LifeMind

... interesting - I wonder what it would be like to experience the world as a culture? ... I'm trying to grasp just how alien that experience would be to an individual human ... as alien as the experience of a mind would be to an individual neuron? as alien as the experience of the planet would be to an individual culture?

It probably would be that alien were we able to experience it first hand, instead of being a neuron (part of the experience). Much like with the brain, a third party can poke at it, measure electric impulses, and interview the own of the brain, but in the end all s/he is doing is tracking the brain's function externally, never experiencing the mind. Much the same as with culture and society, all we can do at the moment is note that there is a system that seems to have a functional being of its own with a will and a purpose, who knows maybe even feelings. Just like a neurosurgeon saying x part of the brain lights up when we laugh, a person who studies cultures tracks trends saying this part lights up when WE laugh.

Yes we are just a piece of a culture but we are also the will of the culture, in a way. But as China is a good example of how the government has control over the culture by inhibiting rights of the people it is the government who is the "outside of the box", the one with the most potential on the will. And we could say that the government type is the state of the mind to neuron ratio. Communism = mind has more control
Democracy = neurons have more control

So in this view what seems more right? Neurons having control, or the whole mind pieced together? What are we really as a human?

Or could we say that the government is not even the mind, that the outcome/virtue if the society is the mind. I think that makes a little more sense actually.:a-ok:

Neurons always have control, if control could be said to be had. Will in itself is not control, will in itself is simply the unexercised ability to do something. When, as is happening in China, the group ideology changes from in this case communism to capitalism, then the culture will be different. It is difficult to draw an analogy of a mass mind, because individual neurons are not agentive, whereas if we equate people to neurons the person/neuron is agentive. A.L. Kroeber made the analogy of the Superorganism, which made the model of the mass mind less of a biological analogy where systems are circulated and very well confined and more of a dynamic body/mind or an organism that has systems both circular and open, affected by external forces and affected by the internal agency of its constituenncy. its a short paper, and an interesting read, although somewhat outdated.

... imagine that you spend your whole life compiling a sense of self, only to have your mind totally rewired almost overnight ... for eons, the "brain structure" of human culture has been geography - and then in an instant, *poof*! The Internet! ... talk about an identity crisis!

Its a tough one, the internet, I tried to start a thread in the Web Culture section about practical language usage change in real time text chat, but it seems that its not something people feel like commenting on. However it's really the same thing, sort of a cyborgification of the self, and the rhysomatic expansion of the community