This is both speculation and a request for input regarding the Internet's
potential for developing awareness. I know it's an "out there" topic, I'm not
claiming to be convinced that the Internet _is_ aware, these are just "what
if...?" sorts of things. That said...
Do you suppose the Internet might already be complex enough to have some sort of
actual rudimentary awareness? It has at least -some- of the same properties as
an organic brain, and so one must wonder.
A brain develops awareness over time through constant activity and stimulus.
Activity within the brain consists of signals pinging off of neurons and
bouncing around. This eventually produces a center of awareness, which I view
as a kind of "ping-pong" ball. It bounces around from place to place being hit
back and forth by the neurons, which keep it moving as though they were playing
"Hot Potato". As long as the ping-pong ball is kept bouncing, awareness is can
be devloped and sustained. But the moment it stops or slows down, awareness
ceases or decreases. The constant activity of thinking keeps one's awareness in
tact.
The circuitry upon which the Internet occurs could easily be bouncing around
some very long-running signals, which is something I think would be necessary to
produce awareness. There are networks on the Internet which operate 24/7/365
and some network traffic -never- stops.
There really wouldn't be any way to tell if it had any sort of awareness without
it coming out and telling us, and it has neither the means nor the impetus to
accomplish this. And at this point, it most certainly wouldn't be a very
coherent awareness - it would be almost like an infant who was born both deaf
and blind with decreased bodily sensation who can experience and react to some
stimulus, but has very little potential for ever coming to a thorough
understanding the world in which it exists.
This leads me to two questions:
1. If somehow the Internet (or -any- computer network for that matter) were to
actually possess awareness, how might we go about providing mechanisms for this
awareness to be expressed?
2. What kinds of setups would allow the kind of autonomy necessary for an aware
being to carry out unpredictable actions at will?
3. If there is some sort of awareness, it's probably not very coherent because
as it was being designed, it had no need to be - no selection pressures to keep
it from emerging into a chaotic perceptual "fog" of sorts. Is there any
possible way for us to change that?
--
L8r,
Uncle Clover
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The true mark of a civilized society is that its
citizens know how to hate each other peacefully.
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