From: Dick.Gray@bull.com
Date: Tue Jan 19 1999 - 09:03:00 MST
James Daugherty writes:
>Unfortunately, Ayn Rand was wrong. Collectives are real!
She never said collectives aren't real. She said they're not entities: they
have no independent physical existence. They exist as relations and as
conceptual categories, not as objects. Take away the individuals and
society disappears. The converse doesn't hold.
>Memes create social organisms just as genes create regular biological
>organisms.
An intriguing idea, but wholly unsubstantiated. Can you point to such an
organism? Have you communicated with one (other than in the sense of
communicating with one or more individuals representing it)?
>One could just a well say that the human body doesn't
>exist! Really, the human body is a group of individual cells, albeit
>co-operating in complex ways.
It's somewhat more than that: it's a tightly integrated and mutually
dependent group of cells with a more or less central control mechanism. A
cell can't exist apart from the rest of the body except under highly
artificial conditions. None of this is true of individuals vis-a-vis
society, for instance.
>Nonsense! Collectives and
>human bodies do exist......fortunately, with self-awareness, one
>does not have to be part of a collective.
Exactly. But if the collective were truly an organism, this would not be
true.
Regards,
Dick
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