This resonates heavily with me. It's an intuitively interesting idea. I do have one issue though (emphasis mine):
"a living system maintaining both a higher level of internal cooperation and a lower level of internal conflict than either its components or any larger systems of which it is a component."
So say there exists some form of higher-level individual that where we can be considered as components. Does its existence suddenly revoke our individual-ness? I don't see why that should be, why it has to be exclusive. The flatworm and the neoblasts can be individuals at the same time.
...But then the definition is meaningless. It'd be great to make it weaker without breaking it, so to say
I think the fact that we are self-aware makes it difficult (in the "it's not helpful" sense) to revoke our individuality if we participate in something bigger than ourselves. To make such a claim, I think one would have to propose some way, for us to be components of a higher-level individual, that takes away our self-awareness.
Philosophy has long held (though not without dispute, of course!) that the world is ontologically divided into 'natural kinds' that have metaphysical significance, but I side with the view that ontologies are merely useful tools in epistemology, subject to modification and qualification as our knowledge increases, and useful in some contexts but not necessarily all. Nothing breaks if we talk about neoblasts being "in a sense" individuals, while also talking about planaria being "in a sense" individuals, so long as it is either obvious, or we make clear, in what sense we mean.
There is quite a continuum here: for example, slime molds are even less aggregated entities than planaria. And then there is the aphorism "a chicken is an egg's way of making more eggs."
One thing that I find interesting to think on is if there is a form of self awareness so greater in scope than our frame of reference.
That an outside entity possessing such a perspective would look upon us in a fashion not unlike how we would look at individual ants or bees in a hive.
Those animals don’t have the capacity to perceive our self awareness with the tools they have, perhaps more base motivations but never understanding more than our actions. How would we look upon a creature so much more expansive than ourselves? Would widespread cthonian-esque cosmic horror unfold among our kind, coupled to cultism and deification?
Much like the interpretation of the Thing from the alien perspective linked on the source article. It’s understanding of the universe is so profoundly different to ours that it is horrified by us.
If we imagine that it becomes possible to ‘record’ full sensory experiences and ‘replay’ them in another person: would a collective pour their meager resources into elevating the life, lifestyle, and success of the single experience donor such that the collective can experience a superior life (as a personal state) that would otherwise be unattainable?
Mary Lou Jepsen at Openwater talked about her team’s efforts to create that tech in a Long Now Foundation talk back in 2018
I think that the recent mathematical+philosophical(?) work by “johnswentworth” on AlignmentForum/LessWrong on Abstraction as “Information at a Distance” is an intriguing approach towards how it could be that abstractions which are “natural” could arise. I think this seems like it might fit fairly well with the concept of natural kinds (though probably not a 100% match? ) .
Separately, I think the idea of degrees of naturalness of a concept seems to make sense?
> I side with the view that ontologies are merely useful tools in epistemology, subject to modification and qualification as our knowledge increases
This is incoherent. How can knowledge even exist if there are no natural kinds? What exactly would you be knowing in their absence? One can be mistaken about a particular predication, but knowledge isn't even possible if you deny the reality of natural kinds. Knowledge presupposes universals and universals presuppose natural kinds. I don't even know what is useful about natural kinds if they don't exist. How could you even talk about usefulness in their absence? You've denied the very possibility of even having a measure of usefulness!
You seem to be taking a vaguely Kantian view of the world, except that you've gone further by denying that the categories of the mind are fixed AND that noumena are real. Kant himself is incoherent. If noumena are unknowable and all we have are phenomena and some mental schemata, then why posit noumena in the first place? What's the justification? In your case, how would you even make the claim you've made?
Look at this statement: "I think the fact that we are self-aware makes it difficult (in the "it's not helpful" sense) to revoke our individuality if we participate in something bigger than ourselves." Putting aside the revolting notion of revoking my individuality like some collectivist (sorry, I'm a person, I have individuality, thanks), who is "we"? Wouldn't that denote at least suggest a genus, if not a species? That's just the beginning. Even if we accept that science reifies some things (which it does; science is to a large degree instrumentalist, but I know that only because I am capable of theoretical knowledge), that still presumes the existence of natural kinds and a broader capacity to know them. Science just becomes a way of organizing data for practical purposes (like laws that classify shellfish as fruit or whatever) and less a theoretical enterprise interested in knowing things as they actually are.
The only workable solution is one that assumes the mind can know reality in principle. It can make mistakes, it can be in error, but it is capable of knowing. Skepticism is unworkable and nothing is worse than a kind of domesticated, halfway house skepticism that fails to notice the non-skeptical baggage that's being smuggled in through the backdoor to produce this half-hearted in-between. Either accept that knowledge is possible, or accept insanity. You cannot coherently straddle both.
Given the very broad range of views on what, if anything, counts as a natural kind [1,2], it would seem that if I am being incoherent, philosophy as a whole is being incoherent, and if knowledge cannot even exist if there are no natural kinds, then we have not even taken the first steps to knowledge!
What happens in practice, of course, is that we propose that the world is a certain way based on our experiences so far, without being hung up on the question of whether we have truly identified the real 'natural kinds' and are talking about them. We seek to validate, or refute, extend and/or replace these opinions, through further study of the world, in a process that is the opposite of the skepticism that you seem to think my position implies.
If you find it helpful to think that 'natural kind' is a natural kind, then go ahead, but the fact that you know something about the world (a premise I am not disputing) does not make your assumption about natural kinds a metaphysical necessity and a prerequisite for knowledge. After all, we have, over the millennia, held many now demonstrably-false ideas about what sort of things there are in the world, yet that has not prevented us from learning more.
One other thing: you wrote "putting aside the revolting notion of revoking my individuality like some collectivist..." Firstly, note how you are presenting an emotional reaction as if it were an argument. Secondly, if you had paid attention to my previous post, you would have seen that I am arguing that our individuality should not be put aside on account of the arguments in the article. Before you start bandying words like "incoherent" and "insanity", you should be a little more careful with your own arguments.
1. You're arguing with the author, who isn't here.
2. The problem with your approach is that people instantaneously leap from "capable of knowing" to "knowing", and they do this all the time.
So anything that reminds you that you are definitely wrong is a useful tool, just as ontologies are helpful tools (and wrong).
3. "genus" does not exist. "species" does not exist. "clade" could exist in limited cases but is inevitably incomplete. (Consider that you are pointing at creatures and their offspring without thinking about their microbiomes, among other things.)
> So say there exists some form of higher-level individual that where we can be considered as components. Does its existence suddenly revoke our individual-ness? I don't see why that should be, why it has to be exclusive. The flatworm and the neoblasts can be individuals at the same time.
A far out way of considering it is in the context of greater humanity and the various pesky problems within it like anti-vaxxers, climate deniers, child deaths due to malnutrition, war, lack of genuine (non-illusory) empathy, etc.
I've had this weird thought stuck in my head over the past few months as I've been reading "Humankind" and watching the horrors of politics and the pandemic:
The idea of "human nature"—good and evil—makes a hell of a lot more sense if you think of humans as a colony species where each tribe is a single individual competing against others.
It's not so much that humans are uniformly capable of both good and evil. It's that what we deem "good" is mostly how we treat our own tribe and what we call "evil" is how we treat others. It's like trying to decide if an arm mostly good or mostly evil because it washes its own body and strikes other people. Those actions are fundamentally different—on incompatible moral levels—because the former is done to the arm's own organism and the latter to another.
It may not even be meaningful to try to aggregate how we behave to our in-group and how we behave towards our out-group into any unified metric.
May I offer an alternative/supplemental approach: rather than thinking of the situation from the perspective of a human within a tribe, analyze the system from the perspective of an ~alien who is outside the system. Treat it like a standard systems analysis exercise: isolate, decompose, and abstract the various objects within the system. So what was formerly a person, is now an agent running a sophisticated yet obviously hilariously flawed biological neural network, running on top of a similarly flawed set of data...and so forth and so on.
I find that from this perspective, all the pieces start to fit together the more you think of it. Not only does what we are living through increasingly make sense, after a while it starts to seem logically inevitable (under present conditions, that is).
And once you spend sufficient time on this phase, ideas might start falling out of the sky on how to plausibly rectify the situation.
Do we have any hope of ever treating all of humanity as our in group? Ideally we should treat people who are infected with dangerous ideas not as enemies, but as we would treat sick members of our tribe.
"a living system maintaining both a higher level of internal cooperation and a lower level of internal conflict than either its components or any larger systems of which it is a component."
So say there exists some form of higher-level individual that where we can be considered as components. Does its existence suddenly revoke our individual-ness? I don't see why that should be, why it has to be exclusive. The flatworm and the neoblasts can be individuals at the same time.
...But then the definition is meaningless. It'd be great to make it weaker without breaking it, so to say