Global brain

Last updated
Opte Project visualization of routing paths through a portion of the Internet. The connections and pathways of the internet could be seen as the pathways of neurons and synapses in a global brain. Internet map 1024.jpg
Opte Project visualization of routing paths through a portion of the Internet. The connections and pathways of the internet could be seen as the pathways of neurons and synapses in a global brain.

The global brain is a neuroscience-inspired and futurological vision of the planetary information and communications technology network that interconnects all humans and their technological artifacts. [1] As this network stores ever more information, takes over ever more functions of coordination and communication from traditional organizations, and becomes increasingly intelligent, it increasingly plays the role of a brain for the planet Earth. In the philosophy of mind, global brain finds an analog in Averroes's theory of the unity of the intellect.

Contents

Basic ideas

Proponents of the global brain hypothesis claim that the Internet increasingly ties its users together into a single information processing system that functions as part of the collective nervous system of the planet. The intelligence of this network is collective or distributed: it is not centralized or localized in any particular individual, organization or computer system. Therefore, no one can command or control it. Rather, it self-organizes or emerges from the dynamic networks of interactions between its components. This is a property typical of complex adaptive systems. [2]

The World Wide Web in particular resembles the organization of a brain with its web pages (playing a role similar to neurons) connected by hyperlinks (playing a role similar to synapses), together forming an associative network along which information propagates. [3] This analogy becomes stronger with the rise of social media, such as Facebook, where links between personal pages represent relationships in a social network along which information propagates from person to person. [4] Such propagation is similar to the spreading activation that neural networks in the brain use to process information in a parallel, distributed manner.

History

Although some of the underlying ideas were already expressed by Nikola Tesla in the late 19th century and were written about by many others before him, the term "global brain" was coined in 1982 by Peter Russell in his book The Global Brain. [5] How the Internet might be developed to achieve this was set out in 1986. [6] The first peer-reviewed article on the subject was published by Gottfried Mayer-Kress in 1995, [7] while the first algorithms that could turn the world-wide web into a collectively intelligent network were proposed by Francis Heylighen and Johan Bollen in 1996. [3] [8]

Reviewing the strands of intellectual history that contributed to the global brain hypothesis, Francis Heylighen distinguishes four perspectives: organicism, encyclopedism, emergentism and evolutionary cybernetics. He asserts that these developed in relative independence but now are converging in his own scientific re-formulation. [9]

Organicism

In the 19th century, the sociologist Herbert Spencer saw society as a social organism and reflected about its need for a nervous system. Entomologist William Wheeler developed the concept of the ant colony as a spatially extended organism, and in the 1930s he coined the term superorganism to describe such an entity. [10] This concept was later adopted by thinkers such as Joël de Rosnay in the book Le Cerveau Planétaire (1986) and Gregory Stock in the book Metaman (1993) to describe planetary society as a superorganism.

The mental aspects of such an organic system at the planetary level were perhaps first broadly elaborated by palaeontologist and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In 1945, he described a coming "planetisation" of humanity, which he saw as the next phase of accelerating human "socialisation". Teilhard described both socialization and planetization as irreversible, irresistible processes of macrobiological development culminating in the emergence of a noosphere, or global mind (see Emergentism below). [11]

The more recent living systems theory describes both organisms and social systems in terms of the "critical subsystems" ("organs") they need to contain in order to survive, such as an internal transport system, a resource reserve, and a decision-making system. This theory has inspired several thinkers, including Peter Russell and Francis Heylighen to define the global brain as the network of information processing subsystems for the planetary social system.

Encyclopedism

In the perspective of encyclopedism, the emphasis is on developing a universal knowledge network. The first systematic attempt to create such an integrated system of the world's knowledge was the 18th century Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert. However, by the end of the 19th century, the amount of knowledge had become too large to be published in a single synthetic volume. To tackle this problem, Paul Otlet founded the science of documentation, now called information science. In the 1930s he envisaged a World Wide Web-like system of associations between documents and telecommunication links that would make all the world's knowledge available immediately to anybody. H. G. Wells proposed a similar vision of a collaboratively developed world encyclopedia that would be constantly updated by a global university-like institution. He called this a World Brain, [12] as it would function as a continuously updated memory for the planet, although the image of humanity acting informally as a more organic global brain is a recurring motif in many of his other works. [13]

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, too, was inspired by the free-associative possibilities of the brain for his invention. The brain can link different kinds of information without any apparent link otherwise; Berners-Lee thought that computers could become much more powerful if they could imitate this functioning, i.e. make links between any arbitrary piece of information. [14] The most powerful implementation of encyclopedism to date is Wikipedia, which integrates the associative powers of the world-wide-web with the collective intelligence of its millions of contributors, approaching the ideal of a global memory. [9] The Semantic web, also first proposed by Berners-Lee, is a system of protocols to make the pieces of knowledge and their links readable by machines, so that they could be used to make automatic inferences, thus providing this brain-like network with some capacity for autonomous "thinking" or reflection.

Emergentism

This approach focuses on the emergent aspects of the evolution and development of complexity, including the spiritual, psychological, and moral-ethical aspects of the global brain, and is at present the most speculative approach. The global brain is here seen as a natural and emergent process of planetary evolutionary development. Here again Pierre Teilhard de Chardin attempted a synthesis of science, social values, and religion in his The Phenomenon of Man, which argues that the telos (drive, purpose) of universal evolutionary process is the development of greater levels of both complexity and consciousness. Teilhard proposed that if life persists then planetization, as a biological process producing a global brain, would necessarily also produce a global mind, a new level of planetary consciousness and a technologically supported network of thoughts which he called the noosphere . Teilhard's proposed technological layer for the noosphere can be interpreted as an early anticipation of the Internet and the Web. [15]

Evolutionary cybernetics

Systems theorists and cyberneticians commonly describe the emergence of a higher order system in evolutionary development as a "metasystem transition" (a concept introduced by Valentin Turchin) or a "major evolutionary transition". [16] Such a metasystem consists of a group of subsystems that work together in a coordinated, goal-directed manner. It is as such much more powerful and intelligent than its constituent systems. Francis Heylighen has argued that the global brain is an emerging metasystem with respect to the level of individual human intelligence, and investigated the specific evolutionary mechanisms that promote this transition. [17]

In this scenario, the Internet fulfils the role of the network of "nerves" that interconnect the subsystems and thus coordinates their activity. The cybernetic approach makes it possible to develop mathematical models and simulations of the processes of self-organization through which such coordination and collective intelligence emerges.

Recent developments

In 1994 Kevin Kelly, in his popular book Out of Control , posited the emergence of a "hive mind" from a discussion of cybernetics and evolutionary biology. [18]

In 1996, Francis Heylighen and Ben Goertzel founded the Global Brain group, a discussion forum grouping most of the researchers that had been working on the subject of the global brain to further investigate this phenomenon. The group organized the first international conference on the topic in 2001 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

After a period of relative neglect, the Global Brain idea has recently seen a resurgence in interest, in part due to talks given on the topic by Tim O'Reilly, the Internet forecaster who popularized the term Web 2.0, [19] and Yuri Milner, the social media investor. [20] In January 2012, the Global Brain Institute (GBI) was founded at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel to develop a mathematical theory of the "brainlike" propagation of information across the Internet. In the same year, Thomas W. Malone and collaborators from the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence have started to explore how the global brain could be "programmed" to work more effectively, [21] using mechanisms of collective intelligence. The complexity scientist Dirk Helbing and his NervousNet group have recently started developing a "Planetary Nervous System", which includes a "Global Participatory Platform", as part of the large-scale FuturICT project, thus preparing some of the groundwork for a Global Brain. [22]

In July 2017, Elon Musk founded the company Neuralink, which aims to create a brain-computer interface (BCI) with significantly greater information bandwidth than traditional human interface devices. Musk predicts that artificial intelligence systems will rapidly outpace human abilities in most domains and views them as an existential threat. He believes an advanced BCI would enable human cognition to remain relevant for longer. The firm raised $27m from 12 Investors in 2017. [23]

Criticisms

A common criticism of the idea that humanity would become directed by a global brain is that this would reduce individual diversity and freedom, [24] and lead to mass surveillance. [25] This criticism is inspired by totalitarian forms of government, as exemplified by George Orwell's character of "Big Brother". It is also inspired by the analogy between collective intelligence or swarm intelligence and insect societies, such as beehives and ant colonies, in which individuals are essentially interchangeable. In a more extreme view, the global brain has been compared with the Borg, [26] a race of collectively thinking cyborgs conceived by the Star Trek science fiction franchise.

Global brain theorists reply that the emergence of distributed intelligence would lead to the exact opposite of this vision. [27] [28] James Surowiecki in his book The Wisdom of Crowds argued that the reason is that effective collective intelligence requires diversity of opinion, decentralization and individual independence.

See also

Related Research Articles

The noosphere is a philosophical concept developed and popularized by the biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky and philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Vernadsky defined the noosphere as the new state of the biosphere, and described it as the planetary "sphere of reason". The noosphere represents the highest stage of biospheric development, that of humankind's rational activities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pierre Teilhard de Chardin</span> French philosopher and Jesuit priest (1881–1955)

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit, Catholic priest, scientist, palaeontologist, theologian, philosopher, and teacher. He was Darwinian and progressive in outlook and the author of several influential theological and philosophical books. His mainstream scientific achievements include his palaeontological research in China, taking part in the discovery of the significant Peking Man fossils from the Zhoukoudian cave complex near Beijing. His more speculative ideas, sometimes criticized as pseudoscientific, have included a vitalist conception of the Omega Point. Along with Vladimir Vernadsky, they also contributed to the development of the concept of a noosphere.

<i>World Brain</i> 1938 collection of essays by H. G. Wells

World Brain is a collection of essays and addresses by the English science fiction pioneer, social reformer, evolutionary biologist and historian H. G. Wells, dating from the period of 1936–1938. Throughout the book, Wells describes his vision of the World Brain: a new, free, synthetic, authoritative, permanent "World Encyclopaedia" that could help world citizens make the best use of universal information resources and make the best contribution to world peace.

The Omega Point is a theorized future event in which the entirety of the universe spirals toward a final point of unification. The term was invented by the French Jesuit Catholic priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955). Teilhard argued that the Omega Point resembles the Christian Logos, namely Christ, who draws all things into himself, who in the words of the Nicene Creed, is "God from God", "Light from Light", "True God from True God", and "through him all things were made". In the Book of Revelation, Christ describes himself three times as "the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end". Several decades after Teilhard's death, the idea of the Omega Point was expanded upon in the writings of John David Garcia (1971), Paolo Soleri (1981), Frank Tipler (1994), and David Deutsch (1997).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Superorganism</span> Group of synergistic organisms

A superorganism, or supraorganism, is a group of synergetically-interacting organisms of the same species. A community of synergetically-interacting organisms of different species is called a holobiont.

Spiritual evolution, also called higher evolution, is the idea that the mind or spirit, in analogy to biological evolution, collectively evolves from a simple form dominated by nature, to a higher form dominated by the spiritual or divine. It is differentiated from the "lower" or biological evolution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emergentism</span> Philosophical belief in emergence

Emergentism is the belief in emergence, particularly as it involves consciousness and the philosophy of mind. A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is a new outcome of some other properties of the system and their interaction, while it is itself different from them. Within the philosophy of science, emergentism is analyzed both as it contrasts with and parallels reductionism. This philosophical theory suggests that higher-level properties and phenomena arise from the interactions and organization of lower-level entities yet are not reducible to these simpler components. It emphasizes the idea that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Collective consciousness, collective conscience, or collective conscious is the set of shared beliefs, ideas, and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society. In general, it does not refer to the specifically moral conscience, but to a shared understanding of social norms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Francis Heylighen</span> Belgian cyberneticist (born 1960)

Francis Paul Heylighen is a Belgian cyberneticist investigating the emergence and evolution of intelligent organization. He presently works as a research professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he directs the transdisciplinary "Center Leo Apostel" and the research group on "Evolution, Complexity and Cognition". He is best known for his work on the Principia Cybernetica Project, his model of the Internet as a global brain, and his contributions to the theories of memetics and self-organization. He is also known, albeit to a lesser extent, for his work on gifted people and their problems.

A metasystem transition is the emergence, through evolution, of a higher level of organization or control.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Donald T. Campbell</span> American social scientist

Donald Thomas Campbell was an American social scientist. He is noted for his work in methodology. He coined the term evolutionary epistemology and developed a selectionist theory of human creativity. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Campbell as the 33rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Infosphere is a metaphysical realm of information, data, knowledge, and communication, populated by informational entities called inforgs. Infosphere is portmanteau of information and -sphere.

Universal evolution is a theory of evolution formulated by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Julian Huxley that describes the gradual development of the Universe from subatomic particles to human society, considered by Teilhard as the last stage.

Principia Cybernetica is an international cooperation of scientists in the field of cybernetics and systems science, especially known for their website, Principia Cybernetica. They have dedicated their organization to what they call "a computer-supported evolutionary-systemic philosophy, in the context of the transdisciplinary academic fields of Systems Science and Cybernetics".

Ephemeralization, a term coined by R. Buckminster Fuller in 1938, is the ability of technological advancement to do "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing," that is, an accelerating increase in the efficiency of achieving the same or more output while requiring less input. The application of materials and technology in modern cell phones, compared to older computers and phones, exemplify the concepts of ephemeralization whereby technological advancement can drive efficiency in the form of fewer materials being used to provide greater utility. Fuller's vision was that ephemeralization, through technological progress, could result in ever-increasing standards of living for an ever-growing population. The concept has been embraced by those who argue against Malthusian philosophy.

Collective wisdom, also called group wisdom and co-intelligence, is shared knowledge arrived at by individuals and groups with collaboration.

<i>The Phenomenon of Man</i> 1955 book by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The Phenomenon of Man is an essay by the French geologist, paleontologist, philosopher, and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In this work, Teilhard describes evolution as a process that leads to increasing complexity, culminating in the unification of consciousness. The text was written in the 1930s, but it achieved publication only posthumously, in 1955.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Collective intelligence</span> Group intelligence that emerges from collective efforts

Collective intelligence (CI) is shared or group intelligence (GI) that emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making. The term appears in sociobiology, political science and in context of mass peer review and crowdsourcing applications. It may involve consensus, social capital and formalisms such as voting systems, social media and other means of quantifying mass activity. Collective IQ is a measure of collective intelligence, although it is often used interchangeably with the term collective intelligence. Collective intelligence has also been attributed to bacteria and animals.

The concept of conscious evolution refers to the theoretical ability of human beings to become conscious participants in the evolution of their cultures, or even of the entirety of human society, based on a relatively recent combination of factors, including increasing awareness of cultural and social patterns, reaction against perceived problems with existing patterns, injustices, inequities, and other factors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theta Noir</span>

Theta Noir is a performance art project and collective that uses multi-platform storytelling, rituals, and technology to explore the evolutionary and ecological implications of advanced artificial intelligence (AI), particularly artificial general intelligence (AGI) or artificial superintelligence (ASI).

References

  1. ↑ Heylighen, F. "What is the global brain?". Principa Cybernetica Web. Retrieved 9 November 2017.
  2. ↑ Phister, Paul W. Jr. "Cyberspace: The Ultimate Complex Adaptive System" (PDF). The International C2 Journal. Retrieved 25 August 2012.
  3. 1 2 Heylighen, Francis; Bollen, J. (1996). Trappl, R. (ed.). The World-Wide Web as a Super-Brain: from metaphor to model (PDF). Cybernetics and Systems' 96. Austrian Society For Cybernetics. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2012-07-22.
  4. ↑ Weinbaum, D. (2012). "A Framework for Scalable Cognition: Propagation of challenges, towards the implementation of Global Brain models" (PDF). GBI working paper 2012-02. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2012-07-22.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  5. ↑ Russell, P. (1983). The Global Brain: speculations on the evolutionary leap to planetary consciousness. Los Angeles: JP Tarcher.
  6. ↑ Andrews, D. (February 1986). "Information routeing groups – Towards the global superbrain: or how to find out what you need to know rather than what you think you need to know". Journal of Information Technology. 1 (1): 22–35. doi:10.1057/jit.1986.5. S2CID   29171232.
  7. ↑ Mayer-Kress, G.; Barczys, C. (1995). "The global brain as an emergent structure from the Worldwide Computing Network, and its implications for modeling" (PDF). The Information Society. 11 (1): 1–27. doi:10.1080/01972243.1995.9960177. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-09-07.
  8. ↑ Bollen, J.; Heylighen, Francis (1996). Trappl, R. (ed.). Algorithms for the self-organization of distributed, multi-user networks. Possible application to the future world wide web (PDF). Cybernetics and Systems '96. Austrian Society For Cybernetics. pp. 911–916. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-08-09. Retrieved 2012-07-22.
  9. 1 2 Heylighen, Francis (2011). "Conceptions of a Global Brain: an historical review" (PDF). In Grinin, L. E.; Carneiro, R. L.; Korotayev, A. V.; Spier, F. (eds.). Evolution: Cosmic, Biological, and Social. Uchitel Publishing. pp. 274–289. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-04-17. Retrieved 2012-05-16.
  10. ↑ Wheeler, William (1911). "The Ant Colony as an Organism". Journal of Morphology. 22 (2): 307–325. doi:10.1002/jmor.1050220206. S2CID   85810040.
  11. ↑ Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre (1964). "Chap VII – The Planetisation of Man". The Future of Man .
  12. ↑ H.G. Wells. World Brain .
  13. ↑ H.G. Wells. The New Machiavelli. But the ideas marched on, the ideas marched on, just as though men's brains were no more than stepping-stones, just as though some great brain in which we are all little cells and corpuscles was thinking them! ... And then I came back as if I came back to a refrain; — the ideas go on — as though we are all no more than little cells and corpuscles in some great brain beyond our understanding....
  14. ↑ ( Berners-Lee 1999 , pp. 4, 41)
  15. ↑ Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre (1964). "Chap X – The Formation of the Noosphere". The Future of Man .
  16. ↑ Szathmáry, Eörs; Maynard Smith, John (16 March 1995). "The major evolutionary transitions". Nature . 374 (6519): 227–232. Bibcode:1995Natur.374..227S. doi:10.1038/374227a0. PMID   7885442. S2CID   4315120.
  17. ↑ Heylighen 2007.
  18. ↑ Kelly, Kevin (1994). Out of control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley. pp.  5–28. ISBN   978-0-201-57793-8.
  19. ↑ O'Reilly, Tim (March 2012). Towards a Global Brain. One Great Idea.
  20. ↑ Freeland, Chrystia (2011-09-23). "The advent of the global brain". blogs.reuters.com. Archived from the original on 2011-09-26.
  21. ↑ Bernstein, A.; Klein, M.; Malone, Thomas W. (2012). "Programming the Global Brain" (PDF). Communications of the ACM. 55 (5): 41. doi:10.1145/2160718.2160731. hdl:1721.1/75216. S2CID   9288529. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-08-13. Retrieved 2012-08-27.
  22. ↑ Helbing, Dirk (2015). "Creating ("Making") a Planetary Nervous System as Citizen Web". Thinking Ahead - Essays on Big Data, Digital Revolution, and Participatory Market Society. Springer International Publishing. pp. 189–194. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-15078-9_13. ISBN   978-3-319-15077-2.
  23. ↑ da Silva, Chantal (2017-08-28). "Elon Musk could be about to spend $100m linking human brains to computers". The Independent. Retrieved 2017-11-07.
  24. ↑ Rayward, W. B. (1999). "H. G. Wells' s idea of a World Brain: A critical reassessment". Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 50 (7): 557–573. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.85.1010 . doi:10.1002/(sici)1097-4571(1999)50:7<557::aid-asi2>3.0.co;2-m.
  25. ↑ Brooks, M. (June 24, 2000). "Global brain". New Scientist (2244): 22.
  26. ↑ Goertzel, Ben (2002). Creating Internet Intelligence: Wild computing, distributed digital consciousness, and the emerging global brain. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. ISBN   978-0-306-46735-6.
  27. ↑ Heylighen, Francis (2007). "The Global Superorganism: an evolutionary-cybernetic model of the emerging network society" (PDF). Social Evolution & History. 6 (1): 58–119. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-06-06. Retrieved 2012-07-22.
  28. ↑ Heylighen, Francis (2002). "Das Globale Gehirn als neue Utopia" [The global brain as a new utopia](PDF). In Maresch, R.; Rötzer, F. (eds.). Renaissance der Utopie. Frankurt: Suhrkamp. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-04-17. Retrieved 2012-07-22.

Further reading

Wide audience

Advanced literature

For more references, check the GBI bibliography:

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.