II. A Learning Planet: An Integral Knowledge by Humankind

C. Mindkind: A Global Knowledge

Lyon, Pamela. The Biogenic Approach to Cognition. Cognitive Processing. 7/1, 2006. A paper in two special issues, previously 6/4, 2005, on Memory and the Extended Mind. Lyon here proposes an evolutionary basis that proceeds as a self-organizing, autopoietic complex system with a propensity for increased free agency in an environment. These dual issues also explore the views of Richard Menary, John Sutton, Robert A. Wilson, and others on a situated and embodied social cognition. Google for more info. Cognitive scientists and philosophers seem to be closing in on the realization that human communities indeed have minds of their own, and if so appreciated can be a source of salutary knowledge.

Marien, Michael. The Future of Human Benefit Knowledge: Notes on a World Brain for the 21st Century. Futures. 39/8, 2007. The long time editor of the Future Survey newsletter explores how this concept advocated in the 1930s by H. G. Wells could become a salutary reality in years to come.

Mayer-Kress, Gottfried and Cathleen Barczys. The Global Brain as an Emergent Structure from the Worldwide Computing Network. The Information Society. 11/1, 1995. From a neuroscience perspective, the Internet seems to be developing and functioning in a similar way as a human brain.

Invoking concepts from complexity science, we can view both the cognitive abilities of the biological brain and the problem-solving capabilities of the Global Brain as other levels of capability that emerge from this interconnected system once the system is sufficiently complex. (5) Thus a Global Brain derived from a complex information and communications network composed of people and computers would be able to sense and respond to the world outside that network as well as within that network, with abilities that would be analogous to our brain’s abilities but would surpass them. (8)

Michael, Miller. Cloud Computing. Indianapolis: Que Publishing, 2009. The welling revolution from desktop PCs to remote, vastly interlinked servers, as if “clouds” of computation, will much change the industry. Here is one of the first volumes to explain the lineaments and values of such peer-to-peer, distributed collaboration.

Muller-Scholer, Christian, et al, eds. Organic and Pervasive Computing. Berlin: Springer, 2004. Computer and system architectures are becoming more animate in kind as they gain capabilities of adaptive self-organization.

Organic Computing investigates the design and implementation of self-managing systems that are self-configuring, self-optimizing, self-healing, self-protecting, context aware and anticipatory. (Preface)

Newman, Harvey, et al. The UltraLight Project: The Network as an Integrated and Managed Resource for Data-Intensive Science. Computing in Science & Engineering. November/December, 2005. The international high energy physics community is assembling an interlinked computational grid to process and share vast data-sets. With similar efforts in other fields such as climate change, as Albert Barabasi, et al (Science. 308/639, 2005) observes, the human scientific endeavor is in transition to a new global cerebral capacity.

Nolte, David. Mind at Light Speed: A New Kind of Intelligence. New York: The Free Press, 2001. The future of optical, holographic, and quantum computers and worldwide communications presage an immense expansion of human mental abilities.

Norgaard, Richard. Learning and Knowing Collectively. Ecological Economics. 49/2, 2004. The University of California at Berkeley environmental scientist contends that the challenges of climate change and many other systemic issues will require a new mode of intentional, global collaboration. The many disciplines and specialties can no longer proceed in isolation. A common epistemology, language and modeling approach is vital so we can learn and act in effective concert.

Norgaard, Richard and Paul Baer. Collectively Seeing Complex Systems. BioScience. 55/11, 2005. In a Special Roundtable Section with several articles, Norgaard, University of California at Berkeley and Baer, Stanford University, continue their efforts, in collaboration with the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment team, to implement a new understanding of science and policy as a collective seeing, learning, and judgment, a distributed cognitive network. Only by such interdisciplinary social syntheses can ultra complex issues as global climate change be addressed.

Olsen, Gary, et al, eds. Scientific Collaboration on the Internet. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. Originating from the University of Michigan School of Information, an attempt to scope out science’s shift to such a worldwide electronic domain. Six parts with many authors discuss the 'collaboratory' vision, distributed research, the physical sciences, biological and health sciences, earth and environmental studies, and the developing world.

Omicini, Andrea, et al. The Multidisciplinary Patterns of Interaction from Sciences to Computer Science. Goldin, Dina, et al, eds. Interactive Computation. Berlin: Springer, 2006. A universality of self-organization via entities-in-relation gives rise to a globally informative intelligence. Such a dynamically creative nature can then provide an exemplary model for computational systems.

No matter if we are modeling the behavior of a human organization, the life of an intricate ecosystem, or the dynamics of a huge market-place, we can expect to find some repeated patterns, some shared schemes, some common laws that makes all these systems look similar when observed at the right level of abstraction. (396)

Park, Kihong and Walter Willinger, eds. The Internet as a Large-Scale Complex System. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Proceedings of a Santa Fe Institute conference to consider the network properties and power-law connectivities of the worldwide web. For example, Computation in the Wild by Stephanie Forrest, et al and The Bio-Networking Architecture by Tatsuya Suda, et al describe natural evolutionary qualities which can serve as a model for its increasing viability and cognition. However Willinger, et al have recently taken issue with the wholesale apply of 'scale-free networks' in this regard in "Mathematics and the Internet" in Notices of the AMS for May 2009.

The Bio-Networking Architecture is inspired by the observation that the biological world has already developed mechanisms that are necessary for future network requirements such as self-organization, scalability, adaptation and evolution, security, and survivability. (Suda 251)

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