Paul Diduch has asked why I use the term ogregore rather than just calling a corporation a corporation, or an organization. He may be right. Most, though perhaps not all, things I call ogregores are organizations. I’ll argue that the categories of ogregore and organization overlap but are not the same. Paul suggested that an ogregore might be an organization with an eerie agent-like effect; it might also distinguished by being more powerful than run-of-the-mill organizations.
I read Dan Neil's columns because I love his writing not because I'm interested in cars. This week's review of the 2024 Dodge Hornet R/T: An Italian Stallion, Made for America (WSJ, 29 Jun 2023) has a lovely passage that suggests that car companies have distinct characters—evidence, perhaps, that they're ogregores.
My recent post, Bud Light Blunders: An Ogregore Story, delved into a controversy surrounding personalized cans of beer sent to a transgender influencer. Bud Light's behavior resembled that of an ogregore. But was its antagonist also an ogregore?
I learned about Carolyn Chen’s book about how blurring the line between work and religion in an interview with the CS Monitor. It made me wonder if egregores are more likely to arise in workplaces now that they are becoming more like the home turf of those “autonomous psychic entities that are composed of and influencing the thoughts of a group of people” (Wiktionary, see also Wikipedia).
Jill Dupré raised the question of crypto as an orgregore. Exploring the question helped me think about what an orgregore (aka ogregore or materialist's egregore) is.
I’ve been using the term orgregore to refer to supra-human systems with agency and perhaps sentience that emerge from the joint actions of groups of people. Why not just call them organizations or institutions?
Testing my thesis statement (in the recent Project Snapshot), Paul Diduch pointed out to me that significant impacts are usually not hard to discern. That’s true, but there are exceptions. I believe orgregores are one of them. Here is first cut justification of my claim.
Applying Betteridge's law of headlines to this blog’s title, it’s a fair bet that egregores (distinct non-physical entities that arise from a groups of people with shared motivations) do not play. And yet…
I’ve been impressed by the creativity of my dreams – they show imagination and invention that my waking life doesn’t have. They’ve become tiresome, though, because I can’t get sense from them, try as I might. I’m beginning to think that there is no meaning to be found because there is no dream-self; it's just a mindless algorithm churning out material.
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.
I was recently reminded of the old Scottish grace, “Some hae meat that canna eat, And some wad eat that want it; But we hae meat, and we can eat, And sae the Lord be thankit.” Expressing thanks for one’s blessings is a wonderful practice – but what if there’s no one to be thanked?
This post tries to pull together some of the threads of a conversation with Gabor Molnar and Ramiro Montealegre about orgregores, my term for putatively sentient agents that emerge when large numbers of people are very well connected and have a common purpose. Our discussion focused on corporations.
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.
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.
