>>I would say "true"
>>metaorganisms that have their own behavior independent of humans today
>>tend to be very old and large, and it might be that they have not yet
>>fully emerged.
And speaking of Greg Bear's SLANT, as Max did a moment ago:
=====================
`[Torino] thinks there's a world-spanning bacterial mind,' Nathan says
lightly.
`A *mind*, in germs?'...
`Not like a human mind, or even like Jill [an AI thinker], not socially
self-aware. He thinks every bacterium is a node in a loosely connected
network. That would make them parts of the largest distributed network
anywhere - on Earth, at least.'
=====================
An intelligence you can't debug!
I wonder from time to time whether memetic meta-organisms might not be
running an entire slow, massively distributed and time-sharing kind of
ecology inside human brains/minds, so that each brain's modular structure
is itself MIP-snatched by fleeting computations *from different
interpenetrating critters* that operate, fairly fuzzily and with a lot of
noise-repair required, via *patterns* of speech and other semiotic
behaviour. In a sense we'd be infested not just by collective moods and
fashions but by large-scale mind-animals that cross and merge and sometimes
contest within each single head.
Perhaps this is just a restatement of the basic meme postulate, but I have
a hunch that it might be more than that. But then I can only suspect this
while I'm being run by a mind-parasite that wants me to think so...
Damien Broderick