II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Actual Factual Knowledge

C. Earth Learns: Interactive Person/Planet, Self-Organizing, Daily Collaboratiions

Krumov, Lachezar, et al. Motifs in Co-Authorship Networks and Their Relation to the Impact of Scientific Publications. European Physical Journal B. Online First, March, 2011. We highlight this report by Technical University Darmstadt, Martin Luther University, and Jacobs University computer scientists for its perception that similar viable topologies and dynamics reoccur across widely separate realms of genomes, brains, and earth’s self-organizing education sphere, and are akin to modes of information processing.

Co-authorship networks, where the nodes are authors and a link indicates joint publications, are very helpful representations for studying the processes that shape the scientific community. At the same time, they are social networks with a large amount of data available and can thus serve as vehicles for analyzing social phenomena in general. Here we show that the success of individual authors or publications depends unexpectedly strongly on an intermediate scale in co-authorship networks. We find that the average citation frequency of a group of authors depends on the motifs these authors form. In particular, a box motif (four authors forming a closed chain) has the highest average citation frequency per link. We also relate this topological observation to the underlying social and socio-scientific processes that have been shaping the networks. (Abstract)

An interesting alternative to these simulation-driven studies is to explore the relationship between network architecture and dynamics from a data-analysis perspective, i.e. to extract this relationship from large-scale data sets, which can be expected to be produced, at least partly, by the dynamics of the network at hand. Evidences for network architecture being a clearly discernible, quantifiable component, contributing to the patterns observed in data, exist from a diverse range of fields: gene expression patterns, both on the level of whole transcriptional regulatory networks and on the scale of small regulatory devices… (1-2)

We showed that some aspects of citation data are a consequence of the pattern of collaboration, rather that of the individual collaborators themselves. The outstanding role of the box motif, given by the highest average edge weight, the fact that the two authors in a box motif with the highest weight are typically adjacent, the high betweenness and long construction time, all give a first insight into the self-organization processes underlying the production of knowledge. (5)

Last, Cadell. Global Brain: Foundations of a Distributed Singularity. Korotayev, Andrey and David LePoire, eds. The 21st Century Singularity and Global Futures. International: Springer, 2019. A Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science, Vienna scholar achieves a well researched, thoughtful essay upon the emergent formation of an informational worldwise phase of collective, informed intelligence. It is proposed that this evident presence appears to have a capability to gain actual knowledge by its own analogous cognizance. In regard, if this spherical sapience can be rightly identified, enhanced and availed, it could provide a vital resource to advise, edify and solve dire problems which are otherwise intractable. See also the author’s 2020 book Global Brain Singularity (Springer) which is his doctoral thesis at the Free University of Brussels with Francis Heylighen.

Global Brain is a concept used to describe and understand the distributed, self-organizing intelligence currently emerging from all people and information-communication technologies (ICT) connected via the Internet. In its future network form it could become more intelligent and coherent with the capability to coordinate the functional operations of human civilization. Such a system would represent a new level of organized complexity which would allow people to deal with planetary problems that cannot be solved by contemporary methods. Thus, in a Global Brain metasystem, the human possibility space would open up levels of freedom and opportunity which have never before existed in evolutionary history. (Abstract)

“Global Brain” is a helpful metaphor to understand how our modern human society has become mediated by Internet functions like a biological brain. Here we posit that as brains produce intelligence, goal-directedness, and consciousness, so our species as a whole civilization produces higher order intelligence, goal-directedness, and consciousness. In positive regard, a Global Brain would help the human superorganism solve problems too complex for any lower level of intelligent organization. In another way, neurons within neural networks process information in a parallel and distributed fashion transmitting information; this is the same basic structural pattern used by humans to transmit information via the Internet. (3, edits)

Therefore, the Global Brain may be a useful metaphor for describing a distributed and self-organizing planetary superintelligence emerging from humans and ICT interacting and learning via the Internet. (4) But importantly for our inquiry, the idea of the Earth itself as a superorganism asks us to reflect on the possibility that the Global Brain would function as the structure of a nervous system. Thus, just as animals grew increasingly sophisticated brains so that they could make better models of the world and eventually their own models (self-consciousness), the Earth could be forming a brain so that it can accurately model its surrounding environment (i.e., the universe). (5)

Last, Cadell. Global Commons in the Global Brain. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. 114/1, 2017. In this special issue, a Free University of Brussels, Global Brain Institute, researcher offers an insightful prediction. Rather than the touted technological singularity as machines take over, a more likely occasion could be the beneficial fruition of a worldwide cerebral faculty. Prime aspects and movers are an intentional human facilitation, which if properly situated could provide an integral, Earthwise knowledge we need to solve intractable problems. A Global Brain Singularity will involve the Internet as a universal coordination medium, provide distributed, open-ended superintelligence, foster societal self-organization towards planetary systems, and ultimately facilitate our self-becoming. In January 2017, a world bent on divisive, fanatical planetcide could immensely benefit from these imaginative scholarly visions.

The next decade could be characterized by large-scale labour disruption and further acceleration of income and wealth inequality due to the widespread introduction of general-purpose robotics, machine-learning software/artificial intelligence (AI) and their various interconnections within the emerging infrastructure of the Internet of Things. In this paper I argue that such technological changes and their socioeconomic consequences signal the emergence of a global metasystem (i.e. control organization beyond markets and nation-states). Consequently, this paper attempts to develop a conceptual framework to aid an international political transition towards a post-capitalist, post-nation state global world. This conceptual framework is grounded within the Global Brain, which describes a planetary organizational structure founded on distributed and open-ended intelligence. The socioeconomic theory of the Commons means distributed modes of organization founded upon principles of democratic management and open access. (Abstract edits)

Laxton, Rita. The World Wide Web as Neural Net. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. 64/1, 2000. There are deep parallels between the Internet and a brain as they both cogitate by a redundant pattern matching of perception and experience.

The primary hypothesis is that it can be shown that the World Wide Web’s birth, growth and knowledge acquisition patterns are remarkably similar to those of the human brain. (55)

Lenartowicz, Marta. Creatures of the Semiosphere. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. 114/1, 2017. In a Global Brain issue which she co-edits, this is a paper by the Free University of Brussels systems sociologist with a recent doctorate in pragmatics, semiotics and sociolinguistics from Jagiellonian University, Krakow. Its subtitle is “A problematic third party in the humans plus technology cognitive architecture of the future global superintelligence.” Her contribution thus adds a novel quality to an imminent planetary knowledge achieved by this nascent faculty. An “individuation of the semiospecies,” via a triad of information, discourse and understanding can result. In accord with our website premise, a worldwide learning process on its own, which we desperately need, goes unnoticed. See also The Individuation of Social Systems by ML, et al in Procedia Computer Science (88/15, 2016). OK

Contrary to the prevailing pessimistic AI takeover scenarios, the theory of the Global Brain (GB) argues that this foreseen collective, distributed superintelligence is bound to include humans as its key beneficiaries. This prediction follows from the contingency of evolution: we, as already present intelligent forms of life, are in a position to exert selective pressures onto the emerging new ones. As a result, it is foreseen that the cognitive architecture of the GB will include human beings and such technologies, which will best prove to advance our collective wellbeing. Since the rapid evolution of interconnecting technologies appears to open up immense emancipatory possibilities not only for humans, but also for the intelligently evolving ‘creatures of the semiosphere’, it is concluded that in the context of the rapidly self-organizing Global Brain, a close watch needs to be kept over the dynamics of the latter. (Abstract excerpts)

Therefore, I propose a thought experiment: a re-combination of several existing theories in a way that reveals social systems (which shape and drive our world today), not humans, to be the most advanced intelligence currently operating on Earth. The resulting exploration of the hypothesis that we are continuously failing to acknowledge this posthuman superintelligence, which is already present, may open up paths for several reconsiderations related to the foreseen cognitive architecture of the Global Brain. (36)

Leuf, Bo. The Semantic Web. New York: Wiley, 2006. In order to make the Internet more user useful, searchable, interactive, self organizing, correcting and responsive, its textual basis needs to be reconceived. First proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, the present work provides a good introduction to this on-going project.

Perhaps we are also approaching something more than just a vast globally-accessible knowledge repository. There is the potential to develop devices, services, and software agents that we might converse with as they were fully sentient and intelligent beings themselves. (314)

Levy, Neil. Neuroethics: Challenges for the 21st Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. A Research Fellow at both the University of Melbourne and Oxford explores the ramifications of advances in neuroscience which augur for increasing abilities to influences mental states and capacities. The book is noted here for a lengthy chapter on the “extended mind hypothesis” whereof aware intellects reach pervasively beyond the body into social settings.

Levy, Pierre. Collective Intelligence. New York: Plenum, 1997. From France comes another report on the rudiments of an embryonic planetary mind arising from integrated human cognition.

Levy, Pierre. The Semantic Sphere: Computation, Cognition and Information Economy. New York: Wiley-ISTE, 2011. The latest volume by the University of Ottawa communication philosopher and Canada Research Chair in Collective Intelligence illumes the fulfillment over the past decade of a worldwide cerebral faculty, which is in fact the conceptual basis and occasion of this website.

The new digital media offers us an unprecedented memory capacity, an ubiquitous communication channel and a growing computing power. How can we exploit this medium to augment our personal and social cognitive processes at the service of human development? Combining a deep knowledge of humanities and social sciences as well as a real familiarity with computer science issues, this book explains the collaborative construction of a global hypercortex coordinated by a computable metalanguage. By recognizing fully the symbolic and social nature of human cognition, we could transform our current opaque global brain into a reflexive collective intelligence. (Publisher)

Lightman, Alex and William Rojas. Brave New Unwired World: The Digital Big Bang and the Infinite Internet. New York: Wiley, 2002. The book contains both technical details and visionary perspectives on a wireless network now enveloping the globe. When it is accomplished, anyone, anywhere should have free, instant access to the totality of human knowledge.

We are not an accident of the Universe. Our intelligence is not random. We are generators of information content in the universe. (142)

Liu, Jiming and K. C. Tsui. Toward Nature-Inspired Computing. Communications of the ACM. 49/10, 2006. Prof. Liu, a leading innovator of an autonomous, self-organizing, worldwide web intelligence, is presently Director of the School of Computer Science at the University of Windsor in Canada. Check his website via Google for an extensive list of publications. Here he is joined by an IT manager from the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp. The broad intent of this project is to carry forth natural developmental and cognitive viability to enhance the Internet. These include autonomous agents, distributed decision-making, emergent complexity, adaptive responses, all of which are able to organize themselves.

Llinas, Rodolfo. I of the Vortex: From Neuron to Self. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. A veteran neuroscientist explains how the brain achieves “perceptual binding” by a simultaneity of communicative modules. These theories lead to speculations about whether the Internet is becoming a rudimentary species mind.

One of the few ways in which local order can increase is through the generation of such things as a nervous system that employs modularization of function. If modularization is indeed a universal to combat disorder, such a geometric and architectural solution may have happened at other levels as well. (258)

[Prev Pages]   Previous   | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17  Next  [More Pages]