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

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

Sutton, John. Introduction: Memory, Embodied Cognition, and the Extended Mind. Philosophical Psychology. 19/3, 2006. To a special issue on the various dimensions of socially situated cerebral activity.

Suzuki, Einoshin. Special Issue on Discovery Science. The Computer Journal. 56/3, 2013. A Kyushu University information scientist introduces an array of techniques for gleaning knowledge content from the myriad web pages of our enveloping noosphere. Typical papers are Mutual Enhanced Infinite Community-Topic Model for Analyzing Text-Augmented Social Networks (China), and A Methodology for Mining Document-Enriched Heterogeneous Information Networks (Slovenia), a good sign of its global essence. But one wonders if we could altogether cerebrally imagine, the very thought, question, possibility, of actually discovering a phenomenal genesis universe that exists on its own for our edification. However can this awakening happen, not a day too soon?

This special issue focuses on Discovery Science (DS), which is a scientific discipline on any discovery process that is mainly approached by computer science. DS first started as a national project in Japan involving more than 100 researchers in 1998 and the project gave birth to a series of international conferences on DS, which have been held successfully every year since 1998. The objective of this special issue is to provide a leading forum for timely, in-depth presentation of recent advances in algorithms, theories and applications in the field of DS. Seven papers, ranging in a spectrum from basic theoretical research to solid application research, are included in this special issue. (Abstract)

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)

Thomas, John and Anna Zaytseva. Mapping Human Knowledge as a Complex Adaptive System. Complexity. Online June, 2016. A paper from a Santa Fe Institute Summer Seminar project by Thomas, a Cognitive Tools (New York) entrepreneur, and a University of Oslo mathematician, both with science PhD’s. We note as a unique, thorough perception about worldwide collaborations proceed which can be found to take on this common creative pattern and process. By these insights, Earth life evolves, develops, learns, and comprehends as an oriented teleological emergence.

A paper from a Santa Fe Institute Summer Seminar project by Thomas, a Cognitive Tools (New York) entrepreneur, and a University of Oslo mathematician, both with science PhD’s. We note as a unique, thorough perception about worldwide collaborations proceed which can be found to take on this common creative pattern and process. By these insights, Earth life evolves, develops, learns, and comprehends as an oriented teleological emergence.

Thompson, Evan and Mog Stapleton. Making Sense of Sense-Making: Reflections on Enactive and Extended Mind Theories. Topoi: An International Review of Philosophy. 28/1, 2009. University of Toronto, and University of Edinburgh, philosophers join these certain aspects of an apparent cognitive dimension that socially spreads beyond cerebral brains, which in this case is seen to occur and proceed by its own edifying self-construction.

Putting together the abstract and physical ways of characterizing autonomy, we can state in general terms that “an autonomous system is a thermodynamically open system with operational closure that actively generates and sustains its identity under precarious conditions. (24) We can now say what sort of autonomy is required for sense-making and cognition. What is required is not autopoiesis but adaptive autonomy. In single-celled organisms such as bacteria, adaptive autonomy takes the fore of adaptive autopoiesis. Multicellular animals with nervous systems embody more complex forms of adaptive sensorimotor autonomy. (25)

Todd, Peter, et al, eds. Cognitive Search: Evolution, Algorithms, and the Brain. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. A Strungmann Forum Report on the natural propensity and imperative for organisms to search and survive in their environments, ranging from early creatures to our Worldwide Web milieu. Weighty contributions come in these sections: Evolution of Cognitive Search, Search, Goals, and the Brain, Mechanisms and Processes of Cognitive Search, and Search Environments, Representation, and Encoding. Chapters include The Evolution of Cognitive Search by Thomas Hillis and Reuven Dukas, Foundations of Search by James Marshall and Frank Neumann, and Information Foraging on the Internet by Wai-Tat Fu. One wonders if this activity is so primary, might it imply a self-searching universe, and we folks as the latest conscious phenomenon for its purpose of discovery and creation.

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?

Tovey, Mark, ed. Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace. Earth Intelligence Network, 2008. A gamut of papers intended as much to bootstrap such a salutary occasion as to report on it. Disparate sections and chapters range from Individuals and Groups to Large-Scale Collaboration. With leading proponents such as Thomas Malone (search), Tom Atlee, Pierre Levy, Yochai Benkler, Peggy Holman, and Craig Hamilton, weighing in, a substantial document is accomplished. It is available both in full online at the EIN site, or at Amazon.com.

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.

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