Consciousness is nubbley state. It is something that we can lose and yet when we are awake, it eludes our knowing like a shadow glimpsed in corners of our vision. We have created, through the use of mechanical connections via computers and the internet, a form of conscious that is independent of the individual. It is growing neural links at an astounding rate and it is capturing and conveying input from millions of human nodes. Vast resources in terms of money and intelligence are being diverted to its growth and to borrow a line from the early Frankenstein movie, I believe, "It's alive."
If we can accept the viewpoint that we are no longer in control of it's growth and that no one person, corporation, or government can stop it from expanding, then it begins to assume a separate identity. It is, at present or apparently, not a self conscious being, but it is behaving exactly like any other life form. It replicates itself, it repairs itself, it is moving inexorably to control its environment and it has co-opted human intelligence to evolve into a unified consciousness that exists beyond the individual.
Sometimes when I am working alone at the computer and deeply involved, I have a sense of it. I ask questions, I respond with answers and at times it feels exactly like I am addressing my own memory or rather that I am part of a huge mind. Is it virtual? Is it any less solid than the stitched together reality we have formed in our individual minds?
There is an interesting article titled the Global Brain by Michael Brooks published on line by the New Scientist that explores this subject:
"It is hard to find a researcher who doesn't think that the global brain is a possibility. But do we really want it? The scientists are aiming to create a vast mind that goes beyond anything we could understand or control--opening a door that most of us might prefer to keep firmly shut. Heylighen acknowledges this little image problem. He sees his global brain as the centre of what he calls the global super organism. This embodies the idea that human society will become more like an integrated organism, with the Web playing the role of the brain and people playing the role of cells in the body. "The brain itself does not seem to be very controversial, but the super organism certainly is," Heylighen admits. Artificial intelligence researcher and writer Ben Goertzel of IntelliGenesis Corporation, New York, believes that humans will be a secondary part of this organism, perhaps a dispensable one. It's not a very comfortable self image for a species used to considering itself the pinnacle of creation.
The global brain's self-adapting intelligence could quickly surpass our ability to understand it. Or perhaps it already has. According to Daniel Dennett, director of the Centre for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, "the global communication network is already capable of complex behavior that defies the efforts of human experts to comprehend". And what you can't understand, he adds, you can't control. "We have already made ourselves so dependent on the network that we cannot afford not to provide it with the energy and maintenance it needs," he warns."
I suppose I raise this subject merely because I am aware of it and that it interests me, but I also recognize that by participating in this system and incorporating the computer into my life, I have a responsibility to do so consciously.