We Think in Society: Notes on the Destruction of Colllective Intelligence

Dinosaur left over from a miniature golf course in Florida.

I find myself coming back to one central question, that is at once political and philosophical. Previously on this blog I referred to the political dimension of this transformation as the constitution of a new episteme, a new standard for what counts as truth. This new standard appears primarily as the destruction of the old standards, as expertise of scientists are contested, and universities are under attack. This new episteme is not in itself a conscious program, and like many things it has multiple overlapping and contradictory conditions, encompassing both the assault on the expertise underlying the administrative state, the knowledge of scientists and experts, on one hand, and the proletarianization of the intellect of day to day life by the proliferation of artificial intelligence, on the other. These strategies often converge and overlap, but have different motivations and conditions. The primary point of their overlap is the way in which they elevate what Spinoza called the imagination about reason, above common notions. The truth of things is how they effect us, or how they effect certain people, if vaccines feel invasive and destructive then they must be, if America does not seem to be racist (to white people) then it isn't, if it seems like the machine is thinking, fully conscious and sentient, then it must be. It is an episteme the puts imagination above reason.  

That is as good of formulation as the problem as possible. However, as much as Spinoza replaces Descartes "I think, I exist" with "Man Thinks," replacing the individual with the collective basis of knowledge, something that persists  I am not sure if Spinoza offers enough to really think through the social dimension of knowledge. To be more precise, I do think that there is a formulation of collective intelligence in Spinoza, it is part of what makes him "the anti-Orwell," but it needs to be recovered through a reading. In this way, I am making a point similar to the one that I made with respect to transindividuality, the individual thinker, "the thing that thinks" has such a huge hold over our image of thought that it takes an active work of transformation to escape it. I would argue that the image is even stronger when it comes to thought than other activities, while even the most entrenched methodological individualist will admit that collective action is a fact of life and a necessary for politics, collective thought always seems to sound like "group think," like an oxymoron if not the nullification of thought itself. To discredit a body of thought all one has to do is claim that it is held as a doctrine by a group rather than something espoused by individuals. Of course such a criticism overlooks the point that the very ideas of not only truth, but a shared "reason" presuppose people thinking alike if not the same things. 2+2=4 is groupthink, but it is rarely labelled as such. To return this to Spinoza, I have often understood common notions to be both common in the sense that they are "equally in the part and in the whole" and in the sense that they are held in common. When two individuals grasp things according to their common notions, understand them, they in some sense think the same thing. When we think rationally we also think alike.

To paraphrase Marx, the common is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations." In other words, it is not enough to replace the idea of thought as an individual activity with thinking as a collective endeavor if the collective is posited as some abstract idea. The real question is a matter of thinking about the connection between the current organization of thought and the current organization of social relations, of thinking the sameness of the order and connection of ideas and things not as metaphysics but as an actual social relation. Historically this attempt to connect knowledge to the social relations that make it possible and limit it, has been called "the sociology of knowledge." In some sense this project combined two scandals for thought: the first, that I have already referenced is in grasping thought, thinking, as something that exists collectively not individually. The second is understanding thinking to be an activity that is influenced if not determined by other activities. This second point is perhaps even more scandalous than the first, that we are determined physically is something that even the proponents of the free will have to accept on some level. As anyone who has tried to learn a physical skill, a sport, a martial art, or dance knows, it is rarely enough to simply will that one acts or move their body in a particular way, one has to develop the skills, the capacities, the habitus to make such actions possible. Our body reminds us that we are a thing in the world. Matters would seem to be different with the mind, which appears to be free to think whatever it (or we)wants. The freedom of the mind versus the conditioned state of the body is one of the arguments Descartes gives for their separation. We are free to think whatever we want, but we cannot do whatever we please.

This to me is the more radical dimension of Proposition Seven of Part Two of the Ethics, (something I wrote about earlier) not just the mind and bodies are one, but that ideas, like bodies, are caught in their own causal relations, there own determinations. As I wrote in that piece, 

"To take Spinoza’s example, one cannot have a thought of a triangle without also thinking that it has three sides, or that its three angles make up two right angles; the object of thought determines the mind, as a kind of automaton, to think that. One cannot have an idea of a triangle and then choose to deny or affirm that it has three sides and so on; these decisions are determined by the particular causality of the idea insofar as it is an idea (E1P17S). Spinoza’s example, drawn from geometry (philosophy’s ideal in terms of clarity and universality since Plato), hits at the center of this ideal, suggesting that if the abstract figures of geometry can be understood as causes that determine the mind to think, then the same must be true, albeit even more so, with respect to ideas drawn from the arguably more messy world of concrete experiences and desires."

To draw from that essay a little more, all ideas are causally determined, but the difference is between those that express and comprehend that necessity, like the concept of triangle, and those that unknowingly reflect that determination. As I wrote:

With respect to thinking, all ideas are in some sense necessary. The difference lies between those that express and comprehend their necessity (thought as sub pecie aeternitatis ) and those that are, in a sense, necessarily ideas of contingency. While inadequate ideas are themselves necessary, produced by a series of

conditions, there are logic and reason as to why one is compelled to think this or that, but as ideas they are uncertain and vacillate. Hence they are necessary in relation to the order that produces them, but contingent in relation to the mind that conceives or perceives them (EIIP44). Misunderstanding and misinterpretations are themselves produced from determinate conditions and relations; they are ‘‘true errors’’ (. Spinoza demonstrates how the experience of a particular chronological order (meeting Paul in the morning, and so on) produces the idea of the contingency, of utter chance. Through the constant juxtaposition of the future against the past one is determined to think in terms of contingency, and ultimately, freedom. Inadequate ideas do not comprehend their necessity. ‘‘[A] thing is called contingent only because of a defect of our knowledge’’ (EIP33S1). The difference between adequate and inadequate ideas, like the difference between external and internal compulsion in the realm of actions of the body, is not a clean break; it is rather a difference that is continually practiced, as one strives to adequately grasp the world.

The Dinosaur of Saugus 

Philosophy may very well be scandalized by this, but such an observation is pretty much foundational to such fields as sociology and anthropology, which is part of the reason that they remain scandals for a society founded on the image of a free individual. As Pierre Bourdieu writes,  

"How can one fail to recognize that the 'choices' of the 'free' and 'disinterested' subject glorified by tradition are never totally independent of the mechanics of the fields and therefore of the history of which it is the outcome and which remains embedded in its structures and, through them, in the cognitive structures, principles of vision and division, concepts, theories and methods applied, which are never totally independent of the position he occupies within the field and the associated interests."

I started this post with the idea that I was going to offer some sort of quick summary of some of the key take away points from some summer reading in the sociology of knowledge, Max Scheler's Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge, Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality, and Bourdieu a lot of Bourdieu. While that might be useful to my own self-clarification, it would probably be too long and too far afield for a blogpost. It does occur to me on a sort of abstract level, one very much framed by a kind of Spinozism, that much of the sociology of knowledge struggles with a kind of "double determination" of thinking. That thought is at once situated, a product of a specific history. particular relations, relations shaped in part by the place in the division of labor, that "street porters" and "philosophy professors" see things differently, to use Adam Smith's examples, and in some sense out of place, caught up in concepts and ideas which exceed their social location, but are nonetheless situated by existing relation of ideas. As Asad Haider argued, "People think." To emphasize one, the situation of thought, its determination by history, structures, and habits, risks collapsing the sociology of knowledge back into a kind of positivism, but to overemphasize the other, the capacity of thought to be out of place, is to just repeat idealism. Mannheim gave these two aspects their own particular name, referring to the thought that reflects and reproduces its place in the social order, ideology, and the ability of thinking to not only exceed its place but also call it into question, utopia. Life determines consciousness, as Marx wrote, but consciousness has a limited efficacy in determining or shaping life. Or as Berger and Luckmann put it, "Man is even capable of eating and theorizing at the same time. The continuing existence of man's animality and his sociality may be profitably observed at any conversation over dinner."

One more dinosaur with me in the foreground.

The question is then a matter of how this helps us understand the current conjuncture, what is the double determination of the destruction of collective intelligence? Here, as is often the case, much has been said about the so called leaders of thought that have lead to the destruction of knowledge, the podcasters, RFK Jr, etc., These people have their effects, but there is a limited efficacy of the untrue as much as the true, ideas can only take hold if there is something in social life for them to take hold of. As outlandish as all of the various treatments and cures of the MAHA movement, from horse tranquilizers to eating a diet exclusively of steaks and sauerkraut, have one fundamental aspect of social life as their basis. Health is an individual matter, not a public concern, and if you want to be healthy it is up to you. In some ways, the miasma theory of health, which RFK Jr. embraces, maybe a relic from the past at the level of ideas, having long since lost out to the germ theory of disease, but it is absolutely contemporary with a society that privatizes all sorts of social problems. The individual is not just where we find our cures, but our problems as well, as it has often been noted, conspiracy theories are attempts to think social relations under the sway of the individual, positing individual actors in place of structural forces. 

Not all of our problems can be laid at the feet of the idea of the individual (though I would say that we need to be more critical of our tendency to see ourselves as "kingdoms within a kingdom" with respect to both the natural and social world). I would posit two other social relations that have contributed to the destruction of collective intelligence. The first is to be found not so much in work, in the division of labor, but in consumption. Consumer society has to be grasped as its own socialization process, one that produces people who are accustomed to convenience and immediate satisfaction. I locate a great deal of the backlash to COVID policies here. So much of the reaction which has taken on conspiratorial tones started with the basic frustration of not being able to get what one wanted when one wanted it. The second is technology, I do not mean the specific technologies of social media and AI, although I think both are going to do a great deal to make it possible to disseminate all kinds of imaginary ideas. Here I am reminded of Marx's point about the printing press, 

"Up till now it has been thought that the growth of the Christian myths during the Roman Empire was possible only because printing was not yet invented. Precisely the contrary. The daily press and the telegraph, which in a moment spreads inventions over the whole earth, fabricate more myths (and the bourgeois cattle believe and enlarge upon them) in one day than could have formerly been done in a century."

We are definitely living in an age of the fabrication of myths, one that exceeds not just the printing press, but our past dystopian imaginary, however, that is not what I mean by technology. I am referring less to specific technologies, than to the way in which technology carries its own authority. To put it simply answers from LLMs seem to be "objective," while answers from humans seem to be irredeemably biased, despite the fact that, as anyone will tell you, LLMs cannot help but reproduce the biases of the information that they are trained on, and I would add, are programmable to give the answers one wants. Elon Musk seems openly and transparently trying to make sure Grok gives the answers he wants it to give, which seems to be maintaining all of the myths of "great replacement theory" without going so far as to openly praise Hitler. 

These are my three hypothesis about the social destruction of knowledge, that beyond the specific agents that are accelerating this process, the silicon tech companies and Trump administration, the deeper causes are in the fragmentation and isolation of social life, the immediacy and hierarchy of consumer society, and the fetishization of technology. This is only a partial list, and I would not want to discount the role of racism, sexism, and other entrenched hierarchies in shaping these imaginaries. More work has to be done to develop a "sociology of ignorance," but a bigger question would be, how to counter it. It would be naive to maintain that we can just rely on our individual will to combat this, read more books, spend more time online, and spend time watching physical media to avoid the fabrications of digital media. These all have their efficacy, but it is an incredibly limited efficacy. The real question is how can we maintain and build the social institutions that create and sustain knowledge. I honestly do not have an answer to this now.