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008: Populus
Apr. 28th, 2021 09:22 pmAll of the heavy lifting to establish the criteria for mind was a necessary evil in order to get to the interesting stuff—the practical applications. If I accept that anything meeting all six criteria qualifies as a mind, how does that change my perspective on things and the decisions I make? Having clearly differentiated a mind from a brain from a consciousness, and having decided to ignore the latter two, what other systems is it useful to consider as a mind?
Allow me to reopen the Case of the Sticky “D”. It came under the fifth criterion, quoted here:
Bateson notes that anything can produce information (difference that makes a difference) if it can be incorporated into a circuit in which it can produce change. So, anything can become a part of a “mind” as long as it introduces a change that is perceived by another part and has consequences. Let’s say the “d” key on my laptop is sticky and I keep typing “an” instead of “and,” and it annoys me every time I catch it. I’m not saying my laptop qualifies as a mind—my keyboard certainly doesn’t—but it can become incorporated into my mental circuit, producing changes in my mood and behavior each time it registers the difference between “an” an “and”. At this point, it might be useful to change the name of this mind from Me, to Me-laptop, to denote that consequential differences in the second thing have become a part of my mind’s feedback system. It will stay that way until I stop paying attention to it. Until then, those differences produce transforms of the event preceding, the sticking of the “d” key.
Once something, like a person, qualifies as a mind, anything that can enter that circuit of attention and produce changes can become part of that mind, even if that thing does not even remotely qualify as a mind of its own. This can be a temporary integration, passing as attention turns, or last the lifetime of the original mind, depending on the specifics. What’s more, two things that individually qualify as minds can link up in a circuit. Let’s say we have two guys, Eric and Randy. They are alive, they meet the criteria of minds. Great or small, admired or not, they are minds. When Eric and Randy interact with one another, they are sending messages through body language, regular old language, and metamessages about context, etc. This is a circuit, each component of which creates information. The other component—i.e. person—receives it, and generates its own feedback, wash, rinse, repeat. Neither has stopped being his own mind, but in the process, they have joined into a mind that is neither Eric nor Randy, since the member of a class cannot also be the class of which it is a member. There is now a new mind, called Randy-Eric (Randric, or Errand, if they are a celebrity couple.)
While it may seem like a bit of a leap to assign agency to something that has no material connection, this is where we remember that we’re dealing with maps as navigational devices, not literal territories. Is there any case at all when two or more individuals interacting can be shown to be different than the sum of their parts?
Yes, actually, a lot of really obvious ones. Mob mentality springs to mind. Everyone has seen a mob, if not been part of one, that behaves very differently than the people who compose it and has the power to sweep up more and more members as it grows. I’ll call the phenomenon “populus,” the Latin word for population, or the opinions and will of the crowd. When we have a mob, or a populus, there are at least two minds operating. Me and all of the keys on my keyboard do not make any more of a mob than myself alone. They can cause change, but as non-minds they lack the complexity to make something that becomes difficult to model by looking at the individual parts.
"Mob" has negative connotations, which is why I prefer a different word, but let’s stick to it for the time being since it’s an easy example of a populus. A bunch of people in the street are upset over something. They are constantly sending messages to another through their movements, tone, language, etc., and receiving messages in return. Over a short time, emotion washes over the crowd. It’s not a lot of different emotions. It’s a big wave of more-or-less shared emotion. There is a unity to their behavior. They move as a group, shout the same things, have the same angry looks on their faces. Finally, some threshold is reached, and individuals who wouldn’t jaywalk on their own engage in violence and destruction of property. Once the crowd has dispersed, if you interviewed any of them, they’d probably say things like, “we got carried away,” “I don’t know what came over me,” or if they’re unapologetic, “I felt like part of something greater than myself.”
None of the participants “lost their mind.” They were all still minds on the normal level. But they were also components in a larger system, acting on feedback from its parts. For a moment, a mind of a higher order of magnitude was created, and minds that big tend to have the power to sweep smaller-order minds along like a rising tide in the harbor.
While the mob mind was larger and more powerful, and in the technical sense more complex, it certainly wasn’t capable of the nuances of thought and emotion that its members would have been on their own, nor did it last very long. What could account for that?
In order for two minds to engage in a circuit, they have to include one another in their attention. Think of a mind as a circle, and a pair of them as overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. Many, many, many messages that Eric can generate (call them thoughts, emotions) will be inappropriate or practically impossible to share with Randy, especially in all of their detail. Remember, they get transformed. The overlapping part is the range of things they can share, the topics they can communicate about. The rest of the circles are kept to themselves. The surface area of potential sharing is still quite large compared to the unshared, however. That’s why two people can have a more complicated relationship than one hundred people.
If we add in a third person, a third circle to our diagram, now the area shared by all three has shrunk. There are things shared by all, just two, and no one. Still, it’s a significant area. Add a hundred more circles, making sure there is always some part where all overlap, the area shared by all is minuscule, disappearing.
Turning to politics as a convenient example, movements are largest and most powerful when they are focused on a single idea—one thing that all of the members can get behind. I start a party called the Pop-Tart party. Our sole item on the agenda is free pop-tarts for all as a basic human right. Quite a few people will be on board with that. The area that we need to share in order to remain cohesive is small, and whatever opinions or intentions we have apart from that are allowed to remain isolated in our individual minds, not called to the forefront. But imagine I let power go to my head, and I decide to elaborate the campaign by banning cinnamon pop-tarts, which I would never do. Some of the minds who could get behind the pop-tart idea will find that they have far less overlap with the group who wants to ban cinnamon, because that’s obviously the best flavor. They may even decide to splinter off, creating the Cinnamon Pop-Tart Reform Party. The more planks each of the two parties adds to their platforms, the more the individuals involved lose common ground. At some point, they will leave for other populi (is that the plural? I only speak one kind of atin-Lay). To the extent that people belong to the same political party, they avoid creating, or ignore existing, items that would remove enough common ground between themselves and the others to cause a schism. The more items that become non-negotiable points of emphasis in the party’s platform, the smaller it will become. The more extreme and demanding members—Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “intolerant minority”—will push out the less puritanical until there remains no one but Eric and Randy with a single revolver on the table between them.
If being part of a populus is important to someone, that person will need to limit the extent to which they think their own thoughts. Any disagreement will cause a split, or cognitive dissonance on the part of the thinker. Someone who places thinking for themselves high on the list of priorities would do well to avoid entangling alliances and group minds, in general. Of course, we can’t avoid them entirely short of being a hermit in a cave. So how can this perspective help navigate the endless conflicting populi to which we subject ourselves?
Recall that something becomes part of the circuit of mind when it provides information (differences that make a difference) to other components that produce change. How, then, do I avoid something being an unwanted part of my mind? Ignore it. Pay no attention. If the attention I pay to the Cinammon Pop-Tart Reform Party is entirely negative, I avoid becoming a part of that larger mind, but it still provides feedback that changes things like my mood and actions, so in a roundabout way I have made it a part of me anyway. Instead of being passionately swept up in its movements, I’m now swept up in trying to counteract its movements, which ties me to it in a tango of spite.
I may have made a populus sound wholly negative. That’s clearly not the case. Some memberships allow us to accomplish things we couldn’t dream of on our own, and perhaps give us a wisdom and a focus that isn’t available to a smaller mind, nuanced as it may be. A populus can run the gamut from saint to devil the same as any of its members. That’s why it’s important to take a step back and ask who serves who? To what end? And when is it time to let a populus that served well and ran its course decompose, its components scattered to fertilize something new?
I will note at this point that the ephemeral simplicity of the large populus seems only to apply across one wheaton scale, for example, individual people→a crowd of people. If I consider all the individual organisms, the species, the inorganic components, and the whole they create in the lake ecosystem mentioned in the last essay, I can’t find the same simplicity. It doesn’t make a good Venn diagram. I think that’s because there are way too many levels of complexity, all interacting with one another on all levels, that it defies my comprehension. You have a duck, all ducks, all other animals and their species, wind, sunlight, water movement, plant individuals and classes, all of which interact to create an ever-changing mind we would call the lake ecosystem. Though you might be able to find the corresponding traits in the ducks and the flocks they form when considered in isolation.
Whether it’s two people trying to decide where to eat for date night and ending up somewhere they both hate, or family decisions that hardly seem good for anyone involved, it’s clear that when minds join into larger circuits, the mind that results will follow its own processes to its own ends, whether or not the components agree. It’s the same when I eat an entire box of cinnamon pop-tarts in a single sitting even though most of the systems in my body don’t seem to like it. Unfortunately for them, they die too if they mutiny. As individuals dealing with a populus, we have the freedom to invoke The Clash and ask ourselves, should I stay or should I go, now?
Allow me to reopen the Case of the Sticky “D”. It came under the fifth criterion, quoted here:
Bateson notes that anything can produce information (difference that makes a difference) if it can be incorporated into a circuit in which it can produce change. So, anything can become a part of a “mind” as long as it introduces a change that is perceived by another part and has consequences. Let’s say the “d” key on my laptop is sticky and I keep typing “an” instead of “and,” and it annoys me every time I catch it. I’m not saying my laptop qualifies as a mind—my keyboard certainly doesn’t—but it can become incorporated into my mental circuit, producing changes in my mood and behavior each time it registers the difference between “an” an “and”. At this point, it might be useful to change the name of this mind from Me, to Me-laptop, to denote that consequential differences in the second thing have become a part of my mind’s feedback system. It will stay that way until I stop paying attention to it. Until then, those differences produce transforms of the event preceding, the sticking of the “d” key.
Once something, like a person, qualifies as a mind, anything that can enter that circuit of attention and produce changes can become part of that mind, even if that thing does not even remotely qualify as a mind of its own. This can be a temporary integration, passing as attention turns, or last the lifetime of the original mind, depending on the specifics. What’s more, two things that individually qualify as minds can link up in a circuit. Let’s say we have two guys, Eric and Randy. They are alive, they meet the criteria of minds. Great or small, admired or not, they are minds. When Eric and Randy interact with one another, they are sending messages through body language, regular old language, and metamessages about context, etc. This is a circuit, each component of which creates information. The other component—i.e. person—receives it, and generates its own feedback, wash, rinse, repeat. Neither has stopped being his own mind, but in the process, they have joined into a mind that is neither Eric nor Randy, since the member of a class cannot also be the class of which it is a member. There is now a new mind, called Randy-Eric (Randric, or Errand, if they are a celebrity couple.)
While it may seem like a bit of a leap to assign agency to something that has no material connection, this is where we remember that we’re dealing with maps as navigational devices, not literal territories. Is there any case at all when two or more individuals interacting can be shown to be different than the sum of their parts?
Yes, actually, a lot of really obvious ones. Mob mentality springs to mind. Everyone has seen a mob, if not been part of one, that behaves very differently than the people who compose it and has the power to sweep up more and more members as it grows. I’ll call the phenomenon “populus,” the Latin word for population, or the opinions and will of the crowd. When we have a mob, or a populus, there are at least two minds operating. Me and all of the keys on my keyboard do not make any more of a mob than myself alone. They can cause change, but as non-minds they lack the complexity to make something that becomes difficult to model by looking at the individual parts.
"Mob" has negative connotations, which is why I prefer a different word, but let’s stick to it for the time being since it’s an easy example of a populus. A bunch of people in the street are upset over something. They are constantly sending messages to another through their movements, tone, language, etc., and receiving messages in return. Over a short time, emotion washes over the crowd. It’s not a lot of different emotions. It’s a big wave of more-or-less shared emotion. There is a unity to their behavior. They move as a group, shout the same things, have the same angry looks on their faces. Finally, some threshold is reached, and individuals who wouldn’t jaywalk on their own engage in violence and destruction of property. Once the crowd has dispersed, if you interviewed any of them, they’d probably say things like, “we got carried away,” “I don’t know what came over me,” or if they’re unapologetic, “I felt like part of something greater than myself.”
None of the participants “lost their mind.” They were all still minds on the normal level. But they were also components in a larger system, acting on feedback from its parts. For a moment, a mind of a higher order of magnitude was created, and minds that big tend to have the power to sweep smaller-order minds along like a rising tide in the harbor.
While the mob mind was larger and more powerful, and in the technical sense more complex, it certainly wasn’t capable of the nuances of thought and emotion that its members would have been on their own, nor did it last very long. What could account for that?
In order for two minds to engage in a circuit, they have to include one another in their attention. Think of a mind as a circle, and a pair of them as overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. Many, many, many messages that Eric can generate (call them thoughts, emotions) will be inappropriate or practically impossible to share with Randy, especially in all of their detail. Remember, they get transformed. The overlapping part is the range of things they can share, the topics they can communicate about. The rest of the circles are kept to themselves. The surface area of potential sharing is still quite large compared to the unshared, however. That’s why two people can have a more complicated relationship than one hundred people.
If we add in a third person, a third circle to our diagram, now the area shared by all three has shrunk. There are things shared by all, just two, and no one. Still, it’s a significant area. Add a hundred more circles, making sure there is always some part where all overlap, the area shared by all is minuscule, disappearing.
Turning to politics as a convenient example, movements are largest and most powerful when they are focused on a single idea—one thing that all of the members can get behind. I start a party called the Pop-Tart party. Our sole item on the agenda is free pop-tarts for all as a basic human right. Quite a few people will be on board with that. The area that we need to share in order to remain cohesive is small, and whatever opinions or intentions we have apart from that are allowed to remain isolated in our individual minds, not called to the forefront. But imagine I let power go to my head, and I decide to elaborate the campaign by banning cinnamon pop-tarts, which I would never do. Some of the minds who could get behind the pop-tart idea will find that they have far less overlap with the group who wants to ban cinnamon, because that’s obviously the best flavor. They may even decide to splinter off, creating the Cinnamon Pop-Tart Reform Party. The more planks each of the two parties adds to their platforms, the more the individuals involved lose common ground. At some point, they will leave for other populi (is that the plural? I only speak one kind of atin-Lay). To the extent that people belong to the same political party, they avoid creating, or ignore existing, items that would remove enough common ground between themselves and the others to cause a schism. The more items that become non-negotiable points of emphasis in the party’s platform, the smaller it will become. The more extreme and demanding members—Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “intolerant minority”—will push out the less puritanical until there remains no one but Eric and Randy with a single revolver on the table between them.
If being part of a populus is important to someone, that person will need to limit the extent to which they think their own thoughts. Any disagreement will cause a split, or cognitive dissonance on the part of the thinker. Someone who places thinking for themselves high on the list of priorities would do well to avoid entangling alliances and group minds, in general. Of course, we can’t avoid them entirely short of being a hermit in a cave. So how can this perspective help navigate the endless conflicting populi to which we subject ourselves?
Recall that something becomes part of the circuit of mind when it provides information (differences that make a difference) to other components that produce change. How, then, do I avoid something being an unwanted part of my mind? Ignore it. Pay no attention. If the attention I pay to the Cinammon Pop-Tart Reform Party is entirely negative, I avoid becoming a part of that larger mind, but it still provides feedback that changes things like my mood and actions, so in a roundabout way I have made it a part of me anyway. Instead of being passionately swept up in its movements, I’m now swept up in trying to counteract its movements, which ties me to it in a tango of spite.
I may have made a populus sound wholly negative. That’s clearly not the case. Some memberships allow us to accomplish things we couldn’t dream of on our own, and perhaps give us a wisdom and a focus that isn’t available to a smaller mind, nuanced as it may be. A populus can run the gamut from saint to devil the same as any of its members. That’s why it’s important to take a step back and ask who serves who? To what end? And when is it time to let a populus that served well and ran its course decompose, its components scattered to fertilize something new?
I will note at this point that the ephemeral simplicity of the large populus seems only to apply across one wheaton scale, for example, individual people→a crowd of people. If I consider all the individual organisms, the species, the inorganic components, and the whole they create in the lake ecosystem mentioned in the last essay, I can’t find the same simplicity. It doesn’t make a good Venn diagram. I think that’s because there are way too many levels of complexity, all interacting with one another on all levels, that it defies my comprehension. You have a duck, all ducks, all other animals and their species, wind, sunlight, water movement, plant individuals and classes, all of which interact to create an ever-changing mind we would call the lake ecosystem. Though you might be able to find the corresponding traits in the ducks and the flocks they form when considered in isolation.
Whether it’s two people trying to decide where to eat for date night and ending up somewhere they both hate, or family decisions that hardly seem good for anyone involved, it’s clear that when minds join into larger circuits, the mind that results will follow its own processes to its own ends, whether or not the components agree. It’s the same when I eat an entire box of cinnamon pop-tarts in a single sitting even though most of the systems in my body don’t seem to like it. Unfortunately for them, they die too if they mutiny. As individuals dealing with a populus, we have the freedom to invoke The Clash and ask ourselves, should I stay or should I go, now?
