II. A Learning Planet: An Integral Knowledge by Humankind

C. Mindkind: A Global Knowledge

Pentland, Alex. On the Collective Nature of Human Intelligence. Adaptive Behavior. 15/2, 2007. An MIT Media Lab professor contends that individuals do not exist in lone isolation, but are enmeshed and engaged in myriad fluid social networks. He goes on to detail novel technologies that could enhance such distributed cognition.

Pfeifer, Rolf and John Bongard. How the Body Shapes the Way We Think. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007. Actually a significant contribution to the field of artificial intelligence with regard to the design of robots based on evolutionary principles of self-organization, variation and selection. Sure, the brain can influence and control its soma but this vehicle will in turn in momentary, ontological and phylogenetic time frames constrain and enable reflective and anticipatory thought. As such complex systems are allowed to evolve, a responsive order can be seen to emerge. As agents thusly interact they serve to generate an emergent modular-based collective intelligence from cells to societies.

Pink, Daniel. The Book Stops Here. Wired. March, 2005. With an engagingly edgy style, the story of Wikipedia, the free self-organizing, repairing, policing, online encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to or edit. Which surely looks like a global cerebral learning enterprise. How can we then imagine all these efforts achieving their own composite, salutary knowledge?

Provencal, Yvon. The Mind of Society. New York: Gordon & Breach, 1998. An innovative study based on the work of Marvin Minsky and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin of human society as a superorganism with its own physiology, cerebration and self-consciousness. In this view, a close agreement is recorded in Piaget’s nomenclature between a child’s cognitive experience and the education of humanity.

The conceptual correspondence between cerebral mechanisms of perception and the collective mechanisms of scientific discovery can be seen in striking detail. (40) The analogical method used here requires that we consider global human society, which is undergoing rapid change, as a self-organizing structure similar to a young child’s brain. (49)

Rasmussen, Steen, et al. Collective Intelligence of the Artificial Life Community. Artificial Life. 9/2, 2003. A report on an exercise at their August 2000 conference to collectively access the status and future of this endeavor.

Human society evolved from small, separated hunting tribes to a huge, globally integrated society….When the full diversity of the society’s intellectual dynamics is combined with the Internet’s ability to quickly and accurately link information, large groups can quickly and efficiently pool their resources and coherently analyze complexes that were very difficult to cope with in other ways. (209)

Ridley, Matt. The Rational Optimist. New York: HarperCollins, 2010. From a 21st century vantage, a British science writer looks back over the millennia to discern a broad, pervasive improvement in the human condition. While admitting its tragic trajectory, this real advance is in need of exposition today to counter an media apocalyptic gloom in the media. Fraught as we are with weapons, stupidity, and greed, by many measures, a consummate horizon ought to be appreciated that bodes for a earthwide eden, if we so choose. Ridley goes on to attribute this progression and vista to a ramifying, collective brain that overcomes individual whims in favor of social well being. (A similar view would be Nonzero by Robert Wright).

Rodriguez, Marko. The Hyper-Cortex of Human Collective-Intelligence Systems. www.arxiv.org/abs/cs.CY/0506024. Online June 2005. A computer scientist with the Center for Evolution, Complexity, and Cognition, Vrije Universiteit, Brussels (ECCO Working Paper 06-2005) finds scientific collaboration networks and digital libraries to take on the lineaments of a true worldwide brain. The next step, I would add, (see also Barabasi, et al this section) is to perceive a new phase of earth itself learning, as an emergent complex adaptive system, as it begins to achieve its own knowledge.

A hyper-cortically supported scientific community is a self-organizing entity that constantly derives solutions to its problems by matching its present state with its past realizations via the use of its artificial neural-network. (15)

Rosnay, Joel de. The Symbiotic Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000. This synoptic work which is cited in several places finds a close comparison of brain anatomy and function with the worldwide computer network.

In this way, amazing maps of Internet topology are created. They look like dendritic maps of neurons in the brain. Dendrites are complex ramifications of the “wires” that interconnect neurons. They are involved with neural stimuli and response. Such a dendritic visualization of the Internet sheds light on its macrobiological nature and the evolutionary process leading to a brainlike global infrastructure. (60) Our collective responsibility now is to guide it to a societal symbiosis that respects, life, humanity, and human freedom. (61)

Rosvall, Martin and Carl Bergstrom. Maps of Random Walks on Complex Networks Reveal Community Structure. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 105/1118, 2008. University of Washington system biologists distill common features of scale-free nets, now found everywhere, from their topical subject of interlinked physics, biology, and social science journal citations. A prime exemplar, one might add, of such phenomena is often the dynamic neural connections of the human brain. So an implied extension might appreciate the correspondence of their illustrated webs of cross-interactions with similar cerebral maps of thinking, remembering, and learning neuron, synapse, and axon, as a real world-wide cognitive capacity.

Roush, Wade. Second Earth. Technology Review. July/August, 2007. A grand virtual marriage of the Second Life site and Google Earth prowess portends a global imaginative noosphere that everyone anywhere can immerse in, surf through, and contribute creatively to. Like, you know, a personal planet really coming to think and learn on its own, and maybe to itself if we might so avail.

Roush, Wade. The Infinite Library. Technology Review. May, 2005. A report on the Google sponsored and funded project to digitize the world’s collection of print books, starting with multi-million volume repositories such as Stanford and Oxford University libraries and the New York Public Library. When fully implemented, this entire global heritage is to be available free to every person anywhere.

Roush, Wade. The Internet Reborn. Technology Review. October, 2003. Its next iteration under banners such as PlanetLab and Smart Planet could be seen as the effective emergence of a global brain.

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