The idea that the company doesn't exist was first highlighted to me in "The Software Hegemony" and it's been a super useful mental crutch since.

You are absolutely right. The company doesn't make you promises, offer you raises, or in fact owe you anything, people do.

> "The Software Hegemony"

Do you mean this? https://www.daedtech.com/developer-hegemony-the-crazy-idea-t...

What's an ant colony then -- imaginary or real? And if imaginary, who is doing the imagining?

I'm not sure I understand your position.

You see thousands of individual ants, and call that colony.

What if I went around the forest and picked one ant out of thousands of colonies and put them all together? Will you still call this a colony? Even if they begin fighting each other?

I wouldn't. It's the behavior of the ants that makes them a colony, which isn't a "real" physical thing.

Isn't the fact that you can't pick a thousand random ants and trick me into thinking they're a colony evidence that there's more to there being a colony than mere imagination on my part?

Unless you're alleging that the ants conceive of a colony, the colony is a machine made out of pieces -- it's like saying a puzzle doesn't have a physical reality when clearly it does: a thousand random pieces don't make a puzzle, and that distinction lies in the physical reality of the system under examination.

In so much as it makes sense to talk about ants, and not clumps of mobile cells or automata of particles, it makes sense to talk about ant colonies. After all, it's the behavior of the particles that appears to make the ant an entity -- the ant isn't real, only the particle behavior.

Your point seems to depend on those entities which we can immediately recognize as entities being more real than other kinds of entities, but that has no logical basis and is an outright appeal to emotion.

Imagination is certainly not the right word here. But we seem to agree that "there's more" to a colony than just the physical reality of many thousands of ants in a pile. I can't touch it or extract it from the pile of ants.

If I take half the ants, do I still have a colony? If they now form two colonies, where did the second one come from? How many times can I divide the ants and still have a colony? Where did the colony go if I no longer have one?

Of course "all the ants that form the colony" is a real physical thing, just the same as all the cells that form the ant, but that's arguing in circles. You need to have the "idea" of the larger (or smaller) entity in the first place to be able to point at it.

And it's not the point of the OP anyway, because the ants certainly themselves don't have any concept of the whole colony and don't freely decide if they are one or not. That's just an external observation and classification we made after the fact.

Late reply, but --

My point is that what makes the colony distinct from the pile is the chemicals, genomic structure, etc that the ants share and are in their environment -- things which all themselves are quite physical. That collection of shared structure between the ants and environmental factors creates a system distinct but made from the ants. Corporations have similar physical components that their constituent humans interact with.

It seems to be begging the question to assume that humans require imagining the corporation but ants do not need to imagine the colony -- it's simply a dynamic system/entity in its own right that happens to have constituent "ants". (Similar in nature to the relationship between cells and animals.)

Everything at some point has a physical manifestation that can be broken down further and further until we explain things with (according to many physicists) strings.

Every thought, idea, dream or lie could be described as neurotransmitters moving between neurons, but that's very rarely the level of detail we use.

Yes, corporations have physical manifestations. And if we use a formal or legal definition, you could maybe break that down to some database entry at some government branch or paperwork in a cabinet etc. Very real and physical.

But then I could hack the database and insert a new company and fake the paperwork, and arguably the result is not a real company. Or delete a real company and destroy the paperwork, but arguably the company will still exist.

If we imagine I could create or delete a company perfectly in all its physical aspects, documents, electronic records, inventory, products etc - but not modify anybodies thoughts or memories -, you would be very clearly be able to tell if the company is "real" or not.

If nobody knows about it ("believes" it exists) and nobody works for it, it's not real. The office, machines, computers and a bunch of (fake) employment contracts do not result in anything if nobody shows up.

If everybody still believes it exists and just continues to work, they might need a few new staplers and other things, and at some point get the paperwork corrected.

There's nothing more real and physical than the behavior of creatures that choose whether to bite you.

This phrasing sounds like the book Sapiens (that I'm currently reading and does not live up to its hype for me). I also think thats a superflous way to describe the world though.

I read it recently, and it was a major influence, that passage. It's a bit too ambitious to describe everything we do as a species, so the book does get a bit stale partway through.

The central idea isn't wrong at all. It's quite clear that we've created a bunch of cultural shared "items" like the the limited liability corporation and such, which are useful but don't really have a physical existence. That doesn't mean they're easy to create or destroy either.