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Comment by Permik | Hacker News Reader

"Minds beyond ours", how about abstract life forms, like publicly traded corporations. We've had higher kinded "alien lifeforms" around us for centuries, but we have not noticed them and seem generally not to care about them, even when they have negative consequences for our survival as a species.

We are to these like ants are to us. Or maybe even more like mitochondria are to us. Were just the mitochondria of the corporations. And yes, psychopaths are the brains, usually. Natural selection I guess.

Our current way of thinking – what exactly *is* a 'mind' and what is this 'intelligence' – is just too damn narrow. There's tons of overlap of sciences from biology that apply to economics and companies as lifeforms, but for some reason I don't see that being researched in popular science.

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I think you’re overestimating corporations a bit. Some aspects of intelligence scale linearly as you put more people into a room, eg quantity of ideas you can generate, while others don’t due to limits on people’s ability to communicate with each other. The latter is, I think, more or less the norm; adding more people very quickly hits decelerating returns due to the amount of distance you end up having to put between people in large organizations. Most end up resembling dictatorships because it’s just the easiest way to organize them, so are making strategic choices about as well as a guy with some advisors.

I agree that we should see structures of humans as their own kind of organism in a sense, but I think this framing works best on a global scale. Once you go smaller, eg to a nation, you need to conceptualize the barrier between inside and outside the organism as being highly fluid and difficult to define. Once you get to the level of a corporation this difficulty defining inside and outside is enormous. Eg aren’t regulatory bodies also a part, since they aid the corporation in making decisions?

Usually for companies, regulatory bodies are more like antibodies against bacteria. Or for another example, regulatory bodies are like any hormone producing body part, they control that the assemble of your guts do their thing and don't fuck it up.

Maybe that’s a loosely effective analogy. It depends on the degree of antagonism between corp and regulator.

Really interesting ideas IMO. I have thought about this how you might found a company, you bring in the accountants, the lawyers, the everything that comes in with that, and then who is even really driving the ship anymore? The scale of complexity going on is not something you can fit in your or even 10 peoples heads. Yet people act like they are in control of these processes they have delegated to countless people who are each trudging off with their own sensibilities and optimizations and paradigms. It is no different to how a body works where specific cells have a specific identity and role to play in the wider organism, functioning autonomously bound by inputs and outputs that the "mind in charge" has no concept of.

And it makes it scary too. Can we really even stop the machine that is capitalism wreaking havoc on our environment? We have essentially lit a wildfire here and believe we are in full control of its spread. The incentives lead to our outcomes and people are concerning themselves with putting bandaids on the outcomes and not adjusting the incentives that have lead to the inevitable.

Modern corps are shaped after countries, they are based on constitutions (articles of incorporation/bylaws). It's the whole three branch system launched off the founding event.

This is an interesting perspective, but your view seems very narrow for some reason. If you’re arguing that there are many forms of computation or ‘intelligence’ that are emergent with collections of sentient or non-sentient beings then you have to include tribes of early humans, families, city-states and modern republics, ant and mold colonies, the stock market and the entire earths biosphere etc.

There's an incredible blind spot which makes humans think of intelligence and sentience as individual.

It isn't. It isn't even individual among humans.

We're colony organisms individually, and we're a colony organism collectively. We're physically embedded in a complex ecosystem, and we can't survive without it.

We're emotionally and intellectually embedded in analogous ecosystems to the point where depriving a human of external contact with the natural world and other humans is considered a form of torture, and typically causes a mental breakdown.

Colony organisms are the norm, not the exception. But we're trapped inside our own skulls and either experience the systems around us very indirectly, or not at all.

Personally, I actually count all of those examples into abstract lifeforms which you described :D

There's also things like "symbolic" lifeforms like viruses, yeah, they don't live per-se, but they do replicate and go through "choices", but in a more symbolic sense as they are just machines that read out/ execute code.

The way I distinct symbolic lifeforms and abstract lifeforms is that mainly symbolic lifeforms are "machines" that are kind of "inert" in a temporal sense.

Abstract lifeforms are just things that are in a way or other, "living" and can exist on any level of abstraction. Like cells are things that can be replaced, so can be CEO's, or etc.

Symbolic lifeforms can just be forever inert and hope that entropy knocks them to something to activate them, without getting into some hostile enough space that kills them.

Abstract lifeforms on the other hand just eventually run out of juice.

> We are to these like ants are to us. Or maybe even more like mitochondria are to us. Were just the mitochondria of the corporations

It's the opposite, imo. Corporations, states etc. seem to be somewhere on the bacteria level of organizational complexity and variety of reactions.

No one behaves with species survival as the motivating action.

Maybe not consciously, but otherwise natural selection *will* do that choice for you :D

In countries with civil law (as opposed to common law), companies are called juristic persons (as opposed to natural persons, humans)

Ya, I've always wondered like do blood cells in my body have any awareness that I'm not just a planet they live on? Would we know if the earth was just some part of a bigger living structure with its own consciousness? Does it even need to be conscious, or just show movement that is non random and influenced in some ways by goals or agenda? Many organisms act as per the goal to survive even if not conscious, and so probably can be considered a life-form? Corporations are an example of that like you said.

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