The Problem of the Social Organism

Carl H. Flygt

October, 2005

The brain doesn’t compute answers to problems – it retrieves answers from memory.

In essence, these answers were stored in memory a long time ago.

Jeff Hawkins, On Intelligence

In 1981, when I heard Vernon Mountcastle speak at U.C. Irvine, where I was enrolled as a graduate student in psychobiology, what little tether remained for me at that institution was severed. Mountcastle was speaking to experimentalists about the neocortex as a distributed information processing system, a highly abstract and lofty conception that I had no doubt was beyond the purview of those with whom I had somehow come to be associated. When I asked him after the talk if perhaps there were some asymmetries in the information processing capacities of the various senses, with vision far ahead of all the others, he was skeptical. When he was then forced to correct the English grammar of an aggressive and unmusical computer scientist, I made up my mind to quit Irvine, and to go north in search of the New Age. The vision of the earth from space, which had inspired Stewart Brand’s psychedelic Whole Earth Catalog was, after all, the real reason I had come to California.

The idea of global society as an intelligent distributed system, as a global brain as it were, is not particularly new, but with the advent of conversation theory, which requires spiritual comportment by those involved, it begins to look somewhat practical. Add to that a Mountcastlian theory of the neocortex that fleshes it out in formal detail, and that has a good chance of being machine implementable, and the idea grows beyond New Age fantasy and into actual political culture. It seems reasonable to suppose there will be homologies between two such theories, because after all they deal with the same thing, namely human intelligence, on the one hand conceived socially and on the other conceived in pure terms. Let’s see if we can establish some of this theoretical overlap in a few broad strokes.

Jeff Hawkins’ principle of pattern invariance in intelligent, self-conscious evolutionary processes is represented in my theory, at the lowest level of conversation, by a list of propositions that are taken to apply a priori to all conversational acts as background principles. Each of these propositions, as constituting conversation, is supposed to be intrinsically acceptable to any rational mind, and when arrayed as a social contract, can be invoked in an orderly way to assess (classify) and anticipate (standardize) the form of the current conversational content. In this way, that content remains at all times a universal quantity, regardless of how well or how poorly it is represented by the individual conversationist. Upward flowing classification, and downward flowing standardization, of course, are both key to Hawkins’ idea of the neocortical algorithm.

At higher levels of “computation,” the conversational model appeals to some spiritual notions. The human being, like the planet on which he (she) supervenes, is a cosmic entity nested in a hierarchy of material objects that extends at least as far as the sun, and possibly further. Because of this purported fact, a good deal of supersensible invariance obtains in the possible cosmic contents to which individual brains are privy. Clairvoyant intuition is a reality; the objects of clairvoyant intuition are real, cosmic objects. The trick is to set things up such that the objects of clairvoyance are universalized, consensually reified and deemed generally to have an acceptable ontological status, however strong or weak. It should be noted that taking cosmic contents to be hypotheticals, on my theory, works just as well as treating them as facts. In fact, it is probably better to do so, because few of us who are intellectually honest are truly confident that we have experienced them in a pure form, much less that we can call such contents up at will.

My theory of conversation reifies conversational contents by specifying universal satisfaction (universal intentionality) at each step in the conversational process. Under such conditions, an identical mental content in each socially functioning brain is more or less guaranteed. The condition of identical mental content in itself is sufficient to distinguish what I mean by conversation from the low level species of conversation we commonly experience in the world today, because the identity is one of intuition, not merely one of reason. When people in conversation experience the same mental content, on my theory, they really do experience the same thing, the same actual object. This is not mere mysticism. It is, rather, high level, even cosmic, pattern invariance.

What probably happens during a conversation taking place at these higher levels of prediction and control is that the angels of heaven, and the hierarchies above them, begin to intervene substantially in the affairs and thoughts of men. Whatever these realities are (speaking of “angels” may be merely metaphoric), in true conversation we open ourselves to them and, if we find them acceptable and wholesome, allow them to have their way with us. Real conversation requires a gesture of spiritual sacrifice, and the result is the ingression into the human form of a cosmo-mechanical intelligence that is simply incommensurable with the intelligence of ordinary need and self-interest. It is this form of intelligence that is destined ultimately to transform the whole planetary sphere into a world settled in life and light, because this condition is what everyone dreams about, and it is by means of human beings in conversation, and only by means of that, that this intelligence can be made substantially more efficient than it already is.

Now Jeff Hawkins thinks prediction and control are taking place constantly and uniformly in all cortical areas of the human brain and are applied seamlessly at all stages of sensory-motor processing. He thinks of the brain as applying massive and detailed prediction and control everywhere all the time. My idea of conscious conversation, by way of contrast, is a real clunker. A real conversation is controlled linearly, step by excruciating step, and often very little advancement of content happens for forty-five minutes. In order to practice real conversation, people need time to settle into themselves, to assess the sea of mood and reflexes intuitable in the moment, to decide what is possible for them at the time and what is not. Often an inordinate amount of time and energy is devoted, in my style of conversation, simply to reproducing the current conversational content to everyone’s satisfaction, and thereby learning to attend very closely to the individual self-nature of those gathered together. I take this necessity merely to be a symptom of the contemporary state of social development. In the future, if I am right about my principles, when the social organism has been aroused from today’s state of social indifference and individual self-interest, telepathic communication in the astral body will be the norm, and Jeff Hawkins’ model of cortical intelligence will apply as transparently to the whole of human life on earth as it does today to the individual neocortex.

The human individual is a form of cosmic auto-associative memory. In and by means of the human being, the cosmos gives itself the capacity to remember something about itself. The human being is embedded in a sea of causes, and his (her) mere presence is a literal invocation of these causes, if that presence is composed by the proper art. Similarly, the terms and predicates used by the individual in speech and language reach back with causal feelers across space and time to an initial moment when an object or an event became intelligible to someone, and was named (this is the famous theory of causal reference proposed by the logician Saul Kripke). Both the individual body and the individual mind are full of cosmic memory. A healthy clairvoyance, of course, is the primary exhibition of cosmic memory. Spiritual dreams are also probably evidence for the cosmic dimension in the human being.

Consider a room full of people, perhaps at a University Faculty Club attending a dinner and a lecture. The air is full of sono-mechanical vibration, a sea of unintelligible noise, but underneath it all a stream of real, if disjoint, intelligence. What is going on? I think the example illustrates a social organism whose distributed (cortical) functions have not developed.  The memory intrinsic to the individuals present is not being fully exploited. If it were, something beyond mere noise would be detectable in the atmosphere. What would be detectable under conditions of a global brain would be spiritual forms and figures, actual cosmic beings weaving and working according to cosmic law through the light and the sound. High level invariances in the ether would be detectable, and these would exert a causal influence on the living matrix below. Reciprocally, the living matrix below would be causally responsible for the supersensible order which supervenes on it. Our individual lives and gestures would accordingly have literal cosmic significance, and we would each feel more or less certain that the universe was a good and friendly place to be. Doesn’t that seem to be a worthy framework within which to test our theories about intelligence?