II. A Learning Planet: An Integral Knowledge by Humankind

C. Mindkind: A Global Knowledge

Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. Network Theory – the Emergence of the Creative Enterprise. Science. 308/639, 2005. A commentary on a detailed study in the same issue (Roger Guimera, et al. 697-702) finds that science has now moved from lone investigators (Newton, Darwin) to international consortiums involving a great many researchers. Their dynamic interrelation can then be modeled by the same principles that occur from protein webs to the Internet. What is going on, I add, seems an historic shift and ascent to a worldwide cognitive capacity beginning to attain its own knowledge. Such an integral evolutionary transition promises to join many contributions and fields into a salutary discovery, which is the working basis of this website.

Traditionally, the achievements of individuals such as Darwin and Einstein have dominated the public’s image of science, yet today some of the most groundbreaking work is collaborative in nature. (639) Indeed, the size of collaborative teams is increasing, turning the scientific enterprise into a densely interconnected network whose evolution is driven by simple universal laws. (640) By demonstrating that the Web, the cell, or society is driven by similar organizing principles, network theory offers a successful conceptual framework to approach the structure of many complex systems. (641)

Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. The Architecture of Complexity: The Structure and the Dynamics of Networks, from the Web to the Cell. Grossman, Robert, et al, eds. Proceedings of the Eleventh SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Boston: ACM Press, 2005. A typical example of the many professional meetings each year on every continent as part of intense efforts to develop the full capacity of a global cerebral realm. Physicist Barabasi again notes the deep affinities amongst all realms of an awakening natural genesis.

Networks with complex topology describe systems as diverse as the cell, the World Wide Web or the society. The emergence of most networks is driven by self-organizing processes that are governed by simple but generic laws. The analysis of the cellular network of various organisms shows that cells and complex man-made networks, such as the Internet…and many social and collaboration networks share the same large-scale topology. (3)

Barlow, Horace. The Nested Network of Brains and Minds. Gregory Bock and Jamie Goode, eds. The Limits of Reductionism in Biology. New York: Wiley, 1998. A complex systems view reveals similarities between cognitive architecture and human societies.

Bentley, Alexander and Herbert Maschner. Avalanche of Ideas. Bentley, Alexander and Herbert Maschner, eds. Complex Systems and Archaeology. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003. A preamble contends that while most scale-free network studies look for spatial patterns, an important temporal factor can also be observed. An application is then made to cultural concepts or ideas, which are seen to spread by the same self-similar, branching fractal growth as branching rivers or neural networks.

Berman, Fran, et al, eds. Grid Computing – Making the Global Infrastructure a Reality. Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2003. A large volume on the many aspects of an enveloping worldwide computer network as if a planetary nervous system. By this novel capacity, an immense flow of information coming from many areas such as bioinformatics, earth systems, climate, astronomy can handled, organized and made accessible to everyone. A typical paper in this regard is “The Data Deluge: an e-Science Perspective.” by Tony Hey and Anne Trefethen.

Berners-Lee, Tim. Weaving the Web. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999. The inventor of the Internet finds it to express a fractal self-similarity as exponentially growing networks take on the emergent properties of a global brain.

Berners-Lee, Tim and Lalana Kagal. The Fractal Nature of the Semantic Web. AI Magazine. Fall, 2008. MIT computer scientists (Berners-Lee is the founder of the worldwide web) contend that since the rest of natural and indeed social reality exemplifies a nested, recurrent, self-similarity, so also should the global Internet. Indeed it already can be seen to be so structured to a good extent. The endeavor to design and facilitate better operating ontologies should then further embrace this effective, organic geometry.

The semantic web is a set of standards for knowledge representation and exchange that is aimed at providing interoperability across applications and organizations. We believe that the gathering success of this technology is not derived from the particular choice of syntax or of logic. Its main contribution is in recognizing and supporting the fractal patterns of scalable web systems. (29) In this article we discuss why fractal patterns are an appropriate model for web systems and how semantic web technologies can be used to design scalable and interoperable systems. (29) The inherent fractal nature of language and culture in human societies leads us to expect the semantic web to demonstrate the self-similar patterns of fractals. (29)

Human society is made up of a fractal tangle of overlapping communities and cultures. We expect the same fractal patterns to appear in scalable web systems within which information will be composed of terms from different ontologies – global, community specific, and local. (34)

Borner, Katy. Making Sense of Mankind’s Scholarly Knowledge and Expertise. Environment and Planning B. 34/5, 2008. The Indiana University information scientist traces various pathways to “collecting, interlinking, and organizing what we know” both for web approaches already in place such as www.scholar.google.com, along with proposed uses of a semantic web and mapping networks. But all these online encyclopedias (as is Britannica) are still absent an organizing that would reflect a natural genesis.

Borner, Katy, et al. Studying the Emerging Global Brain: Analyzing and Visualizing the Impact of Co-Authorship Teams. Complexity. 10/4, 2005. This project complements the work of Barabasi, et al (2005, this section) whereby increasingly large collaborations seem to take on the guise of a planetary cerebral and cognitive faculty. The occasion of a collective knowledge, as if an earth that learns at the verge of its own discovery, is quite implied.

Work dating back to the ancient Greeks argues that humanity can be seen as a complex social system or super-organism. In this perspective, people are viewed as analogous to nerve cells that are interconnected by communication channels, collectively forming a "global brain." By adopting this philosophy one is led to believe - hope, given the nearly constant human cognitive abilities - that there is a general trend toward the formation of a more global knowledge production and consumption dynamics exploiting the integration of social systems in concert with technological and biological systems. (57)

A visualization of the growth of the weighted co-author network, and the results obtained from the statistical analysis indicate a drift toward a more cooperative, global collaboration process as the main drive in the production of scientific knowledge. (57) The analysis of this particular dataset confirms our hypothesis that a global brain comprised of larger highly successful co-authorship teams is developing. (58)

Bosse, Tibor, et al. Collective Representational Content for Shared Extended Mind. Cognitive Systems Research. 7/2-3, 2006. From a special issue on Cognition, Joint Action and Collective Intentionality, a quantitative study of a common group intelligence arising from animal species or human-environment interactions. See also herein Deborah Tollefsen’s From Extended Mind to Collective Mind.

Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. In another example along with Ulieru, Doursat, Banzhaf, Floreano, et al, of the 21st century shift to a natural creativity a Queensland University of Technology computer scientist sets aside old designed “production” methods in favor of a novel “produsage” by virtue of participatory, worldwide, networked “information communities.” Thus rather than hierarchical control from above, contributions and solutions are allowed to prosper via egalitarian, probabilistic, shared intelligences. A copious work that touches on many realms from business, education and media to a global democratic renaissance.

Carpenter, Gail, et al. Self-organizing Information Fusion and Hierarchical Knowledge Discovery. Neural Networks. 18/3, 2005. A report from Boston University’s Center for Adaptive Systems on work to develop neural nets that can learn how to learn and recognize salient patterns in large databases.

The ARTMAP information fusion system uses distributed code representations that exploit the neural network’s capacity for one-to-many learning in order to produce self-organizing expert systems that discover hierarchical knowledge structures. (287)

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