Feb 18, 1997
Adventures in the noosphere
Is it possible that forms of consciousness arise as a direct result of sufficient neural complexity? Many general systems theorists -- and some philosophers -- believe this to be true. Leaving aside notions of divine genesis for the moment, consider the possibility that the Internet is a vastly complex neural network, a wiring up of millions of synaptic nodes both organic and silicon, possibly on its way toward achieving some form of consciousness. If this were to be true (indulge me for a moment), each of us would be functioning like cells in a global brain, passing the impulses of global thought through our fingertips.The idea that complex networks give rise to forms of consciousness is not new. Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin wrote decades ago that the sophistication of a nervous system was the prime vehicle for increasing the complexity in consciousness of a being, and that a diversity of neural connections correlates directly to increasingly complex consciousness.
Such was de Chardin's impact on the thinking of Marshall McLuhan and other digerati, that Internet philosopher John Perry Barlow notes: "What Teilhard was saying ... can easily be summed up in a few words. The point of all evolution up to this stage is the creation of a collective organism of Mind."
Consider the continuum of these metaphors: "The wheel is an extension of the foot," "the radio is an extension of the ear," "the television is an extension of the eye." The evolution of tools has extended the form of the human body and its sensory organs into the biosphere -- but what of our extension of the mind into the noosphere (from the Greek noos, for mind)? "RAM is an extension of the memory," "CPUs are an extension of our ability to reckon," "the Internet is an extension of the neural network." We are sitting on the edge of eons of tools built to extend the physical body, a century of tools that extend the senses, and a couple of decades of tools that extend memory, cognition, and the buzzing collectivity of them all. Assuming that the Internet will ultimately subsume not only text and images, but all current forms of telecommunication unto itself (and I believe this is an inevitability), it can be seen as a unified organism tieing together all of humanity's senses and thoughts; a tool that allows millenia of scattered ideas to come together in a unified -- possibly living -- being.
Every Web, e-mail, and IRC server, and every person tapping into them, is functioning like a synapse in this growing network. We are growing a nooshpere as a shell, an outer brain hanging outside our physical bodies, sheathing the earth. Marshall McLuhan, godfather of the original "Global Village," foresaw something like the Net coming as part of a continuum after the inventions of the phonetic alphabet, the dawn of movable type, and the discovery of the telegraph. "Now man is beginning to wear his brain outside his skull and his nerves outside his skin; new technology breeds new man."
The Greeks spoke of their roads and aqueducts, libraries and warehouses in terms of bodily metaphor: aqueduct as blood system, library as brain. There are certain types of fish that school together in a giant silhouette of each individual fishes' body, instinctively creating a macro version of the individual. Ecologists speak of the Gaia hypothesis, the theory of Earth as a living being, all of her systems for heating and cooling, breathing, growing, aging, and circulating fluids mirroring similar functions in biological bodies. And now it's as if Gaia has entered a new phase in her own evolution, growing a sophisticated neural network so that all of her parts, including her humans, can intercommunicate through synergetic utilization of both grey matter and silicon.
For better or worse, we are lacing ourselves up into a hive mind. Collective computing is becoming increasingly important as the Internet allows for the intelligent networking of desktop machines into aggregate supercomputers more powerful than any single machine on earth. Already, individuals are breaking encrypted codes and calculating prime numbers far larger than megafast mainframes have heretofore been able by using the Internet as a conduit for massively parallel processing. And if you consider the vast amounts of information stored on Web servers around the world, you realize that the day is not far off when virtually all human knowledge will be accessible by anyone, anywhere, all organized according to some grand, cryptic scheme -- yet mysteriously woven together to create a functioning, synergetic whole. But where human brains carry only individual human thoughts, the global brain will carry the collective memory and experience of the human species as a whole... and possibly be capable of processing these thoughts.
It's nearly impossible to ponder these metaphors without brushing against thorny issues of autonomy. What is the role of the individual in the global brain? Do each of us sacrifice our individual wills in order to more successfully participate in the well-being of the collective? Is each of us but a single cell, a synapse in the newly forming macromind? If so, why do we feel the illusion of autonomy? Here we veer into philosophical issues that predate the likes of McLuhan and de Chardin. But the critical mass of the Internet phenomenon is forcing us to re-evaluate these questions, as each of us increasingly becomes more like a cell, a synapse, a nerve cluster in a shared consciousness. The important question is not whether a global brain exists -- the question is what sort of mind is attached to it.
For more information, see
- Conceptions of the Global Brain
- A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain
- An interview with John Perry Barlow
- An interview with Marshall McLuhan
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