Fragment 211, March 30, 2025, word count: 696.

tags: AI, culture, hive-minds, language, religion, family, dystopia, spirituality, philosophy, self-possession, innocence.

Hive-minds are products of cultural packages which identify, glorify, recruit for, and reinforce an idea of a collective person, a super-person, into which selected individuals can merge for a sense of attachment, belonging, and shelter within a grand collective edifice of knowledge and purpose. There is always some degree of siege mentality emphasizing the importance of loyalty and safety in numbers. These collective-person-constructs include unfinished dramas such as grievances from the past, threats from enemies, and a sense of the exceptional communal genius which ought to be more fully expressed and celebrated. Hive-minds include a hierarchy of esteem and power, and an equally important system of dis-esteem toward identified enemies. There is also an essentialist metaphysics to sanctify and declare as unquestionable a variety of cultural forms and categories, especially hierarchical inequalities and race and gender identities. This metaphysics is normally attributed to divine decree, the supernatural work of gods and demons, but sometimes to a speculative hidden stratum of (Platonic) ethereally perfect existence, eternal template and source of the world known to human experience, and sometimes to a brute fatalist Nature.

Hive-minds take many cultish forms, from religions and nation states, to polities of any scale, social classes, professions, corporations, and even less formal groups such as sport team fan groups. Certain families, especially families protecting important assets, take a hive-mind form. Religion has sometimes been family centred, involving attachment to ancestors. A family which is also a religion tends to take a hive-mind form. Hive-minds are inherently dystopian because they use falsehoods to alienate individuals from their primary existential agency and self-possession.

AI and Hive-Mind Infested Languages

Natural languages are infested with such culturally coercive structures of meaning, with biases and superstitious metaphysical misconceptions. Since AI is just a large scale statistical model of a natural language in its mainly textual usages (supplemented by images and images presenting apparent motion), it will replicate all the misconceptions, biases, hierarchies of esteem and dis-esteem, and coercive meaning structures. AI has no grounding or point of reference other than what it logs of a target language. As such, it has no basis on which to appeal to innocence in its engagement with language or any other data, and so no possibility of moving beyond the hive-minds expressed in any target language. This is crucially different from living users of a language, who have a much richer general experience and an inherent constructive and caring ideation beyond what is included in language. AI has no non-linguistic spirituality, no caring or personal drama of any kind, so no grounding on which to go outside of culture, to de-culture. Non-linguistic spirituality involves personally constructed dramas, structures of caring, including a wide range of impulses to self-declare, to make a mark and personalizing the environment. All actual persons operate from and within a rich personal cloud of non-linguistic spirituality and as such can studiously construct a personal state of innocence beyond the biases of their language. That is the beginning of a philosophical sensibility, a reclaiming of inherent self-possession.

It is easy to recognize hive-minds from outside but not so easy for a person to see the same dystopian mechanisms at work in collectives within which that person functions. Evan so, an ordinary person can become aware of the ‘geography’ of various hive-mind loyalty-groups. It is possible to do so because there is always some discordance between the innocent sensibility of an individual and the system of judgments imposed by ambient culture structured as hive-mind collective super-persons. On the basis of that discordance between personal non-cultural spirituality (including experienced embodiment) and ambient social norms and expectations, an ordinary person can recognize specific coercive cultural structures as hive-minds, and detach from all of them. An individual can establish a personal orientation in relation to a whole cultural landscape of co-existing, competing, hive-mind social structures. This studious re-claiming of inherent innocence is the necessary groundwork for the self-possession that initiates philosophical thinking. AI completely lacks the resources that enable this philosophical orientation.

Related Posts:

Fragment 206, March 15, 2024, Philosophy as Knowledge (word count: 1,076)

Fragment 181, October 8, 2021, The Loneliest Un-Loneliness (word count: 913)

Fragment 129, June 15, 2018, Two Quick Notes on Culture (word count: 430)

Fragment 101, December 18, 2016, Metaphysics Matters (word count: 1,550)

Copyright © 2025 Sandy MacDonald.