Aristotle compared the acquisition of knowledge to wax taking on the shape of a seal. I prefer to think of it (and must have gotten this from somewhere--don't know where) to a hand grasping something, with the interior of the hand taking on the shape of that which has been grasped (or perhaps I should say "the surface of the hand" in order to avoid the impression that I am imputing a kind of interiority--I am not sure that I want to go there). This metaphor captures how knowledge, and cognition in general, always involves active and passive aspects,with language being the way we reach out at things that we can't actually touch.
This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...
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