Part V: Gods

Existence at the Social Scale

Introduction

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A superorganism $G$ is a self-maintaining pattern at the social scale, consisting of beliefs (theology, cosmology, ideology), practices (rituals, policies, behavioral prescriptions), symbols (texts, images, architecture, music), substrate (humans + artifacts + institutions), and dynamics (self-maintaining, adaptive, competitive behavior).

Superorganisms exist as patterns with their own causal structure, persistence conditions, and dynamics—not reducible to their substrate. Just as a cell exists at the biological scale (not reducible to chemistry), a superorganism exists at the social scale (not reducible to individual humans).

This is not metaphorical. Superorganisms:

Take differences (respond to threats, opportunities, internal pressures)
Make differences (shape behavior of substrate, compete with other superorganisms)
Persist through substrate turnover (survive the death of individual believers)
Adapt to changing environments (evolve doctrine, practice, organization)

Grounding in Identification

Before asking "Is humanity a conscious entity?"—a speculative question about phenomenal superorganisms—we can ask a more tractable question: Can an individual's self-model expand to include humanity?

This is clearly possible. People do it. The expansion genuinely reshapes that individual's viability manifold: what they care about, what counts as their persistence, what gradient they feel. A person identified with humanity's project feels different about their mortality than a person identified only with their biological trajectory.

The interesting question then becomes: when many individuals expand their self-models to include a shared pattern (a nation, a religion, humanity), what happens at the collective scale? Do the individual viability manifolds interact to produce collective dynamics? Could those dynamics constitute something like experience at the social scale?

The framework makes this question precise without answering it. We cannot currently measure integration ( $\Phi$ ) at social scales. The claim that certain collectives are phenomenal superorganisms—that there is something it is like to be them—is speculative. What we can say is that functional superorganisms exist (patterns with dynamics and viability constraints), and that individual humans can expand their self-models to include them. The phenomenal question remains open.