There's a lot of cognition out there
As I’m writing this, there are about 7.98 billion people on earth. The average human brain is usually cited to have somewhere around 86 billion neurons. If we imagine human society as one big brain, then within that huge cognitive organ, each of us represents a little under a dozen neurons. By contrast, the tiny nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, the only organism to have its entire connectome mapped, has 302 neurons. The analogy is brittle, but the point is overwhelming: comparing an individual to all of humanity, in sheer cognitive scale, is something like putting a 1-millimeter roundworm next to a walking-and-talking human. One-thirtieth of a 1-millimeter roundworm, in fact.
Unlike a nematode, of course, we’re each part of that huge cognitive system. We read and write and watch and gossip, and language evolves. Ideas flow, culture changes, money moves. Each of us makes up a conceptually almost-infinitesimal part of this apparatus, and, crucially, none of us controls it. Some of the things that our civilization does, none of us really wants. Most of the things it does, none of us really understands.
And yet, the things that it does are the products of our actions. That is, the things that we do… well, we’re doing them. We have agency – real, human agency – over the things that happen in the world. Are we infinitesimal molecules eddying, hopelessly and permanently, in an impossible-to-understand maelstrom of complexity, power, fortune, and of suffering? Or is society something which can be discussed, understood, and actively improved?
One of the things I’d like this blog to be about is the intelligence of society and the prospect of improving it. From one nematode to another, as it were.