II. A Learning Planet: An Integral Knowledge by Humankind

C. Mindkind: A Global Knowledge

Gong, Weibo. Will the Internet Soon Outsmart Humans?. http://www.ecs.umass.edu/index.pl?iid=2911. A Distinguished Faculty Lecture by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst computer scientist on February 23, 2009 that I attended. The website is a news blurb about it, the speaker can be reached at gong@ecs.umass.edu. As this section has alluded for some time, it is becoming increasingly evident (see e.g. Ning Zhong, et al) that the worldwide electronic web is indeed formally analogous to a brain. In his talk, Prof. Gong presented one of the most detailed affirmations to date by showing how the same complex, dense neural nets of nodes and edges, which form by self-organized, power law criticalities, characterize both our human and global cerebral faculty. And as he noted, everywhere else in nature and society. But a step not yet taken, which many are circling around, is to imagine that this planetary noosphere is then attaining its own salutary knowledge.

Gray, Jim and Alex Szalay. The World-Wide Telescope. Communications of the ACM. 45/11, 2002. An international network of observatories is seen as a coming paradigm for integrative research.

Mining vast databases of astronomical data, this new online way to see the global structure of the universe promises to be not only a wonderful virtual telescope but an archetype for the evolution of computational science. (51)

Grieser, Gunter, et al, eds. Discovery Science. Berlin: Springer, 2003. Papers from the 6th International Conference held at Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan, October 2003, as an example of worldwide efforts to develop techniques such as Algorithmic Learning Theory for extracting patterns and knowledge from scientific databases and other large arrays such as census data.

Griffiths, Thomas, et al. Google and the Mind. Psychological Science. 18/12, 2007. Cognitive scientists find a core parallel between how a human brain and the global computer webwork can instantly locate stored information. Since both employ a neural, scale-invariant form and dynamics, basically a ‘PageRank’ word frequency algorithm, a deep similarity can be identified. Web architects are thus increasingly drawing on neuroscience for better designs and process to an extent that a world brain appears as a true, salutary reality.

Analyses of semantic networks estimated from human behavior reveal that these networks have properties similar to those of the World Wide Web, such as a “scale-free” distribution for the number of nodes to which a node is connected. If one takes such a network to be the representation of the knowledge on which retrieval processes operate, human memory and Internet search engines address the same computational problem: identifying those items that are relevant to a query from a large network of interconnected pieces of information. Consequently, it seems possible that they solve this problem similarly. (1069-1070)

Hamilton, Craig. Come Together: The Mystery of Collective Intelligence. What Is Enlightenment?. May-July, 2004. In this journal of “redefining spirituality for an evolving world,” a long cover article explores the realization that collaborative social groupings can achieve effective learning and knowledge on their own.

Call it collective consciousness, team synergy, co-intelligence, or group mind – a growing number of people are discovering through their own experience that wholes are indeed far more that the sum of their parts. (58)

Havel, Ivan. The Dawn of Cyber-culture. pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Conf/GB-0-abs.html. In a paper presented at the first Global Brain Workshop in Brussels, July 2001, a mathematician at Charles University, Prague and brother of Vaclav Havel perceives the rudimentary outlines of a planetary knowledge.

Recently, some theorists have focused on the remarkable idea that all of human society can be regarded as a kind of many-celled super-organism, the ‘cells’ of which are not cells but rather us, human beings. The internet….might be a kind of embryonic phase of the nervous system of the super-organism, its ‘global brain,’ which might facilitate the linking up of all the partial intelligences of the users into a single global intelligence. Perhaps it could then develop further on its own to ideas and a consciousness of a higher order. (30, Abstracts)

Hayles, N. Katherine. Unfinished Work. Theory, Culture & Society. 23/7-8, 2006. A commentary on Donna Haraway’s 1985 cyborg manifesto which contends this scenario has been today superseded by an intensifying net of worldwide interconnected discourse, here deemed a cerebral cognisphere.

Heylighen, Francis. Collective Intelligence and its Implementation on the Web. Computational and Mathematical Theory of Organizations. 5/3, 1999. The Belgian systems scientist defines collective cognition as the enchanced ability of a group to solve problems than its individual members can do alone. The Internet is well suited for this purpose and methods such as a collaborative mental map are proposed. Heylighen is a founder of the extensive Principia Cybernetica website. His own page http://pcp.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html is posted there and contains many papers on emergent complexity and a global brain.

Heylighen, Francis and John Bollen. The World Wide Web as a Super-Brain. Robert Trappl, ed. Cybernetics and Systems ’96.. Singapore: World Scientific, 1996. If society is viewed as a superorganism, then communication networks play the role of its brain. The World Wide Web functions as a “giant associative network” that can learn and think by the strengthening of frequently used links.

Huang, Chu-Ren and Winfried Lenders, eds. Computational Linguistics and Beyond. Taipei: Academia Sinica, 2004. The common structural and communicative properties of language from traditional Chinese to intelligent agents, vocabularies, and ontologies of the worldwide Semantic web.

Humphrys, Mark and Ciaran O’Leary. Constructing Complex Minds Through Multiple Authors. Bridget Hallam, et al, eds. From Animals to Animats 7.. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. In the proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, a paper which postulates how a “World-Wide-Mind” could arise from multiple interlinked persons and servers.

We have a new vision of a mind: no single author could write a high-level artificial mind, but perhaps the entire scientific community could. (11)

Ijspeert, Auke Jan, et al, eds. Biologically Inspired Approaches to Advanced Information Technology. Berlin: Springer, 2004. An intense effort is underway to revise and recreate the worldwide computer web into a more accessible, organic and cognitively self-assembling and self-healing manner. Researchers are thus increasingly drawn to dynamic models from organisms and their evolution, as this volume illustrates. A typical paper is Dynamic Self-Assembly and Computation: From Biological to Information Systems by Ann Bouchard and Gordon Osbourn, who base their work on stochastic protein networks.

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