Great work – as usual.

I totally agree with the first 1/2 of your post – events are evolving faster and faster on the real-time web, and as this continues new processes possessing collective intelligence will emerge.

But I can't quite buy the part where you got misty about qualia and the uniqueness of human consciousness. I see consciousness as the ability to capture, manipulate and respond to an internal model of external reality. I'm conscious of you to the extent I have a analogical model of Nova Spivack (however caricatured and inaccurate) inside my brain somewhere.

This perspective on consciousness naturally leads to treating consciousness as a continuum, and imbuing other living and non-living entities with various degrees of consciousness. My dog has a degree of consciousness, because it can represent certain aspects of its environment (e.g. the fact that I'm the one that feeds him) and react to them in a way that furthers its goals & needs.

In this model, even thermostats possess a rudimentary form of consciousness, since they internalize a model of external temperature, and will respond (e.g. trip a relay to turn on the furnace or A/C) when external conditions change enough to warrant a response.

There is nothing magical about this model of consciousness, and there isn't a need to invoke any spooky quantum effects to explain it.

As a corollary, machines will come to possess greater levels of consciousness as we (and eventually, they themselves) build in them more rich, accurate & responsive models of the environment.

At least I hope so, since I'm not as optimistic about the ability of our limited human consciousness to cope with the increasing torrent of information coming at us via the global network. As you alluded to in your great singularity talk, in 20 or 30 years the number of machines with human-level intelligence (or at least human level complexity) will come to vastly outnumber the number of actual humans in the system. When this happens, humans will play an ever decreasing role in the functioning of the Global Mind, whether those machines acheive true intelligence or consciousness themselves, as I've outlined here http://bit.ly/8Ss8OM and here http://bit.ly/73COBi.

In summary, you and I seem to agree that the Global Brain will inevitably emerge. Where we appear to disagree is on the role that humans will ultimately play in its formation and operation.

From my perspective human intelligence is a stepping stone, destined to (at best) serve as a component of a global intelligence, much like a neuron in the brain – will a role to play as a unique individual, but a very small role, and with relatively little awareness of what's going at the macro scale.

–Dean

@deanpomerleau
http://www.thoughtfulcog.com

Great work – as usual.

I totally agree with the first 1/2 of your post – events are evolving faster and faster on the real-time web, and as this continues new processes possessing collective intelligence will emerge.

But I can't quite buy the part where you got misty about qualia and the uniqueness of human consciousness. I see consciousness as the ability to create, update and respond to an internal model of external reality. I'm conscious of you to the extent I have a analogical model of Nova Spivack (however caricatured and inaccurate) inside my brain somewhere. For anyone interested in this idea, I recommend Hofstrader's book “I am a Strange Loop”.

This perspective on consciousness naturally leads to treating consciousness as a continuum, and imbuing other living and non-living entities with various degrees of consciousness. My dog has a degree of consciousness, because it can represent certain aspects of its environment (e.g. the fact that I'm the one that feeds him) and react to them in a way that furthers his goals & needs.

In this model, even a thermostat possesses a rudimentary form of consciousness, since it internalizes a model of external temperature, and will respond (e.g. trip a relay to turn on the furnace or A/C) when external conditions change enough to warrant a response.

There is nothing magical about this model of consciousness, and there isn't a need to invoke any spooky quantum effects to explain it.

As a corollary, machines will come to possess greater levels of consciousness as we (and eventually, they themselves) build into them richer, more accurate & responsive models of the environment.

At least I hope so, since I'm not as optimistic about the ability of our limited human consciousness to cope with the increasing torrent of information coming at us via the global network (or for filters to make it sufficiently manageable). As you alluded to in your great singularity talk, in 20 or 30 years the number of machines with human-level intelligence (or at least human level complexity) will come to vastly outnumber the number of actual humans in the system. When this happens, humans will play an ever decreasing role in the functioning of the Global Mind, whether those machines acheive true intelligence or consciousness themselves, as I've outlined here http://bit.ly/8Ss8OM and here http://bit.ly/73COBi.

In summary, you and I seem to agree that the Global Brain will inevitably emerge. Where we appear to disagree is on the role that humans will ultimately play in its formation and operation.

From my perspective human intelligence is a stepping stone, destined to (at best) serve as a component of a global intelligence, much like a neuron in the brain – with a role to play as a unique individual, but a very small role, and with relatively little awareness of what's going at the macro scale.

–Dean

@deanpomerleau
http://www.thoughtfulcog.com

I agree with your perspective about the importance of humans for the emergence of global mind like phenomena. And speed indeed seems to be an incredibly important component of this burgeoning self-organization.

My only feedback would be that you don't seem to emphasize the significance of structure for real-time data quite enough. Without standardization, the speed at which memes spread won't really matter, as the cloud of nonsense will be so great that making any meaning out of it will be impossible. Already, if I go to twitter and search for a meme, the results of what I get are kind of meaningless, just a list of random ass people, saying mostly stupid, grammatically incorrect things. Now if there was some structure to it, real-time becomes really cool. While I could care less what Bob from Kansas has to say about anything, I do care what “certain kinds of people” in AGGREGATE with “social influence” have to say about something. It's only that information in aggregate that I can really process at such short increments anyways. If what you are talking about it true, people would literally be monitoring real-time data all day long and not actually DOING anything. It is only with structured real-time data that you get legitimate global FEEDBACK instead of global NOISE, which is where the possibility of a legitimately self-organizing system comes alive.

Eventually, though, in order for a real mind-like phenomena to occur, all of this real-time data will need to be translated into the deeper language of the mind -NARRATIVE. If you get the chance, pick up The Literary Mind. Great read. The way I imagine it, this global aggregate memetic data will start to form patterns, or global sub-personalities, if you will. The masses of people we now organize into nations and ethnicities and genders will start to get organized by their memetic profile. These collective memetic clusters will then, from a certain perspective, begin to have a conversation, just like one's sub-personalities are in constant dialog, giving rise to the experience of coherent, unified Self. The experience of consciousness is aptly called the “theatre of the mind”, as it is a dance or play of interacting forces. And as you have coherently pointed to the “holarchical” nature of the cosmos, it's very unlikely that individual human nodes will leap directly to a full unified organism. There will very likely be several very significant levels of organization under that. While google's mission to organize the world's information has been the ethos of the last decade, I feel the next decade with demand that we focus more on organizing the world's people and culture.

Anyways, great work. I really feel that the next decade will be the domain of people thinking at this much higher level – the problems and complexities simply will be too much for people stuck within a narrower paradigm.

Co-evolutionarily,
Lion Isis

I agree with your perspective about the importance of humans for the emergence of global mind like phenomena. And speed indeed seems to be an incredibly important component of this burgeoning self-organization.

My only feedback would be that you don't seem to emphasize the significance of structure for real-time data quite enough. Without standardization, the speed at which memes spread won't really matter, as the cloud of nonsense will be so great that making any meaning out of it will be impossible. Already, if I go to twitter and search for a meme, the results of what I get are kind of meaningless, just a list of random ass people, saying mostly stupid, grammatically incorrect things. Now if there was some structure to it, real-time becomes really cool. While I could care less what Bob from Kansas has to say about anything, I do care what “certain kinds of people” in AGGREGATE with “social influence” have to say about something. It's only that information in aggregate that I can really process at such short increments anyways. If what you are talking about it true, people would literally be monitoring real-time data all day long and not actually DOING anything. It is only with structured real-time data that you get legitimate global FEEDBACK instead of global NOISE, which is where the possibility of a legitimately self-organizing system comes alive.

Eventually, though, in order for a real mind-like phenomena to occur, all of this real-time data will need to be translated into the deeper language of the mind -NARRATIVE. If you get the chance, pick up The Literary Mind. Great read. The way I imagine it, this global aggregate memetic data will start to form patterns, or global sub-personalities, if you will. The masses of people we now organize into nations and ethnicities and genders will start to get organized by their memetic profile. These collective memetic clusters will then, from a certain perspective, begin to have a conversation, just like one's sub-personalities are in constant dialog, giving rise to the experience of coherent, unified Self. The experience of consciousness is aptly called the “theatre of the mind”, as it is a dance or play of interacting forces. And as you have coherently pointed to the “holarchical” nature of the cosmos, it's very unlikely that individual human nodes will leap directly to a full unified organism. There will very likely be several very significant levels of organization under that. While google's mission to organize the world's information has been the ethos of the last decade, I feel the next decade with demand that we focus more on organizing the world's people and culture.

Anyways, great work. I really feel that the next decade will be the domain of people thinking at this much higher level – the problems and complexities simply will be too much for people stuck within a narrower paradigm.

Co-evolutionarily,
Lion Isis

Good article, thanks!

Personally, I think that any set of interacting minds has an emergent mind of its own, and so entities like corporations and countries are ALREADY conscious.

It's not obvious to us that they're conscious because they exist at a different level than we do. In other words, humans recognize other humans as conscious because we interact directly with each other. Similarly, countries recognize each other as conscious because they interact with each other.

By coincidence, I blogged about this today:

http://grahamglass.blogs.com/main/2010/01/what-…

Cheers,
Graham

Good article, thanks!

Personally, I think that any set of interacting minds has an emergent mind of its own, and so entities like corporations and countries are ALREADY conscious.

It's not obvious to us that they're conscious because they exist at a different level than we do. In other words, humans recognize other humans as conscious because we interact directly with each other. Similarly, countries recognize each other as conscious because they interact with each other.

By coincidence, I blogged about this today:

http://grahamglass.blogs.com/main/2010/01/what-…

Cheers,
Graham