Social intelligence

When we're looking at the tools science, religion, and business use to look at the world, we have two important properties of human beings that need to be kept in mind.

One is that the shape of a "human being" physiologically is increasingly unclear, but appears to extend somewhat outside their skin.

The other is that the shape of "human consciousness" also extends outside one mind.

What does this mean and why is it relevant?

First, what has been described as one of the "most robust" findings in public health epidemiology is that the physical health of "a person" is highly dependent upon that how that "person" is related to, interconnected with, and interacting with the larger group of "people" around them, and vice versa.

This relationship is very strong, and breaking social ties and connections between "a person" and "other people" can have demonstrable damaging or even fatal effects on that "person."

I use the term "person" in quotes because, from a mathematical systems point of view, if we trace out the physiological and psychological regulatory control loops, they clearly extend outside the skin and include "other people."

This is a very intimate relationship. It is stronger than an "environmental factor", such as the temperature or noise-level. It can be a "phase-lock loop" where internal systems are actually entrained and mathematically "become one" with another "person."

Daniel Goleman, in his recent New York Time's bestselling book Social Intelligence pictured above, describes the new classes of neurons that have been discovered in the brain that facilitate this process, including the "spindle cell" and "mirror neurons".

Where Goleman doesn't go, but I will and have in prior posts, is to look at the multiperson unit from a computer science and information processing viewpoint.

In radio and optical astronomy, a new and very powerful technique is "aperture synthesis", where many small telescopes are mathematically fused together so that, even though they look separate to the eye, they are acting in a very deep sense as "one". The result is twofold - first, the collecting area is vastly increased, so that more signal is available. Second, and more subtle, the resolution of the whole unit is improved, because it depends inversely on the largest diameter of the whole unit, even if there are gaps in the middle.

This unity is very deep, and we don't really have good words to describe it. Mathematically, the many remain separate and yet have become one. (e pluribus unum.)

The unity may not be directly perceived, but the change in output of the combined unit is dramatically different.

Similar phenomena have been observed, now repeatedly, and documented in collections of people that for brief periods of time exceed even slime mold in their power to come together intellectually and emotionally and form a team that is orders of magnitude beyond the normal "committee" that results in putting people in a group.

Professor Kim Cameron at the Ross School of Business nd the center for Positive Organizational Scholarship at the University of Michigan study these extremely high performance teams, and how to achieve this result for business purposes, to solve problems and boost the bottom line. This is real stuff, not some fantasy dream. It really works and has a huge dollar impact.

So, when we start to think about how it is that scientists, or religious people, or business men think and perceive the world, we need to realize that our legacy concepts of what a person is, and what a collaboration are, need some polishing.

In a very real, measurable sense, there is a "public" that has a health, which interacts with but is different from the "individuals" that make up that public. Even our counting "one, two, three" is a billiard-ball technology in a quantum-mechanic wave-type world, and doesn't really work very well. We don't yet know "how many am I?" This reflects work at MIT's Artificial Intelligence lab by Marvin Minsky, as in The Society of Mind, which questioned how many of us are inside one mind anyway.

This is a core issue in the generalized systems theory, or life-sciences, or business - the theory and technology and principles of multicellular operation that actually works well and is "healthy".