II. A Learning Planet: An Integral Knowledge by Humankind

C. Mindkind: A Global Knowledge

8th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics, and Information. www.iiisci.org/sci2004. This international meeting is noted because it plans to provide a balance of each brain hemisphere complement.

We are trying to relate the analytic thinking required in focused conference sessions to the synthetic thinking required for analogies generation….We are trying to promote a synergic relation between analytically and synthetically oriented minds, as it is found between left and right brain hemispheres….SCI 2004 might be perceived as a research corpus callosum trying to bridge analytically with synthetically oriented efforts, convergent with divergent thinkers.

China Knowledge Grid Research Group. www.knowledgegrid.net. This site is a portal to leading edge projects in China in collaborative computing, e-science, innovation culture and so on. Its founder and main mentor is Professor Hai Zhuge. (see below) His recent paper, China's e-Science Knowledge Grid Environment. IEEE Intelligent Systems. 19/1, 2004, provides an overview.

The Knowledge Grid is an intelligent and sustainable Internet application environment that enables people or virtual roles (mechanisms that facilitate interoperation among users, applications, and resources) to effectively capture, publish, share and manage explicit knowledge resources. It also provides on-demand services to support innovation, cooperative teamwork, problem-solving and decision making. It incorporates epistemology and ontology to reflect human cognition characteristics; exploits social, ecological and economic principles; and adopts the techniques and standards developed during work toward the next-generation web.

e-Print archive. www.arXiv.org. The huge online site for electronically published papers in theoretical and experimental science and mathematics. Many technical references are now just listed as: arXiv:hep-th/# where hep-th for example means High Energy Physics-Theory, followed by the number of the paper.

ArXiv is an e-print service in the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, and quantitative biology. The contents of arXiv conform to Cornell University academic standards. ArXiv is owned, operated and funded by Cornell University, a private not-for-profit educational institution. (website home)

The Computer, the Brain, and the Internet. http://santafe.edu/events/abstract/1496. A posting for a Santa Fe Institute Public Lecture on May 27, 2009 by the neuroscience luminaries Marvin Minsky and Gerald Edelman. What is at once notable, as its Abstract conveys, is an advance from standalone PC computers to their worldwide network connectivity seen as the best current metaphor for a brain (again via the latest technology). By just turning this around, can it not imply that the global Internet can indeed be known as a cerebral Noosphere?

In an effort to explain the brain, scientists have turned historically to computers, both as a tool for studying the brain and mind, and as a model for how the brain might work. We now live in the age of distributed data and computers, and the internet has emerged as a giant cobweb of communication among computers and their users. Some now suggest that the internet is our best current model for the brain, and thought is nothing but a form of search in the space of ideas. As we move towards more advanced technology, the brain, the computer, and the internet are progressively merging, and our identities and insights are assuming a radically new form.

Aberer, Karl, et al. Emergent Semantic Systems. Bouzeghoub, Mokrane, et al, eds. Semantics of a Networked World. Berlin: Springer, 2004. This quite global article with 12 contributors from 8 countries on 3 continents is part of a concerted project to develop a semantics, ontology (protocols) and vocabulary for a commonly accessible worldwide information network. To accomplish this, it is vital to understand its inherent self-organizing dynamics. These involve an evolutionary interplay of objects and relations, agents and distribution, which are facilitated by local agreements and rules. By this approach, the universal self-organization of nature and science can be extended to the planetary Internet, which takes on a cerebral quality through Kohonen and Edelman neural nets. In other words, what is being described is a complex adaptive system with these generic complements.

A self-organizing system essentially consists of a system that evolves towards displaying global system behaviors and structures that are more than an aggregation of the properties of its component parts….these patterns are arrived at through interactions between components such that these components only have local information, knowledge or local rules. The collection of information arising from local rules and knowledge leads to the emergent properties of the global system as a whole. (23)

Andersson, Claes. Sophisticated Selectionism as a General theory of Knowledge. Biology and Philosophy. 23/2, 2008. As the quote avers, inklings that the entirety of evolution might be understood as a singular educative learning process.

Human knowledge is a phenomenon whose roots extend from the cultural, through the neural and the biological and finally all the way down into the Precambrian “primordial soup.” The present paper reports an attempt at understanding this Greater System of Knowledge (GSK) as a hierarchical nested set of selection processes acting concurrently on several different scales of time and space. (Web Abstract)

Anthony, Marcus. Integrated Intelligence and the Psycho-Spiritual Imperatives of Mechanistic Science. Journal of Future Studies. 10/1, 2005. The male machine paradigm fractures self and soul. More appropriate would be a feminine vision receptive to an integral consciousness.

Integrated intelligence is a transpersonal intelligence that transcends the boundaries of the individual. It is in effect a collective human and universal intelligence. (32)

Arbib, Michael. Towards a Neuroscience of the Person. Robert Russell, et al, eds. Neuroscience and the Person.. Vatican City: Vatican Observatory, 1999. Arbib theorizes that the brain employs “schemas” or mosaic representations which constantly assimilate and accommodate new experience. The self is an ‘encyclopedia’ of thousands of these schemas gained in ones life. By this model, an analogous existence of ‘social schemas’ as the composite, ever-changing knowledge of societies and humanity can be proposed.

Ascott, Roy. Planetary Technoetics: Art, Technology and Consciousness. Leonardo. 37/2, 2004. In an article written soon after Sept. 11, 2001, the director of the Planetary Collegium at the University of Plymouth, UK contends that only a common worldwide identity and culture, already much in effect, will overcome the archaic conflicts that divide us. To this end a “moistmedia” of Bits, Atoms, Neurons and Genes, “the ‘Big B.A.N.G.’ of our post-biological universe,” is advised. The article leads off with this quote from the British author Martin Amis from the same period:

Our best destiny, as planetary cohabitants, is the development of what has been called a “species consciousness” – something over and above nationalisms, blocs, religions, ethnicities. During this week of incredible misery, I have been trying to apply such a consciousness and such a sensibility. Thinking of the victims, of the perpetrators, and of the near future, I felt species grief, then species shame, then species fear. (111)

Attali, Jacques. A Brief History of the Future. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2009. The veteran Parisian economist tours some decades to come which may experience these sequential stages: planetary empire, read American; global religious/ethnic/political war; unto a planetary hyperdemocracy which, as the quotes aver, will engender a worldwide cerebral faculty with its own thought and knowledge.

The chief intellectual dimension of the common good will be a universal intelligence peculiar to the human species, and different from the sum of human intelligences. (272) In the same way, humanity creates a collective intelligence, universal, distinct from the sum of the particular intelligences of the beings who make it up, and distinct from the collective intelligences of groups or of nations. (272) History will thus drive the integration of collective intelligences into a universal intelligence; it will also be endowed with a collective memory that will preserve and accumulate its knowledge. (273)

Babaoglu, Ozalp, et al, eds. Self-star Properties in Complex Information Systems. Berlin: Springer, 2005. Intricate computer networks such as the world wide web gain enhanced utility and responsiveness if they are founded on innate abilities to continually configure, organize, manage, and repair themselves, thus the term Self-star. Such features are seen to reflect widespread natural phenomena, which further includes cooperation, a self-awareness vector, emergent thinkers, evolutionary games, and so on.

Baker, Stephen. Google and the Wisdom of Clouds. Business Week. December 24, 2007. Making money is a side effect of this socially responsible company which wants to vastly increase the computer power and utility accessible to any user. ‘Cloud’ is their term for great numbers of interlinked, low cost servers, which can crunch much more data than a single PC. See also later BW articles by Steve Hamm: "Cloud Computing" for April 24, 2008, and "How Cloud Computing is Changing the World" by Rachael King on August 4, 2008. But one wonders when, by what imagination, it will take to realize the correct metaphor is actually ‘brain.’

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