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<p>I have not (yet) read this critically, the introduction just
tweaked my (confirmation biased) interests:<br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-11-brain.html"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-11-brain.html</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>When I first encountered the <a
href="https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(22)00134-6">Mirror
Neuron research</a> (decades ago) it fit my own experience
fairly well and in fact helped to explain (just so stories?) many
of the intuitive ways I apprehended my
emotional/intellectual/physical entrainment experience with
others. I suppose this is a self-referential example of the topic
(i.e. confirmation bias, entrainment, etc).<br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Recent <i>mirror neuron</i> review: <a
href="https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(22)00134-6"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(22)00134-6</a><br>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In my recent reminders of the general concept of (reading Yuval
Harari's <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Deus:_A_Brief_History_of_Tomorrow">"Sapiens"
and "Homo Deus"</a>) I was left with a stronger impression than
ever that so much of human experience seems to be like living in a
shared dream driven or at least constrained by our "tribe".
Religion, Politics, Economics, or generally "Culture" seems to be
the stigmergic field that mediates that. The role of media
(print, then broadcast, now internetty) has been to broaden the
scope somewhat arbitrarily or according to the interests of those
who control those resources. <br>
</p>
<p>Now with LLMs and text-to-image generators are becoming so
capable and broadly engaged with, it seems that our
"intersubjective reality" at least has a new fidelity to this
shared dream offered up, if not a broader scope. The fever
dreams/hallucinations of various extremist perspectives is already
problematic (but inevitable?) so this increased fidelity seems
likely to only aggravate that (e.g. deepfake "evidence" for
various conspiracy theories, etc.).</p>
<p>My own preferred understanding of this larger phenomena is that
we are on the cusp of an emergence of a qualitatively different
type of collective behaviour/experience not quite covered by the
various examples that fit in the ontological category of "swarm"
(e.g. herd, pack, school, flock, pod ... ) perhaps by "on the
cusp" we can roll back the clock 10k years to early
agriculturalism/urbanism/written language (or further) but like
false-summits, maybe this is just the next false-saddle in a
saddle point between basins? There is probably an existing
reserved term for that, maybe I'll ask GPT?<br>
</p>
<p>For better or worse we have become mythopoetic creatures and
modern AI is reinforcing/accelerating that? Some resistance to
(questioning of?) metaphor, poesy, narrativity, might be an
intuitive recognition of this collective/inevitable slide into a
new phase of being? Different from but somehow resonant with the
anti-globalist instincts of populism?</p>
<p><br>
</p>
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