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

Giannotti, Fosca, et al. A Planetary Nervous System for Social Mining and Collective Awareness. European Physical Journal Special Topics. 214/1, 2012. In a FuturICT contribution that opens with “Our Visionary Approach,” seven scientists including Alex Pentland and Dirk Helbing, recognize that a 21st century unified spherical civilization, which exhibits such systems interconnections could take on the guise of a global CNS. A typical section is “Human-Level Understanding of Text at Web Scale” as a natural “Never-Ending Language-Learning” facility. See also Participatory Sensing, Computational Crowdsourcing, and so on, hopefully in a reciprocal democratic milieu. In any event, a comprehensive effort with over 100 references.

We present a research roadmap of a Planetary Nervous System (PNS), capable of sensing and mining the digital breadcrumbs of human activities and unveiling the knowledge hidden in the big data for addressing the big questions about social complexity. We envision the PNS as a globally distributed, self-organizing, techno-social system for answering analytical questions about the status of world-wide society, based on three pillars: social sensing, social mining and the idea of trust networks and privacy-aware social mining. The PNS we foresee is the key tool for individual and collective awareness for the knowledge society. (Abstract excerpt) We envision the PNS as a goal-oriented, globally distributed, self-organizing, techno-social system for answering analytical questions about the status of world-wide society, based on three pillars: social sensing, social mining and the idea of trust networks and privacy-aware social mining, that together form the social knowledge discovery process. (52)

Goldin, Dina, et al, eds. Interactive Computation. Berlin: Springer, 2006. Heretofore computer science has necessarily focused on its agent phase. With this in place, the equal presence of fluid interconnections in-between deserves its share of recognition. In 18 chapters, an international panel reviews all aspects of this paradigm advance. For a typical high quality paper see Andrea Omicini, et al noted below.

Interaction is an emerging paradigm of models of computation that reflects the shift in technology from mainframes to networks of intelligent agents, from number-crunching to embedded systems to graphical user interfaces, and from procedure-oriented to object-based distributed systems. (viii) The interaction paradigm provides a new conceptualization of computational phenomena that emphasizes interaction rather than algorithms. Concurrent, distributed, reactive, embedded, component-oriented, agent-oriented and service oriented systems all exploit interaction as a fundamental paradigm. (viii)

Goldstone, Robert, et al. Emergent Processes in Group Behavior. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 17/1, 2008. Researchers at Indiana University use agent-based computational models to quantify how human communities of many kinds might take on a life and cognitive capacity of their own.

Just as neurons interconnect in networks that create structured thoughts beyond the ken of any individual neuron, so people spontaneously organize themselves into groups to create emergent organizations that no individual may intend, comprehend, or even perceive. (10) Social phenomena such as the spread of gossip, the World-Wide Web, the popularity of cultural icons, legal systems, and scientific establishments all take on a life of their owe, complete with their own self-organized divisions of labor and specialization, feedback loops, growth, and adaptations. (10)

Gong, Weibo. Will the Internet Soon Outsmart Humans?. http://www.ecs.umass.edu/index.pl?iid=2911. A Distinguished Faculty Lecture by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst computer scientist on February 23, 2009 that I attended. The website is a news blurb about it, the speaker can be reached at gong@ecs.umass.edu. As this section has alluded for some time, it is becoming increasingly evident (see e.g. Ning Zhong, et al) that the worldwide electronic web is indeed formally analogous to a brain. In his talk, Prof. Gong presented one of the most detailed affirmations to date by showing how the same complex, dense neural nets of nodes and edges, which form by self-organized, power law criticalities, characterize both our human and global cerebral faculty. And as he noted, everywhere else in nature and society. But a step not yet taken, which many are circling around, is to imagine that this planetary noosphere is then attaining its own salutary knowledge.

Graham, Daniel. An Internet in Your Head: A New Paradigm for How the Brain Works. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. Our guiding premise since the early 2000s for this annotated anthology resource website has been that the newly enveloping worldwide Internet webwork, as it proceeds to form a global noosphere by way myriad human contributions, could well be seen to take on a major transition life and mind of its own. Into the 21st century, a further proposal is that this collective faculty is then proceeding to learn and gain knowledge by itself. However until this new work by a Hobart and William Smith Colleges neuroscientist, the plausible extrapolation was rarely considered. In regard, the author posts a strong and thorough comparison and continuity between our brains and this cerebral sensorium is at last fully explained. A veteran theorist, Dan Graham (search) was an editor for an issue of Network Neuroscience (4/4, 2021) and advised for this project by authorities such as Michael Gazzaniga, Gyorgy Buzsaki and Olaf Sporns.

As the quotes cite, it is argued that an older computer metaphor with byte-like nodes needs to be expanded by more emphasis on the many connective links in between. This webwork perspective can then provide a better, functional brain model along with being readily being applicable to the worldwide facility. This 2020s appreciation can thus give precedence to communicative routings of informative content, which is really what the brain is about. By this projected continuity, Graham is able to allow that this internet phase can rightly be seen as learning and coming to its own knowledge. In respect, an Earthuman collaborative neuroscience can begin to perceive and enhance the novel occasion of a palliative dispensation over this critically stressed bioworld.

An update synopsis, Nine Insights from Internet Engineering that Help Us Understand Brain Network Communication, can be found in Frontiers in Computer Science for January 2023.

In neuroscience, the metaphor of the brain as a computer has defined the field for much of the modern era. But as neuroscientists evaluate their assumptions about how brains work, we need a new metaphor to help us ask better questions. The computational neuroscientist Daniel Graham contends that the brain is not like a single computer ― it is a communication system like the internet graced with flexibility and reliability. The brain and the internet route signals which require protocols to direct messages. But we do not yet understand how the brain manages the dynamic flow of information across its entire network. The internet metaphor can help neuroscience unravel the brain’s connectivity by focusing on shared design principles and communication strategies. Highlighting similarities between brain connectivity and internet architecture can open new avenues of research and reveal the brain’s deepest secrets. (Publisher excerpt)

This chapter (5) introduces the workings of the internet and of communication systems more generally. The aim here is to describe the “physics” of the network – the overarching principles that form its conceptual superstructure. As we will see, it’s the internet’s general principles that make the system so powerful, and they are also relevant to the brain. (120)

I believe both approaches – rethinking existing knowledge and discovering new phenomena – are needed. There is more than enough evidence already that is consistent with a brain that performs sophisticated routing of messages and that resembles the internet. (237-238) If the brain is like the internet in important ways, is the internet then like the brain and possibly capable of consciousness? (258)

If the internet is conscious, it may be driven to creativity, much as we are. For humans, consciousness is the vehicle by which we generate new structures and ideas. Creativity relates to how we build up our understanding of the external world. From basic sensory processes upward, the world shapes our experience in fundamental and far-reaching ways. (266) The internet is also creative, and in a similar manner. It integrates and manages new components, along with the information those components generate and transmit. (267)

The internet’s ability to learn requires the existence of efficient real-time communication among millions of nodes, not just computations. This ability is supercharged by its capacity for graceful, creative and interoperable growth. Internet use continues to grow in large part because it learns so effectively and can integrate new forms of information across a rich variety of realms of knowledge. By learning and acting in this way, the internet resembles an adaptive biological entity, one potentially capable of consciousness. (268)

Gray, Jim and Alex Szalay. The World-Wide Telescope. Communications of the ACM. 45/11, 2002. An international network of observatories is seen as a coming paradigm for integrative research.

Mining vast databases of astronomical data, this new online way to see the global structure of the universe promises to be not only a wonderful virtual telescope but an archetype for the evolution of computational science. (51)

Grieser, Gunter, et al, eds. Discovery Science. Berlin: Springer, 2003. Papers from the 6th International Conference held at Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan, October 2003, as an example of worldwide efforts to develop techniques such as Algorithmic Learning Theory for extracting patterns and knowledge from scientific databases and other large arrays such as census data.

Griffiths, Thomas, et al. Google and the Mind. Psychological Science. 18/12, 2007. Cognitive scientists find a core parallel between how a human brain and the global computer webwork can instantly locate stored information. Since both employ a neural, scale-invariant form and dynamics, basically a ‘PageRank’ word frequency algorithm, a deep similarity can be identified. Web architects are thus increasingly drawing on neuroscience for better designs and process to an extent that a world brain appears as a true, salutary reality.

Analyses of semantic networks estimated from human behavior reveal that these networks have properties similar to those of the World Wide Web, such as a “scale-free” distribution for the number of nodes to which a node is connected. If one takes such a network to be the representation of the knowledge on which retrieval processes operate, human memory and Internet search engines address the same computational problem: identifying those items that are relevant to a query from a large network of interconnected pieces of information. Consequently, it seems possible that they solve this problem similarly. (1069-1070)

Hamilton, Craig. Come Together: The Mystery of Collective Intelligence. What Is Enlightenment?. May-July, 2004. In this journal of “redefining spirituality for an evolving world,” a long cover article explores the realization that collaborative social groupings can achieve effective learning and knowledge on their own.

Call it collective consciousness, team synergy, co-intelligence, or group mind – a growing number of people are discovering through their own experience that wholes are indeed far more that the sum of their parts. (58)

Harrison, Fiona and Robert Kennicutt, Editorial Chairs. Pathways to Discovery in Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 2020s. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 2021. We cite this major NAS report and active project as a example of a whole scale, collaborative EarthWise, and EcosmoWise mission to commence a vast celestial survey with a main aim to seek out viable neighbor exoworlds with a degree of resident evolutionary life. The large document is available in stages on its title website.

Havel, Ivan. The Dawn of Cyber-culture. pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Conf/GB-0-abs.html. In a paper presented at the first Global Brain Workshop in Brussels, July 2001, a mathematician at Charles University, Prague and brother of Vaclav Havel perceives the rudimentary outlines of a planetary knowledge.

Recently, some theorists have focused on the remarkable idea that all of human society can be regarded as a kind of many-celled super-organism, the ‘cells’ of which are not cells but rather us, human beings. The internet….might be a kind of embryonic phase of the nervous system of the super-organism, its ‘global brain,’ which might facilitate the linking up of all the partial intelligences of the users into a single global intelligence. Perhaps it could then develop further on its own to ideas and a consciousness of a higher order. (30, Abstracts)

Hayles, N. Katherine. Unfinished Work. Theory, Culture & Society. 23/7-8, 2006. A commentary on Donna Haraway’s 1985 cyborg manifesto which contends this scenario has been today superseded by an intensifying net of worldwide interconnected discourse, here deemed a cerebral cognisphere.

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