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Alan Bell's avatar

The upside to all this is that I don't have to hate on my Red or Blue tribes thought process as much, knowing they are just captured by the egregore. The difficulty lies in helping people find a way out.

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El Monstro's avatar

This idea of an egregore is an interesting one, but mob rule is as old as the mob. It is true that whenever a physical object, informational structure or other organization occurs, there are unexpected complexities that arise because of it. My biophysics professor said "knowing all the laws of physics and chemistry, you would never expect the clouds" and suggested that there should be a "fourth law of thermodynamics" which was basically the concept of emergence. I appreciate your contribution to understanding this new era we are in.

I have another way of thinking about it. It seems to me that there are competing artificial intelligences that are composed of a huge collection of algorithms, computers and programmers, each competing for money, but also power, status and influence. The ones that harness these best to gain attention are clearly the ones that are dominant. This is partially an aspect of the goals of the humans building them, but also an aspect of the emergent phenomena that we are unveiling by being so relentlessly connected to each other.

I think Philip K. Dick was a prophet of our coming era in many ways:

"Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans."

So my understanding is that you are talking about this. It is an interesting idea. I believe that Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg and to a lesser degree Larry Page and Sergey Brin have some control over the entities they posses. I appreciate your contributions here.

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