by godelski | 2025-08-27 06:01:01+00:00
I don't think you're wrong, I think it is just semantics. I mean as long as you're agreeing we're not like the Borg or some other hive mind collective haha. But yeah, the old saying has stayed true: it takes a village to raise a child.

Just that I think there's a lot of utility in using the terminology of "individual" to talk about each human. It's true, we're dependent on one another for our survival and reproduction. But the "independence" is not a description of our capacity of survival but in that our consciousness is independent.

We have terms like community (and a ton which make implicit approximations about the size) to describe what you're talking about.

I think maybe that part of the problem is, as you point out, there's often a misunderstanding in ants themselves. It is easy to see the emergent behavior of them operating as a group. As if there's some collective mind. But you're absolutely right you could say the same about humans. We know a lot more about ants than we did centuries ago and do know they do operate independently. While it is much more like a monarchy structure, each ant operates, in some form, as a self contained unit. It can exist outside a colony. It's not likely to survive long, but this distinction is worth assigning some word to, right? Clearly there's a distinction from were I to claim that the ant's body were independent from its head. We'd claim that false because the separation causes an immediate (or rather an exceptionally quick) death.

Maybe that is semantics, but I think those semantics are helpful to us communicating and we would be the worse were we to call these things the same.

> I’d argue an individual human being able to understand enough to navigate major problems of their world can’t be expected to exist and was probably never the case.

Fwiw, I actually believe this too. I stated it the way I did because I think most people underestimate complexity (there's definitely advantages to that trait lol). But to refine my position more, I'd say that the current complexity of the world and what is required to solve its problems vastly exceeds that of millennia ago. I'd agree, the world has always been too complex for one man to understand, but certainly the scale of things has changed. In the past the forces pushing on a person or even community were primarily local. There were still global phenomena but if you go to 10000 BC a person's actions on the Eurasian continent had no meaningful effect on a person living in the Americas. Maybe Genghis Khan killed so many he that there was a small change in global temperature, but even then the main reason was that even just 1k years ago there were so few people that their combined efforts itself had little effect on the global temperature haha. Today, these things aren't true. One ship gets stuck in one canal and the whole system is put into chaos. There's lots of advantages to this global interaction but that's for the same reason these issues exist. With an over simplification that I think can be helpful to extrapolate from, just treat every person on the planet as a node and their relationship to others as an edge. Nor only do we have more nodes, but the average node also has more connections.