in mind the tines from Fire Upon the Deep.
I feel like tine-ish levels of cooperation can be achieved in online games (like EverQuest) where everyone knows their role and the role of everyone else. It’s harder to achieve and even to imagine in very dynamic environments with shifting roles.
I’ve done a great deal of high-end raiding (i.e., difficult group challenges, where success relies on perfect cooperation and synergy as well as on individual competence) in World of Warcraft. Based on my experiences, I can say that the comparison to tines, and any suggestion that there is any sort of “group consciousness” in any meaningful way, are severely misplaced.
As you can see, I similarly struggled to communicate my ideas. Probably more than you did, however.
I am not sure that small groups of humans are complicated enough in their interactions to form a collective mind capable of thought.
It seems like tribe-centered moralities have a poor track record, but that obviously assumes a metric for evaluating moral success that you might dispute.