No one bee is an exemplar of its species, nor is it a complete animal. Workers are infertile females. Queens can reproduce but can't move. It is perhaps more accurate to speak of the HIVE as the creature, the individual. So too, humans can't function as individuals. Jeremy K. Nicholson, chairman of biological chemistry and head of the department of surgery and cancer at Imperial College London said, 99 percent of the functional genes in the body are microbial. And there are 10 times more bacterial cells in your body than human cells. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-humans-carry-more-bacterial-cells-than-human-ones/
We don't simply carry around these cells, they digest our food, they secrete neurotransmitters, although non-human, they are arguably a significant portion of our humanity. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-06/asfm-ibp061312.php
if you replace the word " self" with "committee of selves" the thesis is psychologically viable
Good point, but I'm not sure it's necessary. We don't argue if we're told that "Apple Computer is committed to your satisfaction" in favor of "Apple Computer ARE committed to your satisfaction."
One of man’s important mistakes, one which must be remembered, is his illusion in regard to his I. Man such as we know him, the "man-machine," the man who cannot "do," and with whom and through whom everything "happens," cannot have a permanent and single I. His I changes as quickly as his thoughts, feelings and moods, and he makes a profound mistake in considering himself always one and the same person; in reality he is always a different person, not the one he was a moment ago.Man has no permanent and unchangeable I. Every thought, every mood, every desire, every sensation, says "I".Man has no individual I. But there are, instead, hundreds and thousands of separate small "I"s, very often entirely unknown to one another, never coming into contact, or, on the contrary, hostile to each other, mutually exclusive and incompatible. Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking, "I". And each time his I is different. Just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly. Man is a plurality. Man's name is legion.
G.I.Gurdjieff (whose system attracted many celebrities and intellectuals to his door in the 20th century)
G.I.Gurdjieff (whose system attracted many celebrities and intellectuals to his door in the 20th century)
It's semantics really. It perhaps makes more sense for the hive to (metaphorically) say "back away or I'll sting you" rather than "back away or we'll sting you." I allow for the collective "I." MIT AI pioneer Marvin Minsky wrote a book "The Society of Mind" echoing a similar sentiment:
Quote:
Marvin Minsky -- one of the fathers of computer science and cofounder of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT -- gives a revolutionary answer to the age-old question: "How does the mind work?"
Minsky brilliantly portrays the mind as a "society" of tiny components that are themselves mindless.