I have a similar view, that a society (not necessarily a political concept like country, but more culturally defined group of people) is the ultimate intelligent being. And the main rationale behind that notion is that society DEFINES human intelligence. We think human are intelligent beings but as a matter of fact, every capabilities that we deem signs of intelligence, such as language, logic, math are given to the human by the society. Suppose we have a unfortunate person who somehow is raised by a dog without any direct or indirect contact from the human society, he would demonstrate very little intelligent superiority over other advanced mammals - no language, no culture, not even logic.
As pointed out by the article, society as a distributed group entities demonstrate signs of consciousness, but that's not even the key, the key is society defines every single consciousness of the members in it: how we think, what we want, etc. A single person's intelligence is simply a tiny subcomponent of the ultimate intelligent being - the society. How intelligent we are are mostly determined by the society (doesn't mean that everyone thinks a like), and the exciting thing is that some of us get to contribute some improvements to that ultimate intelligent being.
Society may be great at transmitting knowledge but it doesn't create knowledge -- people do. Even the thoughts you've just written down, are your own, not societies. I can even disagree with your thought and we can throw it into the gutter.
Society may know how to create fire, but it's one man who created for the first time, and it's the choice of just that one man to pass it onto another (and yet another). A man on a island may certainly discover fire.
Yes, but a lot of the knowledge you rely on to construct complex concepts were taught to you at some point, they didn't just manifest in your mind independent of society. Every person may add a little bit, and that little bit each person adds may be only a very small bit outside of the collective knowledge that would exist had they not existed.
I guess my point is that how we have learned how to attribute and locate the source knowledge doesn't necessarily describe how it is actually created, moves, and is altered.
> to contribute some improvements to that ultimate intelligent being.
That's fair, I'm just turned off by the language of "ultimate intelligent being." Perhaps that's just my human bias, but I have trouble seeing society as anything greater than its parts, primarily people and knowledge.
I didn't read it that way, but I wouldn't have worded it that way either.
Humans are the ones that decide what intelligence is to them. We've seen many times in history that this is in fact, very unintelligent to do. But sometimes it seems to work splendidly. The individual can define him or herself as the most intelligent while everyone agrees. That really doesn't necessarily mean anything beyond everyone agreeing that they are intelligent. And some people may as a result, choose to entertain their consciousness in other ways, in order to direct it on a different course. And this may wind up being more intelligent. And then we pretend that nothing weird happened and we knew all along what real intelligence was.
:)
I tend to view things as absurd before I view them as intelligent, but my life is fairly boring.
I have to ask how could I express any experience, without society? Without society there is no language I can speak. No knowledge to rely on. No computers to write. And no Internet for sure.
As pointed out by the article, society as a distributed group entities demonstrate signs of consciousness, but that's not even the key, the key is society defines every single consciousness of the members in it: how we think, what we want, etc. A single person's intelligence is simply a tiny subcomponent of the ultimate intelligent being - the society. How intelligent we are are mostly determined by the society (doesn't mean that everyone thinks a like), and the exciting thing is that some of us get to contribute some improvements to that ultimate intelligent being.