Egregore Farm

“you could sort of think of humanity as a biological boot loader for digital super intelligence” - Elon Musk

As an adolescent male - and I had a very lengthy, protracted adolescence that is likely still not over - I would often fixate on extremes. I would seek out the most extreme books, try to understand the most extreme philosophies and follow the most extreme bands. I had a bizarre medical condition which meant that my ankles didn’t grow properly, which I figured precluded me from more sporty or physical extremes. So I made do with cerebral extremes. Despite now being in my sixties, I retain an interest in extremes and like to get in there once in a while and try to outcompete other writers who work in this field. It’s an adolescent thing but it also has, I think, its uses.

In recent times, I’ve been coming across the word “egregore” a lot. Different writers use the word in different ways but it seems to mean a non-physical entity that represents the thinking behaviours of a group of people. Essentially, the idea of a “mindset” either being or acting like an autonomous entity with agency, and possibly existing in some kind of cloud somewhere above the earth, in another dimension.

Are humans being controlled by egregores in some way? Let’s push things towards the extremes and see what that might actually look like.

Okay, so imagine the world as it is - a planet full of people, filled with different cultures, different religions, different languages, different ways of thinking about and interpreting the world. Imagine each of these different broad possibilities as existing as a distinct cloud floating above the earth. We have the Islam cloud, the Hindu cloud (mostly above India), we have the French language cloud, the Marxist cloud, the Capitalist cloud and so on. Hopefully you get the idea.

Now let’s go back in time a bit to the days of the early hominids, say 100,000 years ago. In order for any of these clouds to find a human host, that human needs frontal lobes filled with neurons. Those frontal lobes are the hardware on which the egregore - software - can run. Trouble is that early hominids are kinda dumb. They have a tiny bit of neural capacity but no way could one, say, speak English or become a Marxist. But what one or two of them do have is a kinda psychic ability, a sort of “inner hearing” which would allow them to tune into a very basic egregore.

So a bootloader egregore is needed. Something sufficiently basic that it can run on early hominid frontal lobes and that has the following property. It must offer adaptive advantages to the host - an increased chance to stay alive and reproduce. That way other early hominids will be incentivised to adopt it too, even though they lack the inner hearing to tune into the bootloader egregore themselves. In addition, having adaptive advantages, slowly over time, via natural selection, the early hominid brain will increase its neural capacity and its ability to utilise, store and transmit the programme.

So, all good. The early hominids are hosting the bootloader egregore and enjoying the adaptive benefits it gives them. As generations pass, they begin to utilise information and language in its most primitive forms. They can maybe make vague maps in the dirt of where a good place to hunt is, how to make food last longer or communicate to another about which early hominid in their tribe is not much good at sex.

After huge numbers of generations have gone by and we are now about 10,000 years in the past, the frontal lobes of the early hominids are sufficiently evolved, through the adaptive pressure that the bootloader program afforded, that they are ready for a new program - Hominid 1.0. Certain hominids, those with both the capacity for inner hearing and especially advanced frontal lobe development, get it first. They’re the early adopters.

Pretty soon, every hominid with sufficient frontal lobe development is rocking the new prog and loving it, massively outcompeting those who still run just the bootloader. They’re storing food, creating basic language, developing agriculture and basic weapons and generally hanging out and laughing at those guys who only can run the bootloader. No one wants to have sex with those dudes anymore. And why would they? Why mate with a bootloader when you could get it on with a hominid 1.0? And thus have baby hominids who will also be 1.0s.

Yes, adaptive pressure is building. Generations are passing and it won’t take another 90,000 years until there are hominids ready for a brand new programme - Human 1.0. And this one is special. It features language and alphabet. Meaning you can write stuff down rather than always needing to pass it on via word of mouth. Huge adaptive advantages accrue. Those guys stuck in Hominid 1.0 die out, seemingly pretty much at once and pretty soon everyone is running Human 1.0. The programme is so good that it can extend human life beyond the previous 30 year limit and the numbers of people on the planet rapidly increases.

Egregore Farm is rocking now. Pretty soon, there are guys ready to run Human 2.0 and the Industrial Revolution can begin, ushering in the age of tech. And now, with written communication so widespread and accessible, you don’t even need to have major upgrades. Just every now and again, an individual especially high in frontal lobe development who can also do inner hearing, gets a revelation, from the revelation cloud of course. They shout “Eureka” and bit by bit we have the Benzene Ring, the Theory of Evolution, the Theory of Relativity and the Turing Test.

The contents of the Egregoric Revelation Cloud need to be accessed in strict order, of course - 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, etc. Otherwise all the patches, bug-fixes and upgrades contained therein won’t work or even make sense.

Egregore Farm is a massive success. Its extra-terrestrial overloads, who created the egregores originally, are slapping each other on the back, high-fiving and generally whooping it up. Another planet, another chunk of spacetime envelope ready, they say. Ready for The Next Phase.