Descartes_2006: We Think, Therefore I Am

Over Thanksgiving, I was going back through a book called Swarm Intelligence (Kennedy and Eberhart – an excellent book for the serious beginner, written in accessible and compelling language). I came across a chapter saying that the very existence of any individual human being’s mind is predicated on the existence of the human collective. In other words: “if We don’t think, You don’t exist.”

I don’t know if I agree with this, but it’s a slightly extreme example of the types of core concepts that underpin “collective intelligence” discussions. 

The quote that caught my eye:

A man who has been alone since birth will have no verbal behavior, will not be aware of himself as a person, will possess no techniques of self-management, and with respect to the world around him will have only those meager skills which can be acquired in one short lifetime from nonsocial contingencies… To be for oneself is to be almost nothing (Skinner, 1971, pp. 117-118).

When I first read this, I thought it was just a little creative hyperbole. Nope– they mean it literally. Kennedy and Eberhart write: “In short, and in order to provoke thought and discussion, we would argue that unsocialized humans do not have what we normally think of as minds.” (258)  The chapter moves on to talk clinically about several instances of children who grew up feral, alone in the woods, or who were literally raised by wolves. Having reached an age of 8-10 with no socialization at all, these children never adopted even the most basic of social processes, and they never manifested any apparent form of reasoning or communication.

If you look at it like that, an unsocialized human being is like a computer with no operating system. It doesn’t matter what it’s made of; it has no concept of how to interact with itself or a user. Without an operating system, a computer is just wasted desk space. Install an OS, though, and you have a powerful machine. 

To at least some extent, these ideas mesh with reality. Almost everything that we know, do and want has been taught to us by other people, who were themselves taught the same or similar things, lather, rinse, repeat endlessly backwards until the very beginning of human cognition. I just noticed, for example, that I folded down the upper right-hand corner of a page of my copy of Swarm Intelligence to mark the location of that quote. I didn’t come up with that idea– far from it. My mother taught me to dog-ear books in exactly that way: not to tear the page, or fold the whole side in, or even dog-ear the bottom corner instead of the top one. She taught me that particular way because someone taught her; likely, they never thought twice about it. The body of human knowledge, transferred piecemeal to my brain as codified, unconscious ritual, dictates my every move all day long. Forget the textbook– Without other human beings, I would not know how to produce or manipulate a single object in my office; and, to be totally fair, 99.9% of those objects wouldn’t exist.

After chewing on this for a week, I am beginning to adopt the slightly disturbing view of human beings as just semi-unique mini-processors, whose whole existence is spent absorbing the data that outside processors (other people) kick off, chewing on it, tweaking it, and releasing it back to more outside processors. We hear, we adjust, and we say it back… constantly editing and re-editing “The Collected Works of Modern Humanity.”

Certainly, we each have at least some form of existence as an individual. I have an ego; I’m sentient and I feel things uniquely. But where, if at all, can I really draw the distinction between me and us?

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