The Individual

I've been reading Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky. It's about the mind and how it works from an artificial intelligence point of view. This quote struck me:

...without the concept of an individual, we would have no sense of responsibility.

Dr. Minsky does that. He makes profound statements in an offhand sentence.

A little background. The context is a discussion of self and Self and how we perceive them. The lower case self being the general concept, and the upper case Self being our perception of it. Upper case Self manages our internal dialog and steers the ship. Lower case self differentiates us from the furniture. That leads to the individual, which differentiates us from the other selves and Selves.

The question that opened up to me when I read that was, why? Why does responsibility follow conceiving the individual? As I said above, individuality is a boundary between our selves and everything else. At the most basic level, we act to survive. We seek food and shelter. We act to preserve the species. We reproduce. But those things not really responsibility. They are instinct. You can't assign responsibility to instinct unless you want to split hairs and say that we have a sense of responsibility to act on our instincts. What Dr. Minsky seems to be saying is that there is some kind of causality between individual and responsibility. Instinct and individual don't have a causal relationship. Consider reproduction. That is a purely instinctual urge. There is no immediate benefit to the individual. The individual doesn't have any conscious sense of responsibility to the species.

To my mind, responsibility involves another Self. Think about aboriginal communities. They weren't formed for the purpose of abstract society. They were for survival. One guy with a spear trying to take down the woolly mammoth was suicide. Ten guys with spears was dinner and shelter. One guy had to sleep and risk being dinner for a saber toothed tiger. Ten guys could rotate keeping watch. Also, in an example of purely instinct driven behavior, the bigger the society, the deeper the gene pool. But, in these societies, each member had a responsibility to pull his/her weight or get the boot and become carnivore fodder. But, that doesn't exactly link the individual to responsibility.

An aboriginal community wasn't exactly socialist. The tribe was important, but not more important than the individual. It was a community of individuals who took responsibility for the tribe. Inevitably, there was eventually going to be a leader. Cats are individuals, too, but we know how hard it is to get them to work together. At some point the tribe progressed from simple survival to larger goals. Territory. Advancing from hunter-gatherers to agrarians. But, the tribal leader who built his position purely from the collection of power didn't stay leader for long, one way or the other. Leaders who built the tribe on the importance of the individuals well as the tribe survived for a long time. American Indians built a society truly based on the consent of the governed. The tribe followed the chief as long as he acted in their best interest, when that wasn't true any more, they moved on. And there it is. Individuals responsible to themselves and to the tribe.

In socialist and communal systems, the individual gives up his sense of self for the good of the community. The basis of such systems is sacrifice, not responsibility. One of the most widely heard political sound bites is on the subject of personal responsibility. It preaches that personal responsibility will cure the ills of the current system, but it has it backward. The system has to be fixed to restore the individual and repair our sense of responsibility.

And, I think that's what Dr. Minsky meant by his offhand comment.