(2022-05-13) Rao Graph Minds

Venkatesh Rao: Graph Minds. It is a strange thing: we acknowledge the generally social nature of our species, but resist acknowledging the specifically social nature of our intelligence. (collective intelligence)

We like the idea of dissolving individuality when it comes to playing together, fighting together, laboring together

But we are extraordinarily wary of the idea of thinking together, even though we obviously do a great deal of it (you’re doing it with me right now).

I have hardly ever encountered a thought along the lines of “It is adaptive for humans to band together into collectives because it allows more powerful collective intelligences to emerge.”

One of the few examples is the variability selection hypothesis (Potts, 1999) that explains human intelligence as a response to environmental variability

Early bipedality, encephalized brains, and complex human sociality appear to signify a sequence of VS adaptations

In fact, the argument that complex brains evolved to navigate the problems of sociality (ie politics) is more popular than the argument that they evolved to take advantage of collective thinking.

I am not interested in arguing about these evolutionary questions here, but it does strike me as odd and revealing that this line of thinking is so poorly represented in our thinking about intelligence

It almost feels like there is a sort of conspiracy to construct intelligence as a primarily individual trait, and hide the extent and depth of its social character from ourselves.

I can’t think of a single mainstream positive depiction of advanced collective thinking.

Humans dissolving themselves and vibing together through dance and music is good. Humans thinking together is oppressive assimilation into Borg cubes.

We find the eusocial intelligence of insects like ants and bees particularly striking, since the swarm appears so much more intelligent than the automaton individuals, yet we turn our own much more capable coordination mechanisms, such as markets, bureaucracies and corporations, into cartoon antagonists for courageous rebels operating individually or in small bands of heirloom brains. (swarming)

Fear of the Borg holds us back from exploring the most promising directions for the future evolution of intelligence itself.

In this new series, I want to unpack this Fear of the Borg, investigate how well-founded it is, and try to construct an alternative mental model of a maximally integrated social intelligence that addresses any well-founded aspects of the fear, but is not unduly constrained by mere unexamined egocentrism

I will call this notional maximally safely collectivized intelligence a Graph Mind.

I first came up with the term in 2019, as an alternative to the clumsy “Global Social Computer in the Cloud,” or GSCITC, which I came up with in my old Against Waldenponding post.

A dozen themes that are on my mind

• Bureaucracies and markets as intelligences
• Network effects as intelligence evolution processes
• Wisdom/madness/conviviality of crowds (wisdom of crowds)
• Human collective intelligence vs distributed computing
• Collective memory and narrative as computation
• Brain-to-brain connection technologies
• Swarm theory, but for bigger-than-ant brains
• Vibes, moods, sentiments, and other collective pre-intelligences
• Egoism vs. surrender tensions in collective intelligence
• Collective intelligence and the experience of deep time
• Deep learning/ML as a mirror of collective intelligence
• Silicon futures vs. Neuron futures vs. converged futures

One of the reasons I suspect there’s something important there is just how threatening Borg-like conceptions of intelligence are to modern humans

Anything that sparks such a strong derangement syndrome has got to have something interesting going on inside, right?

We are Graph Mind. We will explore.