Kevin Kelly responds to Nick Carr

There are 2 parts to Nick's claim here.

1) That individuals create better art (science?) than teams. This claim is testable. You can find your criteria of greatness and then count up the creators. I think the results would vary by discipline, and by era. If you asked about achievements in the last 50 years, I would bet most involved more than one person. I think NIck is wrong, but either way this claim is testable. (A version of that test: we present to you various works and you have to tell us which ones were created by teams and which by individuals.)

2) His claim that claim #1 does not matter because there is no such thing as collective creation. It is all metaphor. There is ONLY individual creation that is summed up. There is no emergent creation, that ideas can only be found in individual human minds. This is akin to saying that a group cannot "speak" as a group since the group does not have a mouth; only individuals have mouths. As long as you are a literalist, it is true the group does not speak since it is not making a loud sound, but in the sense of speaking is an issuance of ideas and metaphors, than the metaphor of speaking seems appropriate. My problem with Nick's approach here is that none of the neurons in any of the human brains have ideas, so how can a collective of those neurons possibly have an idea? Where is the idea coming from if not the individual neurons? It seems strange to admit emergence can occur at one level, but not another.

So how would we test for this? Do we ever see any evidence where a group of people have beliefs that none of them individually do? Or show a type of intelligence as a group, or team, that none of the individually show? Or generate an idea that none of them individually generate?

If your definition of an idea is something that can only issue from a human mind, than an idea that does not issue from a human mind will be impossible.

When someone says "we're left with the (reassuring) fact that ideas only come from individual minds" I think the key word is "reassuring," because the view of our own minds as vast collectives of dumb neurons, networks of associative links, and societies of subminds is not at all comforting, even if true.