II. A Learning Planet: An Integral Knowledge by Humankind

C. Mindkind: A Global Knowledge

Rowlands, Mark. The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010. Available in October, we quote from the publisher’s website.

There is a new way of thinking about the mind that does not locate mental processes exclusively "in the head." Some think that this expanded conception of the mind will be the basis of a new science of the mind. Traditional attempts to study the mind are based on the idea that mental processes—perceiving, remembering, thinking, reasoning—exist in brains; they are often described as "software" realized by the "hardware" of the brain. The new way of thinking about the mind has emerged from the confluence of various disciplines in cognitive science ranging from perceptual and developmental psychology to robotics. It emphasizes the ways in which mental processes are embodied (partly made up of extra-neural bodily structures and processes), embedded (designed to function in tandem with the environment), enacted (constituted in part by action), and extended (located in the environment). Mark Rowlands is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami.

Scharl, Arno and Klaus Tochtermann, eds. The Geospatial Web. London: Springer, 2007. With a subtitle of How Geobrowsers, Social Software and the Web 2.0 are Shaping the Network Society, the book tours in 25 chapters a virtual worldwide cerebral faculty in formation. Search and access paths include NASA World Wind, Google Earth, and Microsoft Live Local 3D. In our midst, largely unbeknownst, at our service, is a fertile, burgeoning source of knowledge, discovery, visualization, and community. If we might all freely and fully implement, which web practitioners are striving toward, here may lie common solutions for a fragmenting world.

Shiffrin, Richard and Katy Borner. Mapping Knowledge Domains. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 101/Supplement 1, 2004. An introduction to 19 articles from a NAS colloquium on this subject: “…charting, mining, analyzing, sorting, enabling navigation of, and displaying knowledge,” as it appears in Internet postings and journal publications. These documents are seen by contributors to take the self-similar form of scale-free complex networks.

Sperber, Dan, ed. Metarepresentations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Conference papers which explore the concept and presence of a collectively embodied and stored knowledge.

Spivack, Nova. Collective Intelligence 2.0. www.mindingtheplanet.net. A January 24, 2006 posting which proposes the development of a Internet Metaweb as a globally self-aware, cerebral faculty capable of learning in its own. Its common, palliative knowledge would then be immediately accessible to everyone. By intentionally facilitating such a cognitive capability, even a memory and thought process, an interactive, salutary realm of a “collective mind of humanity” emerges over the earth. The website is also a portal for the visionary concepts of Nova Spivack, a web innovator, entrepreneur and grandson of Peter Drucker.

By providing such a service, we can catalyze the evolution of higher-order meta-intelligence on this plane – the next step in human evolution. Creating this system is a grand cultural project of profound social value to all people on earth, now and in the future. (3)

Stahl, Gerry. Group Cognition: Computer Support for Building Collaborative Knowledge. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. A study of technological and social/educational configurations to facilitate group meaning making, and at the same time are valuable to the individual learner.

Steels, Luc. Semiotic Dynamics for Embodied Agents. IEEE Intelligent Systems. 21/3, 2006. An article in a special issue on The Future of Artificial Intelligence provides another intimation of the nascent presence of a collaborative mindkind beginning to learn and know on its own.

Semiotic dynamics builds on many earlier AI developments: the insights into and technologies of semantic networks and knowledge representation from the seventies, the ideas on embodiment and grounding from the late eighties, and the perspective of multiagent systems from the nineties. But all these aspects join together into a new vision on intelligence, with the social, collective dynamics of representation-making at the center. These new AI developments don’t stand in isolation; they resonate with recent developments in linguistics, psychology, and the mathematical study of networks. (32)

Sterelny, Kim. The Evolution and Evolvability of Culture. Mind & Language. 21/2, 2006. The Australian philosopher considers how “cognitive capital” and collective group knowledge came to socially evolve, coalesce, and function.

Stone, Diane. Introduction: Global Knowledge and Advocacy Networks. Global Networks. 2/1, 2002. A special issue of this new journal which addresses the worldwide profusion of knowledge and how it might be of social utility.

Sulis, William. Collective Intelligence. Guastello, Stephen, et al, eds. Chaos and Complexity in Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. The McMaster University psychologist and director of its Collective Intelligence Laboratory provides a tutorial for nascent local and global cognition.

Collective intelligence refers to collective behavior that is stably correlated with ecologically meaningful features of the environment, salient for the survival of the collective, adaptive to changes in the environment, and that transcends the capability of any single member of the collective. (41) It is quite fair to say that the fields of complex adaptive systems (CAS), and to a lesser extent nonlinear dynamical systems (NDS) and the field of collective intelligence have coevolved in a mutually beneficial manner. (65)

Sunstein, Cass. Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. A law professor at the University of Chicago delves into how communications forums such as prediction markets, wiki groups, open source software, and the blogosphere, can deliberately achieve a form of collective learning and decision, or in some cases may not.

Sutton, John. Introduction: Memory, Embodied Cognition, and the Extended Mind. Philosophical Psychology. 19/3, 2006. To a special issue on the various dimensions of socially situated cerebral activity.

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