II. A Learning Planet: An Integral Knowledge by Humankind

C. Mindkind: A Global Knowledge

Szuba, Tadeusz. Computational Collective Intelligence. New York: Wiley, 2001. From a neuroscience and computer basis, the author frames a theory of a progressive, sequentially emergent tendency in evolution toward collective, information housed in a “social brain” from molecules and bacteria to humankind.

Szuba, Tadeusz. Was There Collective Intelligence Before Life on Earth? World Futures. 58/1, 2002. Yes, whereby an impetus toward group cognition and intelligence impels agents or ‘information molecules” to achieve increased organization by interactive communication at each level from bacteria to the biosphere. This implies evolution is a vast learning process, now at the verge of a planetary knowledge.

Tapscott, Don and Anthony Williams. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. New York: Penguin Books, 2007. An historic shift is underway, whose icon is the Wikipedia website: “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” to the pursuit of business and science as a vast collaborative enterprise. I worked in industrial R & D for decades, among other pursuits, so appreciate this: rather than companies having their own in-house, proprietary departments as before, a technical problem or challenge can be posed on the Internet for all comers to solve. The authors call this an Ideagora, from the ancient Athens marketplace and forum. A similar worldwide scientific cross-fertilization, such as an Earth System Grid which shares servers, supercomputers, and masses of data about climate studies, can enable 21st century advances in common knowledge and effective policy. It is then mused that collective minds ought to be imagined at work and play.

Tetlow, Philip. The Web’s Awake: An Introduction to the Field of Web Science and the Concept of Web Life. Hoboken, NJ: IEEE Press/Wiley Interscience, 2007. By way of an extensive survey of nonlinear complex system principles, a British computer scientist and IBM Senior IT Architect proposes that the worldwide Internet of interconnected computers and servers, along with its vast content repository, seems to be taking on the semblance of a sentient life form. The same dynamic self-organization and scale-free networks that grace a human brain, and indeed all of animate nature as a repetitive universality, can be readily identified in this emergent global domain. In this regard an analogy between molecular genes, literal books, and computational software can be made. “Striking resemblances” are further noted between metabolic and neural nets and the Web’s similar geometry, which is thus organic in kind, not a mechanical automaton.

Along with Alwyn Scott and Antony Crofts independently, (noted herein) Tetlow advises that an intrinsic tendency of natural systems to actively complexify themselves could imply a novel scientific vitalism. An “upward hierarchical cascade” is then evident which as it reiterates and quickens at each nested stage bodes for a cerebral humankind. By this vista, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, along with Tim Berners-Lee, an Internet founder, have conceived a higher global brain and intelligence, as Tetlow notes. He rightly goes on to cite pro and con arguments, and closes with an allusion that when we ask Google a question, whom might be answering?

Fractals come straight from the sweet spot at the center of complexity, being “repetitions of the same general patterns, even the same details, at both ascending and descending scales.” They tell us that the Universe and all that it contains is made up of folded realities within self-similar worlds, and today modern science is quickly realizing the important role that fractals have played in positioning life as the Universe’s pinnacle example of such folded realities. (42) These examples point to the universality of the fractal as a central organizing principle of our most complex systems, including the Web. Wherever we look in our world the complex systems of nature and time seem to preserve the look of details at finer and finer scales. Fractals show a holistic hidden order behind things, a harmony in which everything affects everything else. (43)

Furthermore, complex adaptive systems have many levels of organization, with agents or constituents at any one level serving as building blocks for agents at a higher level in a truly hierarchical manner. A group of proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids will form a biological cell, a group of such cells will form a tissue, a collection of tissues will form an organ, and association of organs will form a whole organism, and a group of organisms will form an ecosystem. In the brain, one group of neurons will form the speech cortex, and in precisely the same way a group of individual workers will compose a department, a group of departments will compose a division and so through companies, corporations, economic sectors, national economies, and finally the world economy. All are example of reoccurring, self-similar patterns, on building on top of the other. They are recursive in much the same way as the fractal structures common in so many complex natural systems. In truth, for all intents and purposes, they are fractal. (51)

Tomlin, Sarah. The Expanding Electronic Universe. Nature. 438/547, 2005. An introduction to a News Feature on the ubiquitous worldwide Internet as it becomes a medium for scientific discourse via blogs and pre-publications, along with Google projects to create digital libraries with millions of print books available to everyone online. One wonders if such a sensorium of human knowledge might be learning and discovering on its own, if we might just imagine and inquire?

Van Overwalle, Frank and Francis Heylighen. Talking Nets: A Multiagent Connectionist Approach to Communication and Trust Between Individuals. Psychological Review. 113/3, 2006. This method views personal network attributes which recursively interact with others to form a higher order cognitive network. The activity is then said to be a neural version of a complex adaptive system.

Wallace, Rodrick and Mindy Fullilove. Collective Consciousness and Its Discontents. New York: Springer, 2008. New York State Psychiatric Institute clinical researchers extend Bernard Baars’ Global Workspace Theory of cerebral consciousness to social and institutional domains in the guise of an emergent distributed cognition arising from many individual contributions. With this mathematical qualification in place, the authors demonstrate its application to real world disease pathologies such as HIV virus AIDS epidemics.

Weiss, Aaron. The Power of Collective Intelligence. netWorker. September, 2005. A survey of the evolving Internet as its density of interconnections and upgraded protocols portend a global cognitive noosphere.

With ever more sophisticated APIs (Application Programming Interface) and Web services being shared, attracting a critical mass of developers to build tools on these services, and a critical mass of users contributing to the services’ value by aggregating shared knowledge and content, we have the makings of a truly collaborative, self-organizing platform. (23)

Wurtz, Rolp, ed. Organic Computing. Berlin: Springer, 2008. As a genesis nature sequentially emerges, as computer technology evolves from incipient PCs to their global integration, our planet earth appears to be gaining a true super-organic cerebral faculty, a brain. Various chapters here explore efforts to intentionally recreate the worldwide web into a biological viability by way of essential self-organizing, nonlinear principles. Typical papers are Organic Computing and Complex Dynamical Systems by Klaus Mainzer, Evolutionary Design of Emergent Behavior by Jurgen Branke and Hartmut Schmeck, and Organically Grown Architectures by Rene Doursat.

Organic computer systems with life-like structure are advocated as a way to handle the increasingly complex adaptive systems created by engineer and computer scientists. Consisting of a large number of dynamically interacting components, these systems exhibit emergent global behavior, which is not deducible from the local actions of a single component. (Branke, Schmeck 136)

Yassini, Rouzbeh. Planet Broadband. Indianapolis: Cisco Press, 2003. Yes, a book from Cisco Systems which along with some hype shows how a “high-speed, always-on connectivity to an interactive digital network” is facilitating a global sphere of ubiquitous communication, information and accessible knowledge.

Yook, Soon-Hyung, et al. Modeling the Internet’s Large-Scale Topology. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 99/13382, 2002. By means of the application of universal, scale-free network principles.

In contrast with the random placement of nodes, we find that the Internet develops on a fractal support, driven by the fractal nature of population patterns around the world. (13382)

Zak, Michail. From Collective Mind to Communication. Complex Systems. 14/4, 2003. A member of the Ultra-computing Group of the California Institute of Technology proposes a “mathematical formalism” to convey how “natural or artificial living systems” lead to the formation of collective cognitive abilities.

“Collective mind” is introduced as a set of simple intelligent unity (say, neurons, or interacting agents) that can communicate by exchanging information without explicit global control. The concept of “collective mind” has appeared recently as a subject of intensive scientific discussion from economical, social, ecological, and computational viewpoints. (335) Thus, the proposed model offers a unified description of the progressive evolution of living systems, and it reconciles this evolution with the second law of thermodynamics. (351)

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