Okay, ten cents on consciousness and the Internet:
The internet is a human organization, with high-speed interactions among
its members. At a mathematical level of abstraction and rigor, most
people (including myself) are mostly clueless about what anyone could
possibly mean by "consciousness" that could apply to an organization.
However, you can look at other organizations with high-speed interactions
among their members.
- Is a symphony orchestra conscious? Is the orchestra's consciousness
located in the conductor? What about a string quartet?
- Is the basketball team the Houston Rockets conscious? Only when
on the court, or all the time?
- Is Major League Baseball conscious? No, it's in a coma from which it
may never recover fully.
Neurologists have a fairly standard set of tests they perform to determine
they perform when they need to determine (for insurance purposes, or
press announcements) if a patient is conscious or not. I'm not a
neurologist, and don't have any textbooks handy that tell me what all
these tests are, but they include the ability to answer simple questions,
like "what is your name?", "where are you?", and "what day is today?"
The Internet has the ability to answer questions via posting to
newsgroups, but it doesn't talk about itself, only its users.
You don't have to post "Can you tell me where you are?" or "are you
the Internet?" in news.newusers.questions to know that the followups
won't be "I'm worldwide" and "yes". And even if you did, you probably
would be skeptical about the truth of the answers. Unless maybe they
came from Vint Cerf, though you'd probably get some argument on even
that, and you probably wouldn't find him responding to that newsgroup.
I don't think the internet is a unified consciousness. I don't think
there's any question that it contains millions of interacting
consciousnesses.
Cheers,
- George McKee
--
Internet: mckee at neosoft.com
Voice: +1 713 890 8122
