I have not (yet) read this critically, the introduction just tweaked my
(confirmation biased) interests:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-11-brain.html
When I first encountered the Mirror Neuron research
<https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(22)00134-6>
(decades ago) it fit my own experience fairly well and in fact helped to
explain (just so stories?) many of the intuitive ways I apprehended my
emotional/intellectual/physical entrainment experience with others. I
suppose this is a self-referential example of the topic (i.e.
confirmation bias, entrainment, etc).
Recent /mirror neuron/ review:
https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(22)00134-6
In my recent reminders of the general concept of (reading Yuval Harari's
"Sapiens" and "Homo Deus"
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Deus:_A_Brief_History_of_Tomorrow>)
I was left with a stronger impression than ever that so much of human
experience seems to be like living in a shared dream driven or at least
constrained by our "tribe". Religion, Politics, Economics, or generally
"Culture" seems to be the stigmergic field that mediates that. The role
of media (print, then broadcast, now internetty) has been to broaden the
scope somewhat arbitrarily or according to the interests of those who
control those resources.
Now with LLMs and text-to-image generators are becoming so capable and
broadly engaged with, it seems that our "intersubjective reality" at
least has a new fidelity to this shared dream offered up, if not a
broader scope. The fever dreams/hallucinations of various extremist
perspectives is already problematic (but inevitable?) so this increased
fidelity seems likely to only aggravate that (e.g. deepfake "evidence"
for various conspiracy theories, etc.).
My own preferred understanding of this larger phenomena is that we are
on the cusp of an emergence of a qualitatively different type of
collective behaviour/experience not quite covered by the various
examples that fit in the ontological category of "swarm" (e.g. herd,
pack, school, flock, pod ... ) perhaps by "on the cusp" we can roll back
the clock 10k years to early agriculturalism/urbanism/written language
(or further) but like false-summits, maybe this is just the next
false-saddle in a saddle point between basins? There is probably an
existing reserved term for that, maybe I'll ask GPT?
For better or worse we have become mythopoetic creatures and modern AI
is reinforcing/accelerating that? Some resistance to (questioning of?)
metaphor, poesy, narrativity, might be an intuitive recognition of this
collective/inevitable slide into a new phase of being? Different from
but somehow resonant with the anti-globalist instincts of populism?
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