> A fellow name of Howard Bloom <i think> has a considerable amount to say on
> that subject in his book "The Lucifer Principal".
>
> To quickly and perhaps grossly summarize <with attendant loss of accuracy> I
> beleive that Mr. Bloom is saying that governments...or "superorganisms" as he
> calls them.....are then next step up on the "memetic" food chain. They are to
> people what people are to cells...
>
> And they don't give a damn what we think...
Seems true. Here in Sweden we do not vote for people, we vote for
parties which themselves select what cells (i.e politicians) to put in
the Parliament (OK, there are theoretical ways around this, but they
are irrelevant in practice), and it is clear that organizations have
more rights than people in some respects.
Of course, metaorganisms are not bad per se. It is just that we as
single cells cry "what's in it for me?". They do not need to have our
best interests at heart in order to prosper, they just have to
propagate their structure.
As transhumans we are interested in developing our own potential, not
necessarily the potential of the metaorganisms (although a case could
be made for the rights of intelligent metaorganisms). So we better
find a way around the metaorganisms (very hard) or come up with
metaorganism structures which benefit us (and themselves) directly,
thus giving us a fitness boost. Something like a colonial
metaorganism, rather than the unitary metaorganism model?
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y