The Net is an emblem of multiples. Out of it comes swarm being—distributed being—spreading the self over the entire web so that no part can say, “I am the I” (Kelly, 1992, p. 25).
Marshall McLuhan first coined the term the ‘global village’ in 1962. He used this term to describe the impact technology has had (and, more importantly, will have) on the instantaneous nature of information propagation and the resulting interconnectedness of humans (McLuhan, 1962). Today we appreciate this in the form of the Internet. McLuhan anticipated the birth of the Net as “the extension of consciousness” (McLuhan, 1962). Although the term consciousness is multifaceted and difficult to define, definitions are important in communicating and understanding things. If consciousness is in some ways similar with intelligence, then the Net itself may very well be better defined as a ‘global brain’, as the Net exhibits intelligent and aware collective behaviours and outcomes. Intelligence emerges through the self-orchestrated collective behaviour of individuals, whether it be in the structure and function of the human brain via the billions of neurons, or in the Net and Web via the trillions of networked computing devices. Broadly speaking, the definition of intelligence used here is that it is a set of qualities, predispositions and abilities to deal with environmental input in a meaningful way.
The emergent properties of brain networks and computer networks are due in large part to their ability to generate activity, behaviors and properties that are non-local – that is, not due to any specific single individual, but truly emerge, often unpredictably, out of the sum individuals and their more or less complex non-linear interactions. Such non-local properties might also be called global properties. These global properties affect the local properties or behaviors and so the two exist in a dynamical complex feedback system, where the global collective behavior is dependent on the individual behaviors, and the local individuals' behaviors become dependent on the new global behavior (Johnson, 2003). This means that the individuals’ behaviors are no longer well describable only with reference to an individual. This kind of process is nicely visible in certain insect societies – ants being the most common example, but bees, bacteria, fungi participate in equally or more complex collectively-intelligent activities. While an individual bee or ant have some amount of visible behavior, individuals do not produce beehives or ant mounts, with intricate and functional structures. These and the communication paths (via pheromones) emerge only with the interplay of multiple entities sensing other entities' signals, modifying these, sending their own signals, and in this whole process, create external systems that in turn affects and drives these same individuals' future behaviors and senses (Johnson, 2003). Without many ants, an individual ant does not quite behave the way it would in a society of ants. These points of interconnected complexity, emergence and feedback loops within networks of individuals are shared in common by brains and nervous systems, as well as the Internet.
The brain is a biological computer or network of neural networks – a densely “interconnected web of neurons transmitting elaborate patterns of electrical signals” (Shiffman, 2012). As the most complex organ, it serves as the command centre of the nervous system capable of a wide variety of activities ranging from exerting control over other organs, to pattern recognition and long-term memory storage. In particular, the evolutionarily newest part of the brain, the neocortex, has a small-world connectivity. To understand this hugely important organizational property of the brain (and human societies, the Internet, etc), it is important to note that many systems can be studied using graph or network theory. In such network analysis, a system’s components are modeled as nodes (often depicted as circles, see Figure 1) and the interactions or connections between the nodes as edges (drawn as arrows or lines between the nodes). Network theory has successfully been used to model and better understand a plethora of situations and problems in almost every field. A scale-free network (illustrated in Figure 2) is one which contains relatively few nodes with a disproportionately large number of connections to other nodes (compared to other nodes’ connections). This means that these highly-connected central nodes act as “hubs” which are important to tying together different parts of a network (Ball, 2005). Any thought or brain activity “triggers an array of neuronal circuits like traffic routes plotted on the map of the mind” (Johnson, 2003, p. 133) - the major highways and intersection points being these hubs. The hubs can exist on a very low level (individual neurons) as well as on a higher level (larger brain structures such as the thalamus). Finally, when we speak of scale-free networks, we mean networks that have such highly unevenly-distributed hubby networks but on multiple spatial (or temporal) scales (Ball, 2005). In other words, we see the brain and human body as having hub-based uneven distribution of connections to nodes on the level of neurons or cells, on groups of cells, within tissues, organs, etc. This self-similarity of structure on multiple spatial (or temporal) scales is fractal in nature - the brain’s structure on a low level mimics the brain’s structure on the higher level.
Figure 1: Image depicting a section of the Internet map (Internet Map, 2011)
Before we discuss the Internet, it is necessary to delineate what we mean by this. The Internet is the global interconnection of computers and devices, while the World Wide Web (WWW) is a collection of dynamic and interconnected documents typically accessed via browsers. The Net is comprised of millions of computers, in which a computer includes any computing devices such as mobile phones/machines connected and communicating over the Net, while the Web is the browsable library of millions of websites and hypertext links. In the case of the Internet, the hubs can be individual routers (acting as hubs for a household or small community), local internet service providers (acting as hubs for larger communities) or national telecommunications and internet service providers that link together multiple local providers and networks into a yet larger network. This kind of structure of hubs-at-multiple-scales means that many of the other related properties of brain and Internet networks are likewise similar (because structural properties are interdependent). As an example of the importance of such central processing and connecting hubs in networks, consider that if you break or otherwise take out one ordinary node (say, a student’s laptop) from the global Internet, the Internet will remain virtually identical. If one removes a single central industrial router, or even control machine, at a major global Internet and telecom firm, the effect may cause all sorts of disruptions. Interestingly, both the brain and the Internet have some amount of redundancy to decrease the catastrophe of hub damage.
Figure 2: Macro-level Internet map (Scale-Free Network: Internet Map, 2003)
It is important to realize that function works on top of structure. Structure defines the allowed or preferred functions. The structure of the Internet, as described previously, is scale-free and highly hub-centered. Activity that uses such a structure tends to be shaped into scale-free activity as well. If the structure is scale-free, so is the activity. Such scale-free activity means that the activity from individuals (say neurons, computer or humans) will affect, look like and be affected by the activity on the higher levels (larger brain regions, computer networks or cultures and societies of humans) (Johnson, 2003). The Internet has previously been compared to the human brain by scientists and science fiction writers such as Ben Goertzel and James Hughes, and William Gibson and Arthur C. Clarke. French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin proposed the idea of the “Omega Point” and “noosphere”, where he suggests that consciousness and the universe are evolving through an ever greater increase in complexity (Argüelles, 2011). Terence McKenna also frequently talked about the universe evolving towards ever greater complexity, which he called “novelty theory”.
On a more empirical and testable side, Ben Goertzel has proposed that there are four phases to the emergence or evolution of what he calls a “global Web mind”. The first being the early stages of pre-WWW, the second being WWW and the third as the “Active Web” functioning as a “real-time software resource” (Goertzel, 1997). Goertzel argues that the Active Web is currently in its early stages of development, and that the fourth phase is potentially the end-point of the Web's evolution, namely the intelligent Web/global Web mind. If the Active Web refers to a “community of programs, texts, images, sounds and intelligent agents, interacting and serving their own ends”, then the global Web mind is having these programs and agents of the Active Web self-organize and display emergent memory, cognitive and behavioral structures that were not initially programmed to exist or be so. Clearly in many ways this is already the case with today’s Internet infrastructure and activities.
But the Internet today is not just mathematically or abstractly similar to the human brain. We have quite literally connected our brains to the Internet. Every time we interact with the Internet via our smartphones and computers, we affect it (for example the local Internet traffic and activity) and it in turn affects us. This is crucial - like the neurons in the brain affecting larger neuronal networks, and the global neural network behavior affecting the individuals - we are synchronized, entrained and driven by Internet-shaped forces that we are scarcely aware of. But every now and then we see large sudden global events that are clearly largely conditional on the interconnecting properties of the Internet - for example the Occupy movements, revolutions and other global events.
The history of activity, as crystallized in the form of digital or neuronal memories, by affecting future activity and even the structure of the brain and the Net, shapes the very essence and future developments of the Net and the brain. That is, the memory (of past events) affect current and future events. As a result, the networks then become “a kind of map of the history of the system(s)...the expansion of the Internet over time is recorded in the growing web that it weaves. In networks the past matters” and “a memory of it is frozen in place and shapes the present” (Ball, 2005, p. 504). Although Kevin Kelly (1992, p. 26) suggests that distributed and decentralized networks are more of a process rather than a thing, if a process is a series of changes, then any living entity is a series of processes rather than a constant thing. This is also in line with Alfred North Whitehead’s (and other modern analytical philosophers’ views) that everything (especially organisms) are processes, not things as such. If networks can exist that can grow, learn and behave like the brain networks, then ”minds and persons are not limited to the biological skin-bag” (Clark, 2007, p. 33) - in other words, intelligence manifesting outside of a biological substrate is not inconceivable. Goertzel proposes that initially the Net will be its own intelligent entity that humans can interact with via their current computing devices and other emerging technologies, until the evolution of the Net merges with the evolution of humans. Unlike futurist Hans Moravec and his ideas of downloading and preserving individual humans to lead “digital… bodiless lives”, Goertzel argues that humans will instead incorporate and synchronize themselves with other humans and be drawn into the Net to “become a kind of collective human/digital entity” (Goertzel, 2001). In other words, technology will eventually enable the creation of a ‘distributed mind’ made up of the minds of both humans and AI, one that goes beyond their individual intellectual capacities to collectively form “a higher level of intelligence and awareness… a Mindplex” (Goertzel, 2003).
In his ‘you are not a gadget’ manifesto (Lanier, 2010), raising the question “what do you do when the techies are crazier than the luddites?”, Jaron Lanier discusses the notion of the Singularity, and that as a result of the emerging global brain, humans might “...enjoy immortality within virtual reality...”, claiming that the size of the global brain could “...host all our consciousness for eternity” (Lanier, 2010, p. 20). Andy Clark’s extended mind thesis concerning the Net (as well as other technologies) as a literal extension of our own mental capacities and limitations then becomes the ‘collective mind’, one with a “...distributed memory that both perceives and remembers” (Kelly, 1992, p. 19). After all, the Net’s topology has no limit on its potential, meaning it is unlikely to remain simply as an “extension of existing aspects of human society into the electronic domain” (Goertzel, 1997).
The Internet is the culmination of the wisdom of millions using its system, and access to the Net permits access to anything that both the human and nonhuman minds have produced. Although the Net currently exhibits intelligent properties and behaviour that resemble the structure, functioning and complexity of the brain, there are many questions to be raised regarding its potential for further growth. If the Internet currently resembles “the mind of a very young child… who has not yet learned to think for herself” (Goertzel, 1997), then perhaps the Internet will someday mature into an entity able to distinguish herself from her environment. Most likely the Net in fifty years time will not resemble anything that it does today. There are also ethical and spiritual questions to be addressed regarding the identity, sanity, morality and limits of the global brain. Skepticism of its viability to exist, survive or be useful, as well as more darker dystopian fears of Skynet-like proportions, are valid topics of discourse regarding the future evolution of it. Whatever happens, it will be at least as interesting as watching a child grow into a conscious and able human.
“In regard to mental processes, it matters not what the parts of brains are; it only matters what they do--and what they are connected to” (Minsky, 1997).
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thank you for reading
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