Dear friend Jack shared a reference to 'egregore' with me the other day, which is a word I think I lost about seven years ago. There's been this concept-shaped hole in my memory around a specific term for 'collective thought manifesting an entity', but it's long slipped me by. It's not necessarily the same thing as a Pratchettian belief model, but it certainly rhymes with it.
(Compare tulpa.)
Jack shared it via this tweet in particular: https://twitter.com/arachnocapital2/status/1551364109970526208. Corporations are, most certainly, organisms in their own right.
Charles Stross:
Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance. (The sources of pain a corporate organism seeks to avoid are lawsuits, prosecution, and a drop in shareholder value.) —Invaders from Mars
I was going to write a whole thing here about my current thoughts, but it turns out I wrote a full-on essay on this back in 2018, so I'm just going to link to that:
The Cthulhu Corporation, alt/thought/process ed. 87
It runs longer than these shards tend to, and some of the specifics/examples are a shade out of date now, but still fundamentally sums this up and is worth your time if this topic interests you.
James Bridle does talk about this in Ways of Being -- once we start expanding our definition of intelligence (as we damn well should), how can we regard a corporation as anything else?
BUT IT ALSO reminds me of something recently from Dan Hon, talking about a paper titled 'If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious'. That's here: https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s12e20-dan-really-are-you-even-reading-what-youre/, under the heading 'Materialism'.
Anyway, this was going to be a simple one, and in fact it's involved double the normal time I spent on these digging into the archives and cross-referencing stuff. But that itself has been interesting.