A couple days ago I was on an evening flight from New York to Los Angeles. Just as our plane pulled into Los Angeles, I was fascinated by the view below. Looking down, one can see the glow of the Southern California megalopolis, the giant sprawl unbounded in size. But the thing that intrigued me most was the sight of the freeways; the steady, arterial motion of traffic through the vast grid of Southern California’s freeways. It was a distinctly an impression of a circulatory system.
The monster of the SoCal sprawl is a living body.
One can extend this metaphor quite far. The freeways are arteries; the streets leading off of it, the network of capillaries that feed goods, services, people, sustenance to the local communities that perform the work of this megasystem. We can perhaps imagine the communications grid as the nervous system. Societies thrive, get sick; sometimes they die. At a point, one cannot be sure that it’s only a metaphor. In what ways are cities, states, countries not organisms?
This begs the natural question: what would be the equivalent of the brain? Perhaps the government serves as the cognitive center. As a whole, it is the government that directs the macroscopic actions of a country. Commerce and trade, warfare, domestic issues – these are all actions ostensibly initiated by a country’s government.
What is interesting about the United States is that it does not act entirely autonomously from the rest of the “body”. Instead, it solicits input from the individual cells of the country – the democratic process. It would be a strange idea for our selves – how crazy would it be if our brain asked our body cells for directions!
How do we know whether, say, the United States is conscious in any regard? Would it be possible for us to know? My skin cells have no idea that the entity it is a part of – me – is conscious at all. Likewise, we probably have no way of comprehending whether our society and civilization is conscious in some cosmic sense. We are all just cells, doing our cellular things, oblivious to the great behemoth of an entity that depends on our performance.
Perhaps the real issue is: could the question of consciousness of society even be relevant?
More later. Thoughts and comments appreciated.
Posted by Andrew on September 8, 2009 at 5:20 am
I’ve thought about this for a while, so let me present my much-lauded Giant Interstellar Wombat Theory.
In the same manner that closed systems like individual cells, persons, or cities can make up a system on the level of an organism, a society, or a country, it is also plausible that whole worlds and star systems can be pieces of a larger whole – perhaps a giant interstellar wombat. When the wombat sneezes, a star explodes. When it scratches itself, plague hits. Much of what we consider divine influence might be the simple day-to-day operations of a higher consciousness that we are but a part of. Who’s to say that my own nostril cells are not terribly disgruntled every time I sneeze.
More to the point about consciousness, though, is that it must be an emergent property as so many writers have suggested. Our consciousness is not to be credited to neurons or even neural pathways alone. It is something wholly separate and even perhaps removed from its constituent parts. I don’t advocate for the idea of a soul (I think that stretches the metaphor too far), but at the same time I’m very much against reductionism that claims to be able to pinpoint our lives to bits and pieces.
So: I do believe that a society can be said to have a consciousness. We know that societies and systems at least have certain behaviors – market forces, demographic shifts, and the like, which signal that they are dynamic entities capable of working in their own way. I don’t believe that we will ever comprehend those capacities as the kind of self-consciousness we expect, though, just as one of my skin cells could never comprehend what I’m thinking right now. Maybe it would if I broke my explanation down to a Morse code of pressure receptors and tubulin proteins. But what’s the point of reducing it down that far?