II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Actual Factual Knowledge

C. Earthica Learns as a Symbiotic Person/Planet, Collaborative Ecosmo Sapience

Engel, David and Thomas Malone. Integrated Information as a Metric for Group Interaction: Analyzing Human and Computer Groups Using a Technique Developed to Measure Consciousness. arXiv:1702.02462. We note this paper by MIT Center for Collective Intelligence scholars for its contribution, and as example of how this complex theory originally conceived by Giulio Tononi (search) to explain cerebral function is gaining broad popular acceptance. In this novel extension the model is found to similarly apply to task-oriented teams and larger Internet assemblies. By this result, an implication is that they indeed may possess an overall neural, cognitive faculty with a modicum of consciousness.

Researchers in many disciplines have previously used a variety of mathematical techniques for analyzing group interactions. Here we use a new metric for this purpose, called 'integrated information' or 'phi.' Phi was originally developed by neuroscientists as a measure of consciousness in brains, but it captures, in a single mathematical quantity, two properties that are important in many other kinds of groups as well: differentiated information and integration. Together, these results suggest that integrated information can be a useful way of characterizing a certain kind of interactional complexity that, at least sometimes, predicts group performance. In this sense, phi can be viewed as a potential metric of effective group collaboration. Since the metric was originally developed as a measure of consciousness, the results also raise intriguing questions about the conditions under which it might be useful to regard groups as having a kind of consciousness. (Abstract excerpts)

What is integrated information? The metric we use is called “integrated information” or “phi” and was proposed by (Giulio) Tononi and colleagues. There have been several successively refined versions of phi, but all the versions aim to quantify the integrated information in a system. Loosely speaking, this means the amount of information generated by the system as a whole that is more than just the sum of its parts. The phi metric does this by splitting the system into subsystems and then calculating how much information can be explained by looking at the system as a whole but not by looking at the subsystems separately. (2)

Falk, Emily and Danielle Bassett. Brain and Social Networks: Fundamental Building Blocks of Human Experience. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 21/9, 2017. University of Pennsylvania neuroscientists offer a nascent sense that personal brains and social discourse have much in common as both domains become quantified by the same interactive, multiplex webby essence. As a result, they could be studied in parallel as a common individual and public cogitation. With technical finesse, the integrative essay identifies deep similarities. But for this website, a further perception is that beyond brains and cultures, genomic, ecosystem, cosmic, quantomic, linguistic, and other areas are now found to have a cerebral-like character. See also Brain Connectivity Dynamics during Social Interaction Reflect Social Network Structure by Ralf Schmalzle, et al including Falk and Bassett in Proceedings of the national Academy of Sciences (114/5153, 2017).

How do brains shape social networks, and how do social ties shape the brain? Social networks are complex webs by which ideas spread among people. Brains comprise webs by which information is processed and transmitted among neural units. While brain activity and structure offer biological mechanisms for human behaviors, social networks offer external inducers or modulators of those behaviors. Together, these two axes represent fundamental contributors to human experience. Integrating foundational knowledge from social and developmental psychology and sociology on how individuals function within dyads, groups, and societies with recent advances in network neuroscience can offer new insights into both domains. Here, we use the example of how ideas and behaviors spread to illustrate the potential of multilayer network models. (Abstract)

Network neuroscience provides new ways of understanding the complex patterns of structural connections and functional coupling the human brain. Social network analysis offers systematic ways to quantify social environments and interactions among persons and people groups. Recent trends bring these two types of analysis together to understand how brain networks and social networks impact to influence the behaviors of individuals, groups and populations. (Trends)

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.

Finidori, Helene. Collective Intelligence is a Commons that Needs Protection and a Dedicated Language. Spanda Journal. Volume V/Issue 2, 2014. The author is an independent consultant for innovation, IT, education and social development who teaches Management and Leadership of Change at Staffordshire University. Similar to Pierre Levy in this issue she broaches how a planetary “pattern language,” akin to Christopher Alexander’s, could be evoked so as to heal, unite, salve and save a global body, brain, and spirit. We quote a paragraph where she cites the phenomenon of Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere, as a contrast to Francis Heylighen’s negation (search).

Collective intelligence arises, as a network of trust, from the empathy, the love and the compassion we have for each other. It is found in the synergy of cognition and skills that enables us to achieve great things when we collaborate. We see it at work in the responsibility we grant ourselves for stewarding the Earth that we have in custody. It manifests when the individual powers that enable us to take our destinies in our own hands aggregate into a collective power to change the world and take part in our shared evolution. We describe it as the global brain formed by the distributed intelligence of our interconnected human minds operating as a neural network, embodied in (Teilhard) Chardin’s noosphere. We see it also as the symbiotic connection between all living beings epitomized in Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, each of us united through the wider system of things, with a role to play in the greater order of the universe. (78)

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.

Floridi, Luciano. The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. The Oxford University philosopher and ethicist of information broadly conceived in natural and global domains, traces and tracks a “hyperhistory” by the relative presence of this knowledge-gaining, social mores quality. After sun-Earth, evolutionary, and psychological changes, today the novel world web as a sensory noosphere draws everyone altogether into interactive communication and shared cultures. With a notice of J. A. Wheeler’s bit to it model, in a realistic way life’s universe to human arc can be seen to take on an informational essence and vectorial course.

Who are we, and how do we relate to each other? Luciano Floridi, one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy, argues that developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are changing the answer to these human questions. As the boundaries between life online and offline break down, and we become seamlessly connected to each other and surrounded by smart, responsive objects, we are all becoming integrated into an "infosphere". Following those led by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud, this metaphysical shift represents nothing less than a fourth revolution. In every department of life, ICTs have become environmental forces which are creating and transforming our realities. Floridi argues that we must expand our ecological and ethical approach to cover both natural and man-made realities. (Publisher)

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)

Frank, Adam, et al. Intelligence as a Planetary Scale Process. International Journal of Astrobiology. February, 2022. Veteran astroscholars AF, University of Rochester, David Grinspoon, Planetary Science Institute and Sara Walker, Arizona State University provide a latest admission, description and affirmation of the actual evolutionary emergence a worldwise cerebral faculty. As the quotes engage, a mindfulness to allow something going on by own agencies, such an appearance and fulfillment now becomes readily evident.

Intelligence is usually seen as an individual faculty. Here, we broaden the idea of intelligence as a collective group property and extend it to the planetary scale. We consider the ways in which a relative technological intelligence may represent a kind of planetary scale transition, much as the origin of life itself may be seen as a global phenomenon. Our approach follows many researchers today that the correct scale to understand key aspects of life and its evolution is planetary, beyond traditional focus on individual species. (Abstract excerpt)

A transition to planetary intelligence, as we described here, would achieve its operative presence at a global scale. Such a mindful world could steer the future evolution of Earth, acting in concert with and guided by a deep understanding of natural systems. If other civilizations that may exist in the universe undergo such a transition, we would expect to see a marked difference in their biosignatures due to a sustainable, global intelligence versus those that not been able to attain this emergent phase. (27)

We propose five properties required for a world to show knowing cognitive activity operating across planetary scales. These are: (1) emergence ,(2) dynamics of networks, (3) networks of semantic information, (4) appearance of complex adaptive systems, (5) autopioesis. Different degrees of these properties appear as a world evolves from abiotic (geosphere) to biotic (biosphere) to technologic (technosphere). (33)

Funabashi, Masatoshi. Citizen Science and Topology of Mind: Complexity, Computation and Criticality in Data-Driven Exploration of Open Complex Systems. Entropy. 19/4, 2017. A Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Tokyo researcher considers how a self-organizing component could enhance the effectiveness of such public collaborative endeavors. In regard, since these universal propensities are well established as cerebral qualities, ought we realize, and avail the nascent formation of a communal and global noosphere beginning to learn on her/his own?

Recently emerging data-driven citizen sciences need to harness an increasing amount of massive data with varying quality. This paper develops essential theoretical frameworks, example models, and a general definition of complexity measure, and examines its computational complexity for an interactive data-driven citizen science within the context of guided self-organization. We first define a conceptual model that incorporates the quality of observation in terms of accuracy and reproducibility, ranging between subjectivity, inter-subjectivity, and objectivity. Next, we examine the database’s algebraic and topological structure in relation to informational complexity measures, and evaluate its computational complexities with respect to an exhaustive optimization. Conjectures of criticality are obtained on the self-organizing processes of observation and dynamical model development. Example analysis is demonstrated with the use of biodiversity assessment database—the process that inevitably involves human subjectivity for management within open complex systems. (Abstract)

Gabella, Maxime. Structures of Knowledge from Wikipedia Networks. arXiv:1708.05368. An Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, physicist scholar achieves an ingenious discernment of inherent, spontaneous self-organized patterns of knowledge content in this vast public encyclopedia. A graphic display (Figure 1), although not cited, looks very much like a brain-based neural net with hubs, synapses and axons. The grand finding, as the quotes convey, is that the same complementarity of Eastern and Western civilizational cognitive attributes reported in that section herein seem to be manifestly evident via his webwork analysis of relative subject area interests and emphasis.

Knowledge is useless without structure. While the classification of knowledge has been an enduring philosophical enterprise, it recently found applications in computer science, notably for artificial intelligence. The availability of large databases allowed for complex ontologies to be built automatically, for example by extracting structured content from Wikipedia. However, this approach is subject to manual categorization decisions made by online editors. Here we show that an implicit classification system emerges spontaneously on Wikipedia. We study the network of first links between articles, and find that it centers on a core cycle involving concepts of fundamental classifying importance. We argue that this structure is rooted in cultural history. For European languages, articles like Philosophy and Science are central, whereas Human and Earth dominate for East Asian languages. This reflects the differences between ancient Greek thought and Chinese tradition. Our results reveal the powerful influence of culture on the intrinsic architecture of complex data sets. (Abstract)

Our results suggest an influence of cultural history on the classification network of first links on Wikipedia. As mentioned above, the attractive power of the Philosophy article may be understood as a manifestation of the origin of Western civilization in the thought of ancient Greek philosophers. In the same vein, a natural explanation for the high betweenness centrality of Science would be the growing influence of scientific thinking since the Enlightenment in Europe. If this is correct, we should observe significant differences for Wikipedias in languages that are not embedded in Western cultural history. For Japanese we find {Human, Interpersonal relationship}, and for Chinese a triplet of cycles of similar importance: {Matter, Invariant mass, Energy, Physics}, {Solar system, Sun}, and {China, Chinese history}. This is consistent with the focus on human relationship in Confucianism, one of the main influences on the East Asian cultural sphere, and with Chinese concepts such as the Qi (vital energy or material force) and the three harmonies (heaven, earth, man). Moreover, the articles Human and Earth appear among those with the highest betweenness centrality, while scientific concepts are strikingly absent. The very presence of three giant components for Chinese illustrates the Eastern holistic approach, in contrast to the Western analytic approach. (4, excerpts)

Gebhart, Thomas and Russell Funk. The Emergence of Higher-Order Structure in Scientific and Technological Knowledge Networks. arXiv:2009.13620. University of Minnesota computer and management scientists contribute a significant entry for several reasons. They proceed to view scientific endeavors as another dynamic complex process which presently seems to be going on by itself. As a result, this worldwise enterprise can be found to exhibit similar node/edge multi-network features as everywhere else. By virtue of algebraic topology and persistent homology methods, an affinity with our own cerebral cognition becomes evident. A graphic page shows an array of common modular, community, paths, central, density, assortativity and other features. We note that these mathematic approaches are used in other areas from galactic clusters (Pranov) to neuroscience (Bassett). Thus the paper provides strong support to date for the premise of this website that an emergent sapiensphere is indeed coming to her/his own revolutionary knowledge.

The growth of science and technology is a recombinative process, wherein new discoveries and inventions are built from prior knowledge. Network science has recently emerged as a framework for measuring the structure and dynamics of knowledge. While helpful, existing approaches struggle to capture the global properties of the underlying networks. Here we use algebraic topology methods to characterize the higher-order structure of knowledge networks across scale. We observe rapid growth in the higher-order structure in many scientific and technological fields, which is not observable by traditional networks. Up to a point, increases in higher-order structure are associated with better outcomes, as measured by the novelty and impact of papers and patents. (Abstract excerpt)

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.

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