Adam’s Peace

I have heard a lot of talk from various blogs about the Internet being a precursor to a fully conscious collective mind. That is quite a radical claim, since the Internet itself is not able to think. I’d like to explore what consciousness really is, and whether the Internet is starting to become conscious, or if it is even possible.

Doing a quick search through different dictionaries, one of the most common definition for conscious is that a person is aware, especially of their own thoughts.

Unfortunately, consciousness can not be proven without any doubt in any creature, except for in yourself. As I’m writing this, I am fully aware of my thoughts and body, but you, as the reader, do not have access to those thoughts directly. You can infer, however, that since I am human like you, that there is a very good chance that I am also conscious like you.

After observing my cats, I would argue that consciousness isn’t a strictly human trait. My cats are aware of their wants and needs, and act within those desires. There is a great deal of planning that goes into them playing with simple objects, such as a discarded bag tie, which leads me to believe that cats are aware of their own thoughts.

One trick which my cats have learned is to take a bag tie to the center of a tiled floor, then to throw it into the air where they can happily chase after it. They chose the tile because otherwise, if they played with the bag tie on carpet, it would get caught in the pile, and it wouldn’t be as much of a chase. This decision shows me that not only do the cats have fun, but they are aware of their own thoughts enough to know what they enjoy the most, and plan for it. Cats are conscious beings. I know that this isn’t empirical, repeatable behavior, since different cats learn different methods of play, but it supports the hypothesis based on my own observations.

Based on my observations, I would say that consciousness is the state of being aware of yourself and making decisions based on that awareness. The definitions says nothing about being human, and I may even argue that being alive isn’t a strict requirement either.

The question remains, though. Is the Internet capable of becoming conscious? Is it already conscious?

Looking at the physical structure of the Internet, we find a large number of nodes and connections, with the nodes being either a client or a server, and the connections being routers and the wires between them. If we were to take an analogy from biology, we would choose the nervous system, with nerves that gather data (receptors), process data (neurons, such as in brain and spine), and react to data (muscle activators), as well as nerves that specialize in simply transmitting data.

Can a nervous system, even if it could live outside of a body, be conscious by itself? It is possible, but we would have no way to measure its level of consciousness. Even though consciousness might matter a great deal to that nervous system subjectively, objectively, it would be a mass of cells that serve no purpose other than to process and store (but not share) information. It would be a one-way system, and be utterly useless.

It is the ability to make decisions while having a sense of self which makes a creature conscious… From studying the way that minds work, and making an analogy to computers, I would say that the human mind is a vastly wide multi-threaded processor. That is, where a computer can only deal with one problem at a time, yet it deals with the problem faster than humans can notice, the human mind can deal with many different problems at the same time, albeit at a much slower rate than computers. When I look out of my window, I am processing millions, perhaps billions of pieces of information each second. The thousands of rods and cones within my eyes each send a specific message down through the optic nerves. The millions of nerves in my skin are constantly telling me the temperature, whether I am touching anything or not, and whether I am in pain or not. My ears are constantly working… I can never shut them off, and they are, perhaps, part of the most sophisticated sense that humans have. Taste and smell are closely related, and the millions of receptors in each are also constantly giving me feedback. I also have nerves that sample the nutrients and poisons in my blood, telling me when to eat and giving me specific cravings if any essential nutrient is missing. All of this information is being processed by the brain and by the mini-brains in our spine that handle our reflexes at a constant rate. We are not always conscious of it, though. In fact, research shows that a typical person can only be conscious of eight things at a time, though people usually only pay attention to three or four things.

So, we have billions of pieces of information that is processed each second, yet we’re only aware of four things at a time. Our consciousness, then, clearly isn’t the ability to gather information. I believe that consciousness forms as feedback from our environment. The nerves that do not affect how the body moves get ignored, for the most part, so become part of the subconscious, or the filter for information coming in. The nerves that affect how the body moves, though, get special attention, and form the consciousness. The feedback loop grows stronger over time, and the consciousness gets more defined, until it is self-aware, able to plan, and able to learn individually.

I said that the Internet is a nervous system… but what it is a nervous system for? Where is its body? The roads, rails, and shipping lanes are the blood vessels, with the trucks, planes, trains, and ships being the red blood cells for this body. The land fills are the large intestines and bladder, the factories are the small intestines, and the strip mines, farms, and other sources of raw material are the stomach and mouth. Super markets form the mitochondria, which, in cells, are the immediate storage for energy. The police and military form our immune system, and the firefighters, paramedics, doctors, and entire healthcare system regenerate damaged tissue.

All of humanity is the body and the mind. The nervous system is all of the different methods of communication between people, and it isn’t limited to just the Internet.

If all of humanity was a conscious whole, then consciousness would reside within the world leaders… The world leaders include the politicians and the business owners, as well as religious leaders. If you can tell other people what to do, and they’ll do it, then you are a part of the consciousness of humanity.

The problem is, though, that humanity is not conscious. The world leaders do not think of themselves as a cohesive whole, with one I being greater than them individually. Maybe, somewhere down the line, the world leaders will realize that we are one body, but I’m not going to hold my breath. The way to become part of humanity’s decision-making subconsciousness, though, is to be noticed by those world leaders and convince them of your way.

The potential for super-consciousness is there… but it isn’t in the Internet alone. Also, as individuals within the system, we probably won’t notice a change, and we most certainly won’t feel any different. From the human perspective, the only way that we would be able to tell if humanity had awoken is if, instead of fighting ourselves, we begin to strengthen ourselves… All of ourselves.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2007 at 2:33 pm and is filed under Responsibility, Inner Peace, Consciousness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.