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Notes -
How many of the participants in the culture war understand that they're memetic agents? For instance, a social justice warrior doesn't necessarily think of themselves as a pawn of a multidimensional space ideology, emitting memes and discarded by the movement once no longer useful to the prospiracy. Instead they simply think of their morality and righteousness as an objective truth.
Similarly people who express and articulate the desire for an ethnostate are convinced of the righteousness of their position.
The culture war is as much a commentary on whose righteousness can be expressed as much as it is a contest over the definition of righteousness.
(The correct answer isn't that none of them are righteous.)
(It's that righteous causes like trans acceptance are not made less righteous by the fallibity of the people who express trans acceptance, and foul causes like the ethnostates are in fact foul and should be neatly excerpted from discourse by moderator attention, or, barring that, bullying to make sure the nerds to get the message.)
What constructive observation can be taken from this?
You can think of causes as vast abstract ideologies puppeteering around people, if you like. Nobody ever thinks of themselves like this. There might be a constructive comment to make on whether thinking about people as 'memetic agents' or causes as 'memes' or 'prospiracies' is useful, I guess, but you haven't gone in that direction.
(For the record I agree that thinking of people as memetic agents in the service of vast impersonal causes is usually foolish. If you spend too much time thinking about 'multidimensional space ideologies' and not about actual people who believe things for all the ordinary human reasons you believe things, you will end up badly astray.)
Instead you've just said that...
Some positions are right and some positions are wrong.
Okay, sure. That's obvious. Some people are right and some are wrong.
So what? I don't see what the point of posting that is. We can discuss reasons why so-and-so cause might be right or wrong, but you haven't made any comment or argument along those lines. We can also discuss what the proper meta-level policy is towards people who hold 'wrong' positions, but again, you haven't offered any ideas, any reasons, that might be discussable.
What's your point?
I might be misreading you, and I'm addressing your parenthetical point, but I don't think your post gives sufficient acknowledgement of the importance of mimesis/memetics.
Perhaps you're focused on strategy rather than ontology but I'm inclined to think mimesis and esoteric ideas like hyperagents are the critical ideas we need to think about to understand current issues.
The reality is we have agency and can aspire to individual rationality (which also requires wisdom, not just formal logic). But we are also subjects to 'interpellation' from the top down, which helps shape our reality. We are mimetic creatures and look to others to know what to think and care about. We can't avoid the cognitive necessity of 'framing', which necessarily narrows our perception and understanding of reality.
So what, you might say-how does this relate to the culture wars?
My contention is that some people are more able, whether due to upbringing or inherent personality inclination, as well as training, to either orient to truth or to occupy contrariwise positions. Others are more susceptible to going along. So there's that dimension-not everyone will act in the same way in what I will outline here..
Our moment sees postmodernism arise with the internet and institutional decay. This gives rise to mimetic possibilities that draw from culture but then proliferate as a dynamical system and operate back down on the culture. This level of hyperagency, or the egregore, explains qanon and the current gender ideology. It needs to be understood at this level because it's spontaneous, contingent and also not rational - it's the old, 'you can't reason someone out of something they didn't reason themselves into'. People need to see that we are mimetic creatures that are prey to mass delusions and we should normalise talking at this level.
Other facets of the problem are more mundane, ie good faith vs bad faith, politics, cognitive biases that prevent people appreciating contextual factors in current world problems, conservative vs progressive preferences etc. They feed in, interact with, the culture war issues but aren't enough to explain the phenomenon.
I'd agree that mimesis is a useful concept, but I'm not convinced that agency is the right way to frame it. As I use the term, an agent implies things like deliberate or conscious intent. Emergent agency - the 'agency' of an impersonal system - is a metaphor. There are times when I don't mind that metaphor (e.g. "Germany wanted revenge after the Treaty of Versailles" - sure, Germany isn't really an agent capable of desiring anything, but it's an analogy), but I think you have to be very careful of reifying it.
What do you mean by "Germany isn't really an agent capable of desiring anything"
Do you mean it doesn't have qualia? What do you mean by "it doesn't have qualia."
Surely you think the humans have qualia.
Do you not agree that those human interactions constitute 'germany'? They seem to identify as 'germany'.
Sure, they aren't agents like you or I, they have way more qualia spread across distributed processing units interacting in often uncoordinated ways.
But if we want to really figure out what "germany" is doing and why, we have to trace back all of the processing that led to the outcome, and that includes a lot of tracing of human qualia. But- and heres the important part- not all of the qualia.
Not all of the qualia of Frank-Walter Steinmeier contribute to the behavior of Germany. Only some of them contribute to the actions we all identify as the actions of Germany. Only some of them identify as Germany. Maybe Frank-Walter Steinmeier's ego is so strong, and Germany's weak enough, that he barely Identifies as Germany at all.
Egregores- usually refers to something stronger. The sense of identity is more unified. The hive mind is more interconnected. The mob shares more of its cognition. A substantial number of Christians have a God tulpa and in antiquity Catholics received systemic back-propagation flowing through the church in a centralized manner. There are systems that use humans to hold their consciousness and propagate and execute their goals. It is important to understand this. Because we live in one of them.
Refusing to reify our God with a human name means it is less likely to appear to the psychotics as a spirit, but having no body also makes it harder to kill.
I mean that there is nothing that it is like to be Germany. Germany does not have a mind with internal experience, or indeed qualia. If I look for conscious experience in Germany, I will find it only at the level of individual Germans. Thus also with desires. Germany qua Germany has no desires - only Germans do, and 'Germany' is a kind of metaphor or collective term for the aggregate desires of German people. When I say 'Germany wants so-and-so', people listening to me generally understand that what I mean is 'a large number of Germans want X'.
To take a specific example, when I say 'Ukraine wants to be independent from Russia', I am not positing some sort of emergent super-mind called 'Ukraine' that has internal conscious experience and coherent individual desire, and which desires to be independent from Russia. I am referring to a commonality in the desires of the majority of Ukrainian people.
I don't see at what point it's helpful to posit, in your language, an ego for Germany or for Ukraine. The national ego is fictional - it is an imaginative construct that we use because our brains are good at modelling other human-like agents, but bad at modelling giant emergent systems, so we pretend that the system is an agent. Even though it isn't.
I disagree. Or rather, I do not think there is anything it is "Like" to be OliveTapenade or CloudHeadedTranshumanist either. Those are fictions. There are human qualia behind those words, but those qualia are no more (or less) OliveTapenade and CloudHeadedTranshumanist than the German qualia are Germany.
We can make objective statements about how the qualia of OliveTapenade and CloudHeadedTranshumanist affect the behavior of the human bodies that house them, but we can also make objective statements about how the qualia of OliveTapenade and CloudHeadedTranshumanist affect the country that houses them, the planet that houses them. etc
We can make objective statements about how OliveTapenade and CloudHeadedTranshumanist identify. but then we're still at a loss if they identify as multiple things.
I can tell you this much. The qualia over here don't identify as merely the consciousness of this body. This is a consciousness that could not exist outside of America, planet earth, in a family that owns 5 dogs, and so on and so forth. All of those things are essential components of this qualia and thus they are part of "me". Could the human agentic system exist without me as I am now? Yes certainly. But you keep saying things like "the national ego is fictional". You're conflating the agentic system of each human with the qualia of each human that feel like they 'are' that human, and then refusing to conflate the agentic system of Germany with the qualia of Germany that feel like they 'are' that Germany. And then saying Germany is "fictional" because it doesn't have qualia.
I feel like you are holding a 'woo for me but not for thee' sort of double standard here.
Ah I see. Yes. In terms of how exactly you model the behavior of Germany- If you're modeling the qualia of Germany the same way you model the qualia of a single person, you are indeed doing it inaccurately. Ideally you should model its qualia in concept as being distributed via media and upbringing and being executed in an ecosystem by a collection of human agentic systems that are also doing lots of other things. You should be modeling its political action more like an ML architecture with specific connections to specific human agentic systems. Ideally you also do this for humans. But the day to day operation of human agentic systems is largely obscured by privacy (mass data gathering by the internet for ads is actually exactly the sort of thing you do to help you model the operation of a human agentic system) and the fact that the internal architecture of the brain is really hard to study. The usefulness of positing an ego for Germany, is that- for one, tons of people are holding that double standard you have there. 'woo for me and not for thee'. And for two, tons of people fail to appreciate the similarities between countries, religions, societies, and more traditional organisms until you frame it this way. They all need to reproduce. They all have specific architectures for transferring information throughout the organism and policies for issuing commands. They all have weak points and can be killed. Those that stick around all pursue certain goals and have mechanisms to fight value drift. And so on.
If you already fully grasp all of this on the object level- it's not going to be as useful to you. If it all just feels like a word game... well
so is the following:
e^x = 1 + x + x^2/2! + x^3/3! + x^4/4! ...
and yet somehow... sometimes a word game is all it takes to unveil the profound.
I'm not particularly sure how to respond to this. I can assure you that there is definitely something that it is 'like' to be me, because I have direct, unmediated experience of that thing. I experience qualia, but moreover, those qualia are not free-floating but are attached to a particular consciousness. I am more confident of this than I am of even the existence of an external world. How could I not be? Subjective experience precedes all else.
I presume that other human beings are also subjects of experience by analogy - they seem similar to me, so I assume that they are.
But I don't know how to get from this to a super-agent. I am definitely an agent. Other human beings are almost certainly agents as well, insofar as I recognise a similarity of kind between us. Germany? Where is the agent? Where is the consciousness or ego?
It's possible that we're talking past each other. My point is that there is no unified 'thing' that is Germany that possesses subjective experience. Therefore, because my understanding of the term 'agency' is inextricably connected to subjective experience (and thus will, desire, etc.), there is no agent that is Germany.
It's true that the overall concept or category of Germany contains many things that are agents. In that sense there is a distribution of qualia across Germany. But all of those qualia are attached to particular conscious agents - and none of them are attached to something called 'Germany'. Because Germany does not have a mind.
I think we may actually agree on this much?
But translated into plain English, this really sounds to me like... you just agree with me. Germany is a collection of many independent human agents that we might model - in a way that I would describe as fictional or metaphorical - as a single giant agent. But that's just a model.
I'm not sure what the machine learning analogy even contributes here.
I'm hoping we agree that individual people have minds, and conscious, subjective experience.
I hope we also agree that Germany does not have conscious, subjective experience.
If you grant that agency has something to do with thought or desire or intentionality, things that can only exist in the mind, I'm not sure how you can avoid the conclusion that people have agency and countries do not.
We might conveniently model countries as having agency, and I think that's a necessary simplification since our brains are pretty well-optimised for modelling the behaviour of other people, animals, etc., and not for giant concepts like countries, so countries-as-agents can be a useful shorthand for us. But the country itself? It does not have the kind of agency that you or I have.
Mmm, yes, we mostly agree. I think the difference is in our understanding of the term "agent"
for me the agent is the construct that makes choices and does things. When I think "agent" I think reinforcement learners selecting a policy. I think min-max searching through a game tree. A human agent becomes a different agent if you separate it from its cybernetics. That is- the policy I follow is inextricably linked to the tools I have for processing information about the world. My collective systems output different choices about what to eat if my collective systems include internet access.
You could destroy most of my agency by removing all of my cybernetics and putting me in solitary confinement. But I would still have qualia. So qualia and agency seem highly separable to me. Agency is about processing information and outputting choices in the pursuit of a goal. qualia is about having an experience.
And the stuff about identity... It doesn't really matter if I'm a brain in a jar and this body is a remote controlled robot, or if I'm a brain in this body. What matters is how the brain is hooked up to the things it controls and how it sees itself as being able to control them and having goals relating to them. So in theory- a brain can be hooked up to Germany and see itself as Germany- and then it really would be Germany. In reality there is no such brain hooked up like that. But there are millions of brains hooked up in tiny ways like that such that each of them really is a little piece of Germany. I agree that it's a different architecture of agency. So it's not 'the kind of agency that you or I have' but it's the same category in my ontology... They're both agency to me.
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