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2024-11-23

Overlapping reading: Cortical and Limbic democracies

Vortex (Last book in the Spin trilogy) 

by Robert Charles Wilson (2011)


“Cortical and Limbic democracies” Ways of implementing consensus governance. Neural augmentation and community-wide Networks had made possible many different kinds of decision-making. 


In “cortical” democracies, the brain areas interfaced are clustered in the neocortex. They used noun-based and logically mediated collective reasoning to make policy decisions. 


In “Limbic” democracies the Networks modulated more primitive areas of the brain in order to create an emotional and intuitive (as opposed to a purely rational) consensus. 


“To put it crudely, in cortical democracies citizens reason together; in limbic democracies they feel together.”


Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to A

by Yuval Noah Harari (2024)


“What I realize is that the social media companies are not incentivized to interconnect pre-frontal cortexes. Social media companies are incentivized to create interconnected limbic systems—which is much more dangerous for humanity.””