Does society exist?

[Hygro]

More rather, does society exist simply as a collection of the people within it, or is there a collective that is greater than the sum of its parts? Is society something real, if meta-physical? Is it some kind of lie, myth, or conspiracy? Is society something we should seek to improve, or is it purely the reflection of individuals such that you can't "improve society"?

Can you owe anything to society? Can society owe anything to you?

 

[amadeus]

If there is a society, at what point does one society end and the other begin? If I am in California, am I part of the same society as a person in Michigan? What if I live in the Congo—if I'm Kongolese (ethnic) and someone lives in Brazzaville across the river but is of the same ethnicity and culture, are we part of the same society?

 

[Perfection]

More rather, does society exist simply as a collection of the people within it, or is there a collective that is greater than the sum of its parts?

An interesting related question one should ask is "does a chair exist simply as a collection of the wood and screws within it, or is there a collective that is greater than the sum of its parts?"

One might consider that because a chair has a special ordered arrangement of its parts we should consider that something more than just its constituent materials. One might consider the same for people and society. Provided we claim that society has some order to it. (which I think we can)

Is society something real, if meta-physical? Is it some kind of lie, myth, or conspiracy? Is society something we should seek to improve, or is it purely the reflection of individuals such that you can't "improve society"?

Can you owe anything to society? Can society owe anything to you?

This is a trickier question. Frankly, I don't know for sure. Some collections of things (the collections of things that make ourselves up being the most obvious example) comprise beings with rational goals and an in-depth understanding of the world they live in. Perhaps societies could be among those beings.

 

[Perfection]

If there is a society, at what point does one society end and the other begin? If I am in California, am I part of the same society as a person in Michigan? What if I live in the Congo—if I'm Kongolese (ethnic) and someone lives in Brazzaville across the river but is of the same ethnicity and culture, are we part of the same society?

Well one need not be restricted to just one society I would think. For example, I might be said to belong to the society of my family, my work, the Twin Cities medical development community, the state of Minnesota, The USA, the western World, OT, Humanity, CFC, Fiftychat, etc. etc. etc.

The other thing is societies might have vague boundaries. Who really constitutes a Fiftychatter, the regulars? Semiregulars? People who came in once? But that doesn't render the distinction useless anymore then the existence of people who have intersex disorders make male and female useless distinctions.

 

[Winner]

Society is a bit more than just a collection of individual, although you could probably use the term there as well. There has to be some shared social bond.

The prototype of a society were the primitive human bands. Since then, thanks to an "error" in our biological programming, we extended the concept to groups that are far larger than the original bands of hunter-gatherers.

 

[lovett]

Is society something real, if meta-physical?

There's a fairly easy way, in my opinion, to test things like this. It concerns whether a property is multiply realizable; if the same property can be realized constituted by different things.

To whit, any given chair in constituted by a complex arrangements of particles. The chair consists of those particles. However, this does not mean the chair is 'identical' to those particles and thereby it does not mean that the chair itself is not 'real'. That is because the chair is multiply realizable; the same chair could be realized by a slightly different arrangement of particles. If we shaved a tiny bit of wood off the front right leg of the chair, the arrangement of particles of which the chair consists would have changed. However it would still be the same chair.

Pain is another good example, For humans, pain is (something like) C-fibre firing. Our pain is constituted by C-fibre firing. However, we do not want to say that pain is identical with C-fibre firing nor that pain does not exist. That is because we can imagine creatures with a complete different biological make-up that nonetheless experience pain. If we met a Martian who, when hurt, acted in exactly the same way we act and reported an experience that appeared to us to be exactly the same as pain, we would say that the Martian were in pain. Whether the Martians biology included C-fibres would be rather irrelevant. Pain is multiply realizable; it can be constituted by many different arrangements of material particles.

Similarly, a society is multiply realizable. When someone dies in a society, that does not mean we consider the society post-death to be different from pre-death. Societies can be constituted by many different arrangements of people and are thus not identical to any one such arrangement. Therefore, societies exist.

 

[Murky]

I prefer the term community to society. Societies seems to group people by class/status. A community is made up of a diverse groups of people regardless of their current status. Everyone belongs to a community.

 

[warpus]

If there is a society, at what point does one society end and the other begin? If I am in California, am I part of the same society as a person in Michigan? What if I live in the Congo—if I'm Kongolese (ethnic) and someone lives in Brazzaville across the river but is of the same ethnicity and culture, are we part of the same society?

Society exists because there is a "contract" between the members of society and the society at large.

That's why we pay taxes and expect certain things from society in return.

I am a member of Ontarian and Canadian society due to this social contract, but also a member of Polonia (a global Polish society) and human society, cause I'm human (technically)

 

[Traitorfish]

I'd say that society does not exist as anything external to individuals, but as the sum of individual relationships, and because these relationships are a process of interaction, rather than something that simply exists, society also has to be understood as an ongoing process. (Also, I'd argue that the key relationships to understanding society are relationships of production, but I wouldn't expect everyone else to agree with that.)

The prototype of a society were the primitive human bands. Since then, thanks to an "error" in our biological programming, we extended the concept to groups that are far larger than the original bands of hunter-gatherers.

Why do you say "error"? Couldn't it simply be that our "programming" was never intended to produce a given outcome, but to act as a mechanism by which societies were formed in reaction to changing circumstances?

 

[timtofly]

Can a society exist if there is no agreement?

IMO society starts when two people agree on most everything, personal preferences aside. Once that agreement is broken, society ceases. So it is only the ideological attraction between individuals and not some force that brings people together. I suppose you could call an ideology a societal force. People do tend to seek out others of like mind. I do not think that it is the ideology itself that brings people together though. That would mean that determinism exist and we cannot control who we join together in a society.

Necessity could decide on how societies are formed, but there comes a point due to time or size, that the original reason for formation is forgotten.

 

[warpus]

Can a society exist if there is no agreement?

There will always be an informal agreement among community members; that's how the earliest settlements/bands/groups of people got started. They realized that they gained a big advantage by operating as a group and began living as a tribe/group/whatever.

 

[Dachs]

a more interesting question is whether the individual exists

 

[Traitorfish]

There will always be an informal agreement among community members; that's how the earliest settlements/bands/groups of people got started. They realized that they gained a big advantage by operating as a group and began living as a tribe/group/whatever.

I was of the understanding that human beings had always lived in groups. Our ancestors certainly did, if the ubiquity of social groupings among the other Great Apes is any indication. (Edit: Except orangutans, before anyone tries to be clever. )

a more interesting question is whether the individual exists

Ooh, that's a good one.

 

[Murky]

Does Mutual-Interest equal Self-Interest? Being able to function well in a group is essential to many of today's career choices. Yet you hear people continually say we need more self-sufficient people to have a strong economy.

 

[warpus]

I was of the understanding that human beings had always lived in groups. Our ancestors certainly did, if the ubiquity of social groupings among the other Great Apes is any indication.

You are probably right. At some point we weren't a social species though, but how far back was that? There must have been a gradual change from non-social to social, and with that you just sorta need that unspoken contract between group members and the group at large. Or hey, maybe even spoken.

 

[timtofly]

But was that out of necessity or ideology?

 

[Traitorfish]

You are probably right. At some point we weren't a social species though, but how far back was that? There must have been a gradual change from non-social to social, and with that you just sorta need that unspoken contract between group members and the group at large. Or hey, maybe even spoken.

Well, given that even the majority of monkeys are social creatures, it would appear to have been a pretty early development, one which takes you way out of the range of paleoanthropology and into simple palaeontology, so it's hard to envision this as something that would take the form of concious, albeit it implicit, social contracts.

But was that out of necessity or ideology?

Do monkeys possess ideology?

 

[.Shane.]

Hygro, you might find Anderson's work, Imagined Communities, interesting.

An imagined community is different from an actual community because it is not (and cannot be) based on everyday face-to-face interaction between its members. Instead, members hold in their minds a mental image of their affinity: for example, the nationhood felt with other members of your nation when your "imagined community" participates in a larger event such as the Olympics. As Anderson puts it, a nation "is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion".[1] Members of the community probably will never know one another face to face; however, they may have similar interests or identify as part of the same nation.

 

[warpus]

Well, given that even the majority of monkeys are social creatures, it would appear to have been a pretty early development, one which takes you way out of the range of paleoanthropology and into simple palaeontology, so it's hard to envision this as something that would take the form of concious, albeit it implicit, social contracts.

I suppose I did say that the social contract began when people started living in groups, didn't I?

Let's look at something like an ant colony. They're not conscious, yet there is def. a social contract of sorts there.. or is there?

Do you need social creatures to have a society? Is this a genetic/biological thing that allows us to form communities?

 

[timtofly]

Well, given that even the majority of monkeys are social creatures, it would appear to have been a pretty early development, one which takes you way out of the range of paleoanthropology and into simple palaeontology, so it's hard to envision this as something that would take the form of concious, albeit it implicit, social contracts.


Do monkeys possess ideology?

So are they social because we say they are or because they need to be? How do they know what their needs are? I think a lot of what we view society as; is just: habit. If you can change a habit, then you can change a society.

That has very little to do with how they form. Does society form because there is a need or from an ideology. I suppose that deciding that, would distinguish between different types of society. If we say there are different types of society, seems we have already decided that society exist. We have moved on to why society exist.