of the internet and intelligence

[Cramulus]

It's waking up


Total number of Internet Users, Worldwide: 1,114,274,426 (citation)
   

The human brain contains more than 100 billion neurons, each linked to as many as 10,000 others.


That means the Internet has 1% as many users as a brain has cells. That sounds like quite a difference, but the Internet is still very young. And the Internet doesn,Äôt need as many users as a brain has cells to achieve a similar or higher level of complexity. Users are, after all, much more complex than singular neurons.

Look at it this way:

versus



Each website on the Internet is reflexive of and responsive to the intelligences which view it. If you look at the whole gestalt picture of the Internet, you'd see a pretty fair representation of each culture's values, of the things it feels are important. Each node on the web is connected to a human brain, so the real size of the Internet is really the Internet plus all the people who connect to it. I think that the Internet, at this point, is more complex than the human brain. This is the information age, and the sheer size of it is staggering.

But the Internet is too big to see. Our browser windows are tiny hands, trying to feel the shape of an impossibly large elephant. An elephant whose shape shifts and drifts and changes like cloud forms. In these clouds we can see the shapes of human things, like intelligence. We can talk about the Internet in terms of what it wants, what it likes, how it moves and breathes and undergoes mitosis.

It,Äôs like that Buddhist metaphor for the universe. The universe is a net, and at the lattices there are jewels. In each jewel there is a reflection of the whole net, including the other jewels and the myriad images reflected in them.

If you visualize the shape of this Internet thing, you'd have to view a vast electrical network, with a geography of scintillating light not unlike an CAT scan, lighting up like a sleeping brain.



Looking at these electrical ley lines from space, you'd see them light up with activity as the day goes on. At 9 AM there,Äôs a buzz as everyone checks their e-mail. That buzz flashes by in chunks, timezone by timezone. There,Äôs an iridescent glow of people checking the weather on Friday right before the weekend. This follows complex fractillian patterns linked to the climate and how gorgeous its gonna be this Saturday.

Each one of us makes a wave in the beast in the exact shape of our personality. We,Äôre wandering from the post office to the amazon. We stand at an index of social consensus, then get distracted by overhead faceshots of potential sex partners, socio-sexually indexed by apparent availability. But it's not US that's being graphed onto the Internet, it's our wants. It's our needs. It's a profile of our interests, spending signatures, bandwith composed of bits of ip addresses, numeric fingerprints, leaving smudges, shaping the nearly liquid form of the great glass beast. The great glass capital I. The Internet is the capital city of knowledge. It used to be in books and in conversations and now it,Äôs in data pulsing rhythmic code.

This Internet God is waking up and its starting to understand what it is. The Internet is growing. We,Äôre no longer steering it, it,Äôs too big, now it,Äôs steering us. The Internet,Äôs nodes have the same properties as amino acids. As they stew in the primordial soup, they,Äôre forming something like DNA. They,Äôre forming double-helixes of memetic structure. The memes are self-modifying, self-replicating. They're reproducing according to the principles of natural selection. If you want an example of how evolution works, just look at wikipedia.

But there are people who have leashes on it. Net neutrality. Copyright law. The commercialization of something that was once just a communication medium. The Internet might grow up thinking it,Äôs something like TV. But it's already way bigger than those britches.




In India, they tether baby elephants to trees with thin cords. The baby elephants are too weak to break the restraints. But people use the same cords to tether adult elephants. As the elephant grew up, it never learned that it was strong enough to break those tethers. But ultimately, it,Äôs just a matter of time and will. And that,Äôs two things the internet has on its side.

[LMNO]

I don't see how a series of tubes can achieve thought.

Also, Orson Scott Card did this bit better.

[Cramulus]

in the same way that the matter / electrical activity in your brain is thought - it requires  level of abstraction to think about it as intelligence.

also, I've never read Card. I'm sure some of his books are better than your posts too. Nyahhh! 

[LMNO]

The Truck is not big enough.

[P3nT4gR4m]

I quite like this (tho I don't recall reading Card)

Turns into a meditation on the nature of consciousness.

Is the universe possessed of a level of consciousness of which we are unaware?

Is it only a brain that is capable of manifesting this elusive quality?

Would a giant brain, using planets as neurons be capable of thinking the same thoughts?

Is consciousness even produced by the brain or does some other element have to factor into this equation?

[Messier Undertree]

That was pretty awesome Cram.

I had never really thought of the internet as being a conscious entity before...

I just thought it was for porn.

Also, Orson Scott Card did this bit better.

Linky? o-o

[Chef]

Also, Orson Scott Card did this bit better.

NEVER HAPPENED.

[LMNO]

Speaker for the Dead, and/or Xenocide.

[Chef]

Speaker for the Dead, and/or Xenocide.

WEREN'T THOSE STALLONE FLICKS?

CHEF DOESN'T WATCH STALLONE FLICKS.  EXCEPT ROCKY.

[LMNO]

Oh, you beautiful Tongan beast, you.

[Messier Undertree]

Found one...

http://www.scribd.com/doc/4943/Orson-Scott-Card-Xenocide

[Cain]

I wont be held responsible for what happens when BMW sees this thread.

[Adios]

I wont be held responsible for what happens when BMW sees this thread.

popcorns up.

[hunter s.durden]

He's going to nitpick.

This is cool though, conceptually.

[Cain]

He's going to nitpick.

This is cool though, conceptually.

Sure.  Conceptually.  Remember that X-Files episode that William Gibson did?  Sort of reminds me of that, minus the HIMEOBS style weaponry.

I just know there are several flaws in how consciousness is being explained here.  I can't remember why, but I know which book its in.  Sadly, said book is 500 miles away.