Thanks. I appreciate the constructive criticism. I’m not sure exactly what you mean by “protocols,” but I think you mean just empirical data. Indeed, scientific explanations could only help philosophy. But there’s also the possibility of getting lost in the weeds. However mysterious the brain’s operations may be there’s only one brain in a body, and one nucleus per cell. (Mind you, I believe some dinosaurs had two brains, including one for their tail, because their bodies were so massive).
This is significant especially because of the redundancy built into many of our organs. We have two nostrils, two ears, two arms and legs, two lungs, two testes and fallopian tubes, and so on. But only one neural control center (again, with some competition from the gut). A conservative, then, could use that fact as an analogy for how governments should work, which could count against democracy and socially distributed intelligence.
Of course, there’s only one democratic government per country, too, so that might be said to resemble more closely the parallel processing brain’s relation to the body, compared to an autocracy which doesn’t include much evolution of planning (because the king or dictator has absolute control, at least in theory).
Regarding whether consciousness makes the decisions or only reflects the prior decisions made by the unconscious brain, there’s been much criticism of Libet’s experiment, as indicated in the article linked below.
That’s an interesting point that the presence of an oligarchy or central command structure may not entail a shared purpose. But we can speak of probabilities here at least, and if we look at how these structures work in all other social organizations, from militaries to corporations to restaurant kitchens, we see that each command structure has been established to implement a function that’s already been decided. So an oligarchy would be a weird exception to that rule.
