The Altruistic Nature Of Individuality In John Milton's Paradise Lost

Johnson portrays the altruistic nature of individuality in a bottom-up, self-organized system through his example of the “demons” or miniprograms within the AI system that were able to develop themselves into larger transmissions whereas the individuality portrayed in Watters’ essay shows how individuals rely on others to develop themselves. Watters writes that “Americans are unique both in willing to openly express distressful emotions and feelings to strangers and in our penchant for viewing psychological suffering as a health care issue” (518). Americans tend to take psychological issues to a serious extent that they believe they need to seek medical attention to fix their internal problems instead of attempting to fix it on their own. This

According to Watters, the Japanese individuals portrayed in his essay are too reliable on the society and cannot properly understand themselves, or their internal issues, in order to correctly participate in the larger system. In contrast, Johnson’s self-organizing systems consist of individuals who are dependent on themselves to perform within the larger community, such as Oliver Selfridge’s “demons”. Oliver Selfridge was a young researcher at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory who experimented with an AI model for teaching a computer to have its own thoughts. He came up with the term “demons” from his reading of John Milton’s Paradise Lost where he was influenced to do some machine learning and see how systems change based on the recognition of patterns. Johnson writes that “All the letter-organizing demons would report to a master demon, who would tally up the votes for each letter and choose the demon that expressed the highest confidence” (206). These demons are able to function on their own and develop a larger technological system, or transfer the message it carries to the larger figure, allowing the computer system to think on its