Slime molds are amazing, particularly when these single-celled organisms congregate and start moving as a single body. The analogy with groups of humans is tempting. I suspect that human organizations are distinct entities separate from their constituent people just as a fruiting slime mold is more than its constituent cells.
‘Slime mold’ is a fuzzy term. There are ‘several kinds of unrelated eukaryotic organisms that can live freely as single cells, but can also […] form multicellular reproductive structures.’ (Quotes in this paragraph from Wikipedia.) I’m focusing here on ‘cellular slime molds [that] spend most of their lives as individual unicellular protists, but [can] assemble into a cluster that acts as one organism.’ Cellular slime molds use molecular signaling to aggregate into a multicellular blob that crawls to an open space and grows a fruiting body. The subsequent differentiation is striking: ‘Some of the amoebae become spores to begin the next generation, but some of the amoebae sacrifice themselves to become a dead stalk, lifting the spores up into the air.’
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| Lamproderma scintillans, photo by HelenGinger via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-3.0 (For more Lamproderma scintillans, see YouTube, Nature Picture Library, The Hidden Forest, Discover Life.) |
This behavior reminds of people that acting in concert and taking on specialized tasks, though of course is much more complex ways than slime molds. People certainly use signaling, and not infrequently sacrifice for the welfare of the group. For a scale comparison, clumps of cellular slime molds can consist of order 100 to 10,000 cells (PNAS paper), quite a typical size for human organizations. (The mean firm size in COMPU-STAT data is 4,605 employees, Zipf distributed, per a paper in Science; cf. a paper for animal body size in Trends in Ecology & Evolution).
Studies on slime molds have suggested an ability to memorize and anticipate repeated events (Discover Magazine). This is a form of intelligence. However, the slime molds don’t have a nervous system, and it seems absurd to claim they have a mind, let alone consciousness. That, of course, depends on how one defines those terms.
I like Antonio Damasio’s distinction between intelligence, minds, and consciousness. In Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious (2021), he proposes that (biological) intelligence is ‘the ability to resolve successfully the problems posed by the struggle for life.’ Intelligence can be ‘based on chemical/biological processes in organelles and cell membranes’ or ‘based on spatially mapped neural patterns.’ The former is the covert, non-explicit intelligence of bacteria and plants (which is also possessed, grandfathered in, by all animals), and the latter is the overt, explicit intelligence possessed by animals like us. For Damasio, minds require neural systems that can form spatial patterns of sensed inputs (he calls these ‘images’), and consciousness requires minds that have feelings (i.e., that can form images of their internal body states). A conscious mind has a sense of ownership of the images it contains. The images are felt to belong to the body that contains the mind.
Human organizations, even the smallest ones, are intelligent in at least the covert, non-explicit way that slime molds are. As they get bigger, I think they have minds in the Damasio sense; artefacts like accounts, document collections and databases act as Damasio-images that represent the external and internal milieu of the organization. Can they be conscious? I’m not sure. (My claims about orgregores, and claims about egregores as far as I understand them, certainly assume so.)
It’s an open question for me whether orgregores have feelings, and thus (for Damasio) mental experiences. For example, I don’t know if they have a well-enough defined ‘body’ to which images of its internal states can be related. We could define an orgregore’s body as the collection of people, data and processes that constitute it. However, this body has fuzzy edges (people could belong to multiple orgregores) and the inside/outside distinction might not be sharp enough to support feelings. I’m also unsure how one would define homeostasis – a key element in Damasio’s analysis – in this case.
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