Put another way, society and culture are things that are essentially imaginary. They take place in the mind, and I doubt society or culture could organize itself without some shared imaginary space strewn with personifications and myths. Take that away and society and culture become impossible.

Your unease is more warranted for things like evolution, which does not depend on a shared imaginary space.

>Put another way, society and culture are things that are essentially imaginary.

Where did you get that from GP's post? They're simplying saying not to anthropomorphise societal systems.

I meant that the qualms he was enumerating could simply be restated this way, and my only addition here is that these societal/cultural things all are essentially imaginary (and depend on anthropomorphism and metaphor), unlike something like evolution. Apologies for my phrasing.

I like this explanation, but I might say abstractions are mutually translatable in a society. People having similar ideas is convenient but not necessary. I could imagine a society where everyone thought differently but used AI as a universal translator to make their ideas and personalities compatible.

Maybe you wouldn’t consider it a real society if they depended on machine translation, but we’re partially there already. It would still be a collection of minds with their own identities and intentions coordinating through an abstraction.

Evolution depends on multiple minds coordinating. A virus’ fate will be decided by thinking people eventually. It’s not fair to talk about something as broad as evolution if you only focus on the early period where determinism is easy to represent with math. The process involves intentions as much as anything.

Who said anything about personified intelligence?

"X does Y" implies nothing of the sort.

If I say "The River Flows" am I arguing that the river is intelligent?

No, absolutely not, you've setup a strawman from the very beginning.

"The police are only there for ... " does not imply there's some overlord with a power point document with a bullet point outlining what the police are there for.

I’m talking about how the framing makes people think and how we can drift toward abstraction over reality. When we talk about the police or the state being created to do something, we’re implying that the intention involved in its creation might be the most important thing about it. At least it still expresses the will of it’s creator. For something involving as many people as police or states, I think this undervalues the importance of individual intentions over abstract insitutional goals.

For specific examples here like, “the police are not there to help you, only the rich,” you can easily find counterexamples, but let’s be a little more generous and imagine it means that the individual intentions of officers are negated by something else. That something else is more likely to be the interests of real living people and not abstract institutional purposes for which the police were created. The institution might provide them an opportunity to pursue their goals because of the power it presents, but any misalignment of goals with public interest is because of the intentions of people in the system, not the will of the system itself.

Maybe that seems too obvious, but I think it’s established that people tend to anthropomorphize things, and when we talk about the will of the police or the state or a corporation, it’s easy to slip into thinking of an abstract entity as a person with thoughts and desires, which only hides the problem.