II. A Learning Planet: An Integral Knowledge by Humankind

C. Mindkind: A Global Knowledge

Johnson, Norman, et al. Symbiotic Intelligence: Self-Organizing Knowledge on Distributed Networks Driven by Human Interaction. Christoph Adami, ed. Artificial Life VI. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. How a symbiosis of people and the Internet can enhance the societal ability for collective problem solving.

Furthermore, in the same manner as to how society self-organized to solve problems of survival, the same processes on the Net will result in the self-organization of knowledge. Because self-organizing knowledge arises from diverse contributions and can encompass knowledge greater than the contribution of any individual, there is the arguable potential of creating knowledge that will contribute to solutions that are not understandable within our current processes. (405)

Jolly, Alison. Lucy’s Legacy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. An anthropologist finds in the evolution of sex and intelligence more evidence for cooperation than competition. A consistent, widespread pattern appears of diverse, recurrent, nested systems from the bacterial realm to cells, organisms, and human groupings.

We seem now to be in the midst of a fifth major transition: the joining of human societies into a global network. (28) We have traced the emergence of biological organization from primeval chemistry to bacterium to cell to body. At each stage a larger, coherent whole emerged from the linkage of independent parts. Each is a holon, simultaneously one and many, a single organism and yet a community of individuals. (408)

Kelly, Kevin. Scan This Book. New York Times Magazine. May 14, 2006. A movement to digitally record the world’s non-fiction and fiction print materials, and to make them freely available to everyone, anywhere, is fast becoming a reality. In a few years a person will be able to access on a PC or even PDA the entirety of human knowledge. By so doing, the universal library of Alexandria is now realized on a global scale. With a total search capability, any work, whether classic, textbook, manual, or novella, will be instantly available. And it is our website premise that such a grand repository, due to an emergent worldwide humanity, might indeed be achieving its own integral discovery

Kelly, Kevin. The Planetary Computer. Wired. July, 2008. As the worldwide electronic web intensifies, the magazine’s cofounder and complexity sage advances one of the most complete comparisons of such a noosphere with the dynamic anatomy and physiology of a human brain. Similar trillions of neural synapses and terabytes of script and image processing serve to outline the advent of a true global cerebration. But the step to imagine that a novel planetary person could attain her/his own salutary discovery and knowledge still eludes.

Kelly, Kevin. We Are The Web. Wired. August, 2005. Writer, editor and web pioneer Kelly surveys the logarithmic worldwide interconnection of personal computers since the 1980’s and 1990’s and looks ahead to its completion circa 2015. By this scope, its developing structure of fractal, neural-like networks appears as a planetary encephalization similar to a human brain. Metaphors do mix and it is also called a global Machine. But I add such an emergent noosphere is not yet appreciated for a potential to achieve common understanding and knowledge, accessible to everyone.

Over time, a Wikipedia article becomes totally underlined in blue as ideas are cross-referenced. That massive cross-referencing is how brains think and remember. It is how neural nets answer questions. It is how our global skin of neurons will adapt autonomously and acquire a higher level of knowledge. (133)

Laxton, Rita. The World Wide Web as Neural Net. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. 64/1, 2000. There are deep parallels between the Internet and a brain as they both cogitate by a redundant pattern matching of perception and experience.

The primary hypothesis is that it can be shown that the World Wide Web’s birth, growth and knowledge acquisition patterns are remarkably similar to those of the human brain. (55)

Leuf, Bo. The Semantic Web. New York: Wiley, 2006. In order to make the Internet more user useful, searchable, interactive, self organizing, correcting and responsive, its textual basis needs to be reconceived. First proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, the present work provides a good introduction to this on-going project.

Perhaps we are also approaching something more than just a vast globally-accessible knowledge repository. There is the potential to develop devices, services, and software agents that we might converse with as they were fully sentient and intelligent beings themselves. (314)

Levy, Neil. Neuroethics: Challenges for the 21st Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. A Research Fellow at both the University of Melbourne and Oxford explores the ramifications of advances in neuroscience which augur for increasing abilities to influences mental states and capacities. The book is noted here for a lengthy chapter on the “extended mind hypothesis” whereof aware intellects reach pervasively beyond the body into social settings.

Levy, Pierre. Collective Intelligence. New York: Plenum, 1997. From France comes another report on the rudiments of an embryonic planetary mind arising from integrated human cognition.

Lightman, Alex and William Rojas. Brave New Unwired World: The Digital Big Bang and the Infinite Internet. New York: Wiley, 2002. The book contains both technical details and visionary perspectives on a wireless network now enveloping the globe. When it is accomplished, anyone, anywhere should have free, instant access to the totality of human knowledge.

We are not an accident of the Universe. Our intelligence is not random. We are generators of information content in the universe. (142)

Liu, Jiming and K. C. Tsui. Toward Nature-Inspired Computing. Communications of the ACM. 49/10, 2006. Prof. Liu, a leading innovator of an autonomous, self-organizing, worldwide web intelligence, is presently Director of the School of Computer Science at the University of Windsor in Canada. Check his website via Google for an extensive list of publications. Here he is joined by an IT manager from the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp. The broad intent of this project is to carry forth natural developmental and cognitive viability to enhance the Internet. These include autonomous agents, distributed decision-making, emergent complexity, adaptive responses, all of which are able to organize themselves.

Llinas, Rodolfo. I of the Vortex: From Neuron to Self. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. A veteran neuroscientist explains how the brain achieves “perceptual binding” by a simultaneity of communicative modules. These theories lead to speculations about whether the Internet is becoming a rudimentary species mind.

One of the few ways in which local order can increase is through the generation of such things as a nervous system that employs modularization of function. If modularization is indeed a universal to combat disorder, such a geometric and architectural solution may have happened at other levels as well. (258)

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