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A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe
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II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Actual Factual Knowledge

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

Wikipedia. www.wikipedia.org. Surely mention ought be made of this ubiquitous, free, volunteer, diverse and complete, encyclopedic online resource. Founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales, it is the first hit for almost any query, a grain of salt is needed, but one can learn about most any and everything. One of the best takes on this efflorescence is Chapter 14 “After the Flood” in James Gleick’s 2011 The Information. But the chapter’s subtitle is “The Great Album of Babel.” Although several million items are posted, more than Britannica, a peek at an “A-Z Index” screen offers over a thousand alphabetic options, the main organizing or sorting device. As a January 30, 2011 article in the New York Times “Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia’s Contributor List” notes, the majority of contributors and editors are men, its competitive mode is said to be off-putting for women. Britannica is no better, for Propaedia lists every topical section with some 30 to 40 men writers to one woman.

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Jimmy Wales

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)

Abraham, Ajith, et al, eds. Computational Social Network Analysis. Dordrecht: Springer, 2010. With an international array of authors, a notable chapter is “Toward Self-Organizing Search Systems” by a team from France and the Czech Republic about wide-ranging efforts to build such capacities into ubiquitous computer systems. As human beings merge into multi-faceted business, scientific, media, and all kinds of linkages, if such geometries and cogitations might be compared, e.g., with Murray Shanahan’s 2010 exposition of global workspace brain dynamics, we might approach the presence of a true worldwide cerebral faculty.

Aerts, Diederik, et al. Towards a Quantum World Wide Web. Theoretical Computer Science. 752/116, 2018. In a special Quantum Structures in Computer Science issue, an eight person team with postings in Belgium, the Philippines, UK, and Chile including Sandro Sozzo draw upon many previous essays (search here and arXiv) to now advance a comparative parallel between quantum phenomena and the global Internet. If to gloss the whole rich paper, correlations are made between particle/wave dualities and equivalent website/informative content pairings. By this view in the later 2010s, across this widest span, a clear similarity between a physical substrate and our worldwise sapiensphere becomes evident. A natural affinity and complementarity is thus apparent whence our human acumen, as it rises to a cerebral collaborative intelligence, gains a quantum essence, while in turn cosmic physics appears brain-like with a textual character. Along with current reports of a universally recurrent complex network system, a further notice of common cross-identities between quantum, genome, brains, literature, a global noosphere are also revealed. Some other entries are Generalized Relations in Linguistics & Cognition by Bob Coecke, et al, and A Quantum-Inspired Multimodal Sentiment Analysis by Yazhou Zhang, et al.

We elaborate a quantum model for corpora of written documents, like the pages forming the World Wide Web. To that end, we are guided by how physicists constructed quantum theory for microscopic entities, which unlike classical objects cannot be fully represented in our spatial theater. We suggest that a similar construction needs to be carried out by linguists and computational scientists to capture the full meaning content of collections of documental entities. More precisely, we show how to associate a quantum-like ‘entity of meaning’ to a ‘language entity formed by printed documents’. We emphasize that a consistent Quantum Web or QWeb needs to account for the observed correlations between words appearing in printed documents. In that respect, we show that both ‘context and interference (quantum) effects’ are required to explain the probabilities calculated by counting the relative number of documents containing certain words and co-occurrences of words. (Abstract excerpt)

Our goal is to describe the Web as a ‘conceptual entity’, which can be in different states and submitted to different contexts. We first have to make clear the distinction between two kinds of Web: the standard (spatial) Web, made of actual webpages, formed by specific collections of letters and words, and the ‘meaning entity’ that we can associate with it, formed by concepts existing in different combinations. This meaning/conceptual entity is intimately related to the standard Web. Consider the similar situation in physics, for example an electron. Before the advent of quantum theory, it was believed that an electron was just a corpuscle, but on closer inspection it was realized that although an electron can leave corpuscular traces, its behavior was not reducible to that of a spatio-temporal (classical) particle, suggesting a wave-like nature. But even a description in terms of a ‘wave-particle duality’ appeared to be insufficient to capture the full reality of an electron, when combining with other electrons, as genuine multi-dimensional (non-spatial) ‘wave functions’ were required to fully describe this situation. So, already in physics we are confronted with the problem of distinguishing an entity like an electron, whose reality is not reducible to spatio-temporal phenomena, like waves, particles and fields, and the many ways an electron can concretely manifest, within our spatio-temporal theater, by leaving well-defined and readable traces in our measuring instruments. (118, excerpt)

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.

Arellanes, David. Composition Machines: Programming Self-Organizing Software Models. arXiv:2108.05402. Akin to Okyay Kaynak, et al herein, a Lancaster University, UK computer theorist considers how to achieve a computational spontaneity which could operate and advance on its intrinsic own.

We are entering a new era in which software systems are increasingly complex and extensive. But they are becoming more difficult to develop and empower. To address this, self-organizing software suites open a promising direction since they allow the bottom-up emergence of complex computational structures from simple rules. In this paper, we propose a composition method which facilitates their presence and operation. Our approach enables the occasion of multiple programs based on well-known rules from the realm of Boolean logic and elementary cellular automata. (Abstract)

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.

Bak-Coleman, Joseph, et al. Stewardship of Global Collective Behavior.. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 118/27, 2021. Eighteen international authorities including Mirta Galesic, Iain Cousin, Carl Bergstrom and Jonathan Donges call attention to the 2020s intense worldwide infosphere which so influences what people may know and think. But at present there is little or no managerial guidance as to relative truth or consequences. An approach is scoped out so to respectfully factor in, and better coordinate. On the TV last night, news items raced from a Vancouver heat dome, Mozambique drought, Chinese communism, Belarus protests, and so on, which brings much despair and dread. This resource site tries to document and foster to such a common cooperation, purpose and ecovillage to ecoworld response.

Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the actions and properties of groups emerge from the way individuals generate and share information. In humans, information flows were initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social networks now transfer high-fidelity information over vast distances. The rise of digital social media has accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood consequences. This gap in our knowledge presents a challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science. (Abstract)

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