One possible way to look at conspiracy theories

Post Reply New Topic

The more I look at the rather strange ways that society operates I'm starting to wonder if people's propensity to consider conspiracy theories, while ill-informed or ignorant as they may be, do match a terrain or topology of dynamics that they're validly seeing.

I'm going to throw this in here because I think it's a useful recitation of the idea of self-organizing systems and the particular speaker gives the example of how ant colonies operate. It's 21:34, as always you don't have to watch anything you don't want to, but for people curious about these sorts of things it can be helpful:



So there are a couple different ways to tackle this one:

1) Feedback loops in the environment forming structures. In this case self-sorting mechanisms occur in societies as much as any other place in nature by causes that filter up from the bottom, sides, or wherever else (admittedly I'm not sold that most forms of causality can be described in terms of their quarks and leptons - physics would have already swallowed chemistry if that were the case). Either way we tend to forget, for as much mythos as we have of us separate and alien to our environments, that we really are just part of the furniture like anything else. We also have a way of forgetting just how much data our subconscious minds are taking in about our environment, what a small trickle of that information we get by the time it reaches our frontal lobes (for caloric budget no doubt), and just how much of this sort of protocol could be well below our radars.

2) The actual panpsychism or functionalism question. We're filled with organs and systems of organs with so much gray matter that it's amazing sometimes that we aren't in active conversation with them or that those systems aren't a part of our I experience but rather we have that life-long 'headlessness' that keeps our center of identity close to our eyes and frontal lobe. There's a good possibility to be considered that if Hillary Putnam's type of functionalism is to be considered there could be tiers of consciousness in operation above us collectively that we'd never be able to see aside from by the results of their activity, in the western esoteric traditions they call these egregores, and with multiple realizability considered it seems like there's no particular reason for us to be able to see into that mind much like I can't see much into the priorities of my stomach.


If the second is the case we may have a more complex set of problems to deal with if we want to do society in better ways because we're not just dealing with people's general tribalism and churlishness, there would in a way be metaphysical entities on top of all of that whose health and livelihood depend on keeping status quo. Such things would be a product of evolution like any other, rather than being as intelligent as the sum of their parts they could very well be quite dumb and limbic but still have a very shrewd way of pulling strings. Either the first or second model could apply here and I'll admit that the appearances of egregore vs. the bundling of synchronized activity and the feedback mechanisms that generate could be nearly indistinguisable if we're just studying outcome.

Either way though this is part of why I have some disdain for just calling conspiracy theorists 'hatters'. I think they're seeing patterns that can be tagged and identified as valid in isolation, just that I think they make the particular mistakes of packaging these observations with old religious tropes which have nothing to do with the actual cause of what they're seeing unless we're considering that those religious tropes came about by similar mechanisms. At the same time I think what feeds these people to run around and connect big swaths of dots is that no one else is really talking about these issues let alone proposing a sane model for such things that doesn't involve religious end-times paranoia.