II. A Learning Planet: An Integral Knowledge by Humankind

C. Mindkind: A Global Knowledge

desJardins, Marie, et al. Introduction to the Special Issue on AI and Networks. AI Magazine. Fall, 2008. Studies over the past years with regard to scale-free, small-world linkages prompt reconsiderations of many AI realms such as Natural Language Processing, Peer-to-Peer Systems, Cooperative Multiagent Systems, the Blogosphere, along with similar gene regulatory, metabolic, neural, and social geometries. Typical papers are The Age of Analogy Networks by Claudio Mattiussi, et al, and The Fractal Nature of the Semantic Web by Tim Berners-Lee and Lalana Kagal (view herein). What one may surmise is a consistent recurrence, a universality, of the same patterns and processes across a wide phenomenal range, which is essentially cerebral and linguistic in kind.

Di Marzo Serugendo, Giovanna, et al, eds. Engineering Self-Organizing Systems. Berlin: Springer, 2004. As global networks become highly complex and interconnected, computer scientists are looking to emulate how nature creates and maintains a dynamic, emergent vitality and order. In this regard, the biological realm is seen as most characterized by multi-agent systems which locally interact to spontaneously form a modular organization.

Donald, Merlin. Origins of the Modern Mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. A much cited exposition of the evolution of cognition and culture from primates to a cultural homo sapiens. Four stages are chronicled: Episodic: great ape experience as a series of events with predictable responses. Mimetic: prelinguistic, intentional representations so as to generate creative responses. Mythic: the use of language to begin to model and change the world. Theoretic: the growing creation of “extrasomatic,” symbolic representations in the collective social mind.

What the Greeks created was much more than a symbolic invention, like the alphabet, or a specific external memory medium, such as improved paper or printing. They founded the process of externally encoded cognitive exchange and discovery. (342-43) One thing is certain; if we compare the complex representational architecture of the modern mind with that of the ape, we must conclude that the Darwinian universe is too small to contain humanity. We are a different order. (382)

Doyle, John, et al. Robustness and the Internet. Jen, Erica, ed. Robust Design: A Repertoire of Biological, Ecological, and Engineering Case Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. On the presence and enhancement of self-similar complex, informational structures and processes.

The new theoretical insights gained about the Internet also combine with our understanding of its origins and evolution to provide a rich source of ideas about complex systems in general. Most surprisingly, our deepening understanding from genomics and molecular biology has revealed that at the network and protocol level, cells and organisms are strikingly similar to technological networks, despite having completely different material substrates, evolution, and development/construction. (273-274)

Dyson, George. Darwin Among the Machines. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997. The evolution of intelligence is now manifest on a global plane through electronic communications, networked computers and technological culture. Dyson contends that if symbiosis is added to Darwinian theory then an emergent vector of mind is traced.

The introduction of distributed object-oriented programming languages (metalanguages, such as Java, that allow symbiogenesis to transcend the proprietary divisions between lower-level languages in use by different hosts) is enabling numerical symbioorganisms to roam, reproduce, and execute freely across the computational universe as a whole. (123)

Ebersbach, Anja, et al. Wiki: Web Collaboration. Berlin: Springer, 2008. An accessible entry to the nature and implementation in its many aspects of creative, user-interaction web sites and their informative content.

What we mean by the “wiki effect” is primarily the self-organization processes that can be observed in well-known and successful wiki projects. It is astounding that people will independently research, organize, write, and publish to provide the general public with a free service. (23)

Featherstone, Mike and Couze Venn. Problematizing Global Knowledge and the New Encyclopedia Project. Theory, Culture & Society. 23/2-3, 2006. An introduction to a large double issue on how to proceed with an egalitarian, on-going worldwide archive that transcends prior linear, western-centric biases. Surely a well intended, international effort with many papers collected under three headings: Metaconcepts (e.g. classification, language, complexity, body, aesthetics, network, life, culture), Metanarratives (civilization, religion, modernity, etc.), and Sites and Institutions (university, library, public sphere). But this postmodern endeavor seems to confound itself by a tacit denial that an encompassing, discoverable reality exists. Rather a rhizomatic, nomadic, (some of its dense jargon) or anarchic plurality is preferred. With a typical contributor ratio of men to women about 5 to 1, the very mental capacity to perceive common patterns and processes, to connect dots, seems is absent. An implicit consequence of a worldwide humankind coming to its own knowledge, the premise of this website, is not then accessible.

Individual papers such Generative Classifications by Luciana Parisi which cites a self-organizing, autopoietic evolution due to genomes as complex adaptive systems have merit, but the collection as a major academic statement is compromised from the outset. An update journal issue (24/7-8, 2007) continues the talk, but gets more tangled by constant reference to who said what when, rather than in quest of a real reality.

Fitch, W. Tecumseh. Evolving a Global Brain. www.edge.org/q2010/q10_3.html#fitch. A response by the University of Vienna cognitive biologist to the 2010 Edge Question: How has the Internet Changed the Way You Think?. But out of 172 respondents, 10/1 men to women, surely engaging but all over the place, this reply was the only one to perceive a real cerebral emergence as the next worldwide phase of life’s evolutionary nested ascent from microbes to organisms to societies. Such a noosphere vista, the very thought or larger question, eludes and seems unthinkable.

Since Gutenberg, human society has slowly groped its way towards a new organizational principle. Literacy, mail, telegraphs and democracy were steps along the way to a new organizational metaphor, more like the nervous system than hormones. The Internet completes the process: now arbitrarily far-flung individuals can link, share information, and base their decisions upon this new shared source of meaning. Like individual neurons in our neocortex, each human can potentially influence and be influenced, rapidly, by information from anyone, anywhere. We, the metaphoric neurons of the global brain, are on the brink of a wholly new system of societal organization, one spanning the globe with the metaphoric axons of the Internet linking us together.

Foster, Ian. The Grid: A New Infrastructure for 21st Century Science. Physics Today. February, 2002. On projections for an intensifying national and worldwide computer network that can instantly send trillions of bytes anywhere so that researchers can collaborate on large projects such as climate analysis or brain infrastructure.

For example, an astrophysicist who has performed a large, multiterabyte simulation might want colleagues around the world to visualize the results in the same way and at the same time so that the group can discuss the results in real time. (44)

Gershenson, Carlos, et al. Time-Scales, Meaning, and Availability of Information in a Global Brain. www.arXiv.org/ftp/cs/papers/0305/0305012.pdf.. A July 2003 posting comments on the many similarities between how a human brain and the World Wide Web process information and perceive patterns. As an example, the authors look at the transmission of scientific articles and conference proceedings on the Internet by way of the Semantic Web ontology.

Goldin, Dina, et al, eds. Interactive Computation. Berlin: Springer, 2006. Heretofore computer science has necessarily focused on its agent phase. With this in place, the equal presence of fluid interconnections in-between deserves its share of recognition. In 18 chapters, an international panel reviews all aspects of this paradigm advance. For a typical high quality paper see Andrea Omicini, et al noted below.

Interaction is an emerging paradigm of models of computation that reflects the shift in technology from mainframes to networks of intelligent agents, from number-crunching to embedded systems to graphical user interfaces, and from procedure-oriented to object-based distributed systems. (viii) The interaction paradigm provides a new conceptualization of computational phenomena that emphasizes interaction rather than algorithms. Concurrent, distributed, reactive, embedded, component-oriented, agent-oriented and service oriented systems all exploit interaction as a fundamental paradigm. (viii)

Goldstone, Robert, et al. Emergent Processes in Group Behavior. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 17/1, 2008. Researchers at Indiana University use agent-based computational models to quantify how human communities of many kinds might take on a life and cognitive capacity of their own.

Just as neurons interconnect in networks that create structured thoughts beyond the ken of any individual neuron, so people spontaneously organize themselves into groups to create emergent organizations that no individual may intend, comprehend, or even perceive. (10) Social phenomena such as the spread of gossip, the World-Wide Web, the popularity of cultural icons, legal systems, and scientific establishments all take on a life of their owe, complete with their own self-organized divisions of labor and specialization, feedback loops, growth, and adaptations. (10)

Previous   1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10  Next  [More Pages]