How to Make a Corporation Happy

Given the boundless influence of money on the American political process (historically always present, but truly let loose only recently by the US Supreme Court's Citizens United decision), and given that most of the money spent on swaying voters in this election cycle comes from wealthy corporate donors (here's some evidence), it makes sense to ask to what extent the goals and aspirations of the super-rich super-voters align with those of ordinary folks. There is a non-trivial cognitive science aspect to this question: whereas ordinary voters are all human, the big-money players in the elections are corporations — aggregate entities that are governed by their own peculiar dynamics, which may or may not make them like people (in both senses of the word "like").

Mitt Romney, the Republican contender in this year's presidential elections, has a very clear stance on this issue. Speaking at the Iowa State Fair in August, he claimed that "corporations are people," because "everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people" (Washington Post, August 11, 2012). Although one suspects that corporate earnings are typically distributed less equitably than Mr. Romney's remark implies, let us set aside for once the question of money and ask instead, What does it feel like to be a corporation? What do corporations care about? What would make a corporation happy? In short, in what sense is a corporation like a human person?

Rather than flights of fancy, in cognitive science these are all legitimate, technically sound questions. All it would take to answer them is to determine (i) whether or not a corporation has/is a mind, and (ii) if yes, whether corporate minds are human-like. Readers of this blog would not be surprised at such questions being aired: insofar as human minds are bundles of computations running on a highly distributed system (the brain's neurons), conceiving of a corporate mind does not require any stretch of imagination.

The idea of an aggregate mind comprised of many human brains dates back at least to the Victorian era. Here's Francis Galton, writing in 1883 (Inquiries into human faculty and its development. London: Macmillan. pp.301-302):

"We as yet understand nothing of the way in which our conscious selves are related to the separate lives of the billions of cells of which the body of each of us is composed. [...] Our part in the universe may possibly in some distant way be analogous to that of the cells in an organised body, and our personalities may be transient but essential elements of an immortal and cosmic mind."

Can we ever fathom such an aggregate mind? In my book Computing the Mind (2008), where I toyed with the idea that the United States may be one, I wrote, "[...] The more functionally dissimilar the nervous system of a sentient creature is to that of a primate, the stranger its qualia [phenomenal experience] would appear to us." And more: "[...] We can no more have a valid intuition about what it is like to be the US than our neurons can have intuitions about what it is like to be us" (pp. 437-438).

Even if we cannot intuit the phenomenal, experiential properties of aggregate minds, we can reason about them. As I wrote in the last month's post, the feelings that a system experiences inhere in its dynamics (see that post for references to formal treatments of this idea). Let us consider the claim that corporations are people (with regard to their feelings, desires, etc.) in the light of this theory of phenomenal experience. On every level of such a comparison, there are fundamental differences. In particular, corporate minds differ from human minds in the time scale of their dynamics, in the laws that govern the behavior of their constituents (notably, the laws of physics in the case of neurons vs. legislated rules, over and above physics, neural dynamics, and individual psychology, in the case of corporations), and in the kinds of outcomes on which evolution evaluates them, which for corporations boil down to a single dimension: monetary profit.

The upshot of this insight is that even if a corporation presents to the world a human (or a nearly human) face — a jovial CEO, or an engaging spokesperson — it is, as far as feelings and care are concerned, no more human than the cellar-dwelling creature from Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, which Pan refers to in the film as "El Que No Es Humano" (see the teaser image). It may be that at the present stage of humanity's economic development we have no choice but tolerate the activity of corporations in our midst; ceding to them political power would, however, amount to appointing wolves to guard sheep (for the lack of a better simile; no wolf has ever been as much of a threat to its own ecological niche as a corporate entity can be to ours). We human citizens of the United States would do well if we remember this on November 6.