If my speculation that some organizations are emergent, conscious entities in their own right, then super-intelligent aliens may have been among us for some time.
How long have they been here?
My intuition is that one needs a large number of well-connected human brains for sciousness (denoting consciousness or sentience) to emerge: Let’s say tens of thousands of brains, each connected to hundreds of others in real time at audio bandwidth or better. By this criterion, scious organizations – which I’ll call o-gregores or orgregores as a nod to egregores and evoking the "awake" etymology – have been around for only a few decades.
If we don’t need the real time requirement, then large bureaucracies might be o-gregores, and we can push back their emergence by hundreds or thousands of years. Candidates include scribal bureaucracies, universities, warrior classes, and priesthoods.
On the other hand, if one needs much higher fidelity communications channels (say, 8k video with 10 ms latency) and many more brains then they may still be decades in the future – or they may never come into being. If nothing else, light speed put a spatial limit on the network size; light travels 3,000 km in 10 ms, so a latency ceiling of that order rules out planetary organisms.
Intersecting o-gregores
One of the most fascinating properties of o-gregores is that they don’t have sharp boundaries. Most of the processing a human brain does is contained in a body (pace distributed cognition). The neural network of a brain seems to consist of multiple modules but AFAIK neurons belong to one network or another.
However, humans can belong to multiple large organizations simultaneously and it’s often hard if not impossible to tell where the organization’s boundaries are, if for no other reason that affiliation with many organizations is a matter of degree. If organizations can be conscious, they can intersect in myriad ways and it could be impossible to draw boundaries around them.
Here are some intersecting large groups that might be o-gregores:
- The Democratic Party, anti-vax, BLM, social justice
- The GOP, anti-vax, white supremacists, QAnon, Tea Party
- Silicon Valley, BLM/social justice, libertarianism, tech utopianism
- Pentagon, contractors, Congress (i.e., the military industrial complex)
The absence of sharp boundaries seems unavoidable and is probably desirable from a fitness point of view. The blurring of o-gregores therefore seems to be a feature not a bug
Perhaps even the notionally sharp boundary of corporations is an illusion. Certainly, organizations can tell whether a specific person is an employee or not; however, consultants and contractors can be plugged into multiple corporate networks simultaneously. Certainly, one knows whether you hold stock in company A or company B; but complicated and sometimes intentionally opaque networks of ownership as one finds in banks and intersecting keiretsu complicates matters. We may have been tempted to take the legal fiction of corporate personhood too literally; they’re more like intersecting swarms of interests than distinct people.
Persistence
The people that make up organizations are clearly an essential ingredient, including through the contributions their brains make to an organization’s putative sciousess. However, organizations – and more importantly, their character and behavior patterns – persist as people leave and join.
Our talk of corporate culture points to an intuition that there is something that persists. The Chinese imperial bureaucracy, old universities, and long-standing priesthoods like the Catholic church and Buddhist orders certainly have a character that changes much more slowly than that of the individuals they contain. These organizations can certainly perceive, remember, learn, react, and adapt, and they do that in ways, and at rates, different from individual people.
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| Photo by John Lloyd Griffith via EarthSky.org |
As a simple analogy: lenticular clouds (aka UFO clouds) seem to be stable objects, but the water vapor that constitutes them is being blown through the structure at the speed of the prevailing winds across a mountain that creates the cloud.
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| From opensnow.com |
Ecosystems and holobionts
There are several biological analogies that might be useful in understanding o-gregores.
The ecosystem metaphor is used ad nauseam to describe industries. It captures the varied roles and inter-relationships of different companies in an economy. Several things put me off using it in this context, though: it’s not clear that industrial value chains map well onto food webs; the mapping of companies and/or industries to species isn’t clear to me; and I’m more interested in the behavior of the aggregates than the interactions between the components.
I learned about holobionts in Caleb Scharf’s The Ascent of Information; Wikipedia defines one as “a collection of closely associated species that have complex interactions, such as a plant species and the members of its microbiome.” It also notes that it’s a variety of holism, the notion that systems should be studied in their entirety, and attention paid to emergent properties through which the whole is larger than the sum of its parts.
I resonate with the notion of emergent behavior of an organization, though large groups interconnected people don’t have the flavor of symbiosis I see in holobiosis, which assumes a particular host organism around which others gather. Doolittle & Booth (2016), cited by Scharf, argue in It’s the song, not the singer that it’s the patterns of interactions between the host and its microbial companions in a holobiont which is the unit of evolutionary selection. By analogy, it’s the interaction patterns between human members of an organization that gives it its character, that lead to “corporate culture.” A difference between o-gregores and holobionts is that the content of the inter-human interactions plays as big a role (and probably bigger) than the mere pattern of interactions.
Another analogy from biology is a superorganism or supraorganism, defined by Wikipedia as “a group of synergetically interacting organisms of the same species.” One might think of an organization as a superorganism consisting of humans. The sci fi version, of course, is the Borg in Star Trek. Wikipedia notes that nineteenth century thinker Herbert Spencer maintained that “every organism of appreciable size is a society”; I’m claiming the converse, that every organization of appreciable size is an organism – and a scious one at that.
Questions about o-gregores (aka orgregores)
If o-gregores supervene on networks of people beyond some threshold size and degree of connectivity, then one can ask whether the appearance of scious organizations represents a phase change: a Singularity avant les lettres A et I.
My hunch is that there hasn’t been a phase change. There are probably various degrees and kinds of sciousness, and different species of o-gregores might emerge and fade over time. Mythological figures that anthropomorphize powerful collective social forces (as distinct from natural forces) could be a signal of their presence.
Of course, the big prior question is: How would one spot an o-gregore, even assuming they exist? If it’s true that they don’t have boundaries the way organic organisms do, that would make it even harder. We’ve often imagined intelligences greater than ourselves (cf. all mythologies and religions) but my talk of o-gregores asserts a materialist explanation. Essentially I want A Field Guide to O-gregores: How does one recognize them? What are the different types, and their behaviors and habits? Do they have feelings? Do collections of o-gregores have o-gregores above them?
As I noted in Scious organizations, one approach is to follow Crick & Koch’s lead to look for an NCC (neural correlate of consciousness) but that begs the question of how consciousness would present itself in this case.
And perhaps the most important question, if we think of them as super-intelligent aliens: Are o-gregores aware of us? Do they care about our interests? What are their values and interests?
Update 18 Apr 2022: I stumbled across Donald T Campbell's notion of entitativity, which might be helpful in analyzing orgregores. According to Wikipedia, "Entitativity, in social science, is the perception of a group as a single entity (an entitative group), distinct from its individual members." According to a piece on psychology.iresearchnet.com/, entititativity tries to explain when people see other people as members of a group. Campbell's three cues of "common fate," "similarity," and "proximity" don't seem to apply to our perceptions of organizations, though.
Update 15 Feb 2022: For the last few weeks I've been toying with "ogregores" as a better term than o-gregores since it connotes organizations more effectively; doesn't have a hyphen; and looks a bit like "ogre" ;-) I've added that synonym to the text. On 18 Apr 2022, I updated the title to include it as well.
Update 28 Oct 2021: Changed lenticular cloud photo, tweaked some text
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