O-gregores, an evolutionary rebuttal

 In “Scious organizations” I speculated that sufficiently large and well-connected networks of people could be conscious, by analogy to neural networks. I’ve been calling them o-gregores or orgregores. One possible rebuttal to this claim is that conscious brains evolved over hundreds of millions of years. O-gregores are ad hoc, human-made networks; while they may have the gross topology of neural networks (e.g. scale-free, small-world), they haven’t been under evolutionary pressure to be conscious. Here's a sketch of a response.

In a recent survey of consciousness research, New Scientist points out that consciousness seems to have evolved several times and presumably has important benefits for survival. The article mentions three possibilities that allow conscious animals to make complex decisions:

1. More flexible conscious responses to the environment rather automatic reflex-like reactions to unconscious content.
2. Better evaluations of the world through feelings that make an individual aware of whether something is good or bad.
3. Selective attention.

Perhaps an o-gregore’s interaction its environment provides sufficient opportunities for evolution. In the words of Sidarta Ribeiro in The Oracle of Night, p. 302:

[1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Gerald] Edelman proposed that the brain is the dynamic product of a constant competition between groups of neurons and their synapses, which are positively or negatively selected according to the interaction with the environment. Edelman's theory was given the name "neural Darwinism," being clearly inspired by mechanisms analogous to those that operate in the immune system and in ecological interactions that shape the evolution of the species.

(For background, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_Darwinism.)

Thus, an analog of neural Darwinism could be happening in large-scale, human-made information-processing networks, i.e., o-gregores.

One might argue there's a gross mismatch between evolutionary timescales and the times over at which o-gregores arise and change. I'd counter that ideas can evolve very rapidly since human brains are involved, which might undermine this objection.

My bottom line is that o-gregores are plausibly under evolutionary pressure to be conscious in order since they are under pressure to survive; and since they can use idea processing rather than genetic change to adjust their behaviors, such evolution could happen on the scale of decades rather than millennia.

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; I've added that synonym to the text.