2025-02-08 -- satan emergent
----------------------------

     The greatest trick the devil ever pulled
     was convincing the world he didn't exist.

On 2025-02-07, I found the following quote on the Wikipedia
page for Douglas Hofstadter:

     Hofstadter's 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop carries his
     vision of consciousness considerably further, including
     the idea that each human "I" is distributed over numerous
     brains, rather than being limited to one.

The entire article deals with the idea of emergence; like
Aristotle said: that the whole, the "system" (to speak in
terms of Luhmann), is greater than the sum of its parts,
similar to Buckminster Fuller's idea of synergetics.

But the quoted passage surprised me. It reminded me of two
things:

1. how the "invisible hand of the market", which emerges from
   prices and other small distributed incentives, boils scarcity
   to welfare better than a consciously thought out 5-year plan;

2. how in one video [1], the upvoting/liking mechanism in
   social media is likened to a Skinner box, which allows
   for self-enforcing social control with minimal effort,
   similar to the story of the monkeys avoiding the ladder.
   The motives need not even be evil or power-oriented as is.

This reminds me of a passage in "The Theory and Practice of
Oligarchical Collectivism" from Orwell's 1984 that surprised
me when I read it in 2016-01: that the regime does not need
hereditary succession, but that it will successfully replicate
itself by meritocracy anyway. Like O'Brien says in the novel:
power is an end in itself.

My point now is: when we think of the world as being ruled, or
influenced by, a single, intelligent, evil mind -- referred to as
Satan in the Christian tradition -- we need not assume a typical
tyrant, or a secret conspiracy or committee of evil plotters. It
suffices that the control of evil emerges from small, distributed
effects, including the decisions of the clueless or well-meaning.

[1] "Social Media as Social Control" by Luke Smith.
     For lack of a longer disclaimer: enjoy with caution.