The Coming Collective Telempathy (2012-Q1)

 

Also see http://minnesotafuturists.pbworks.com/w/page/21442204/The%20Global%20Brain%20Awakens (2007-10)

 

False Assumptions - BToren.pdf (Scanned)

FEAR

 

 

Wikinomics-i4CQuest03-2.pdf

The Coming Collective Telempathy (2012-Q1) False Assumptions - BToren.pdf (Scanned) By Michael Chorost World Wide Mind as Collective Telempathy About the Author Wikinomics-i4CQuest03.pdf Brian_Wang_Technology_5_years.doc Your Brain on Metaphors The Shape of the Future: How to Help Tomorrow's Children Cope ... Michael Chorost took this approach to writing World Wide Mind. NASA Apollo 8 Earthwise-MindShifting (CBS News Sunday Morning Segment)

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By Michael Chorost

The Internet plus humanity equals hyper-organism,

a merger of man and machine that may result in global mindfulness.

 

The Internet is a human invention reflecting human decisions and values. However, it often looks as if it is a separate “species” with an internal logic of its own. The 1987 stock market crash has been blamed on program trading—computers that started selling frantically because every other computer was selling. The ceaseless war between computer viruses and antivirus programs looks eerily like the workings of a biological ecosystem.

 

However, even if one posits that the Internet is comparable to a biological species, it’s obvious that it’s not very intelligent. It has primitive ways of “sensing” and “reacting,” but it has no self-awareness and no ability to formulate its own goals. Nor could it ever reach such a state on its own. It can, however, become the backbone of a sophisticated new organism if physically integrated with humanity. The Internet would become a new nervous system for humanity, and humanity would become a new body and executive brain for the Internet.

 

Such a physical integration can now be discussed in a scientifically grounded way. It’s like the way Jules Verne, in his 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon, imagined launching a spaceship to the Moon by firing it out of an enormous cannon. Verne underestimated the future development of rocketry, but he had the physics right. For example, he explained the concept of escape velocity and correctly identified southern Florida as the best spot in the United States for launching a spacecraft. (Florida’s nearness to the equator gives any projectile additional velocity as long as it is launched eastward.)

Because it was grounded in real science, Verne’s novel was conceptually plausible. In the same way, recent advances in neuroscience and neurotechnology make it possible to write a conceptually plausible account of how brains could be “read” and linked together. My book World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet (Free Press, 2011) is grounded in science now going on in labs around the world, and it draws on technology that is already in use in human beings.

 

World Wide Mind as Collective Telempathy

How might a network of “linked” brains manifest itself? What would the experience of living among them be like? Here’s a short scenario. Let’s say you’re the governor of New York in 2039, and most of your constituents are connected to this World Wide Mind. Among other things, their neural Internet connections, or rigs, monitor production of a neurotransmitter called cortisol, which is produced by the brain when it feels stress. Each rig sends its person’s cortisol level to a central server, which keeps a running average. It sends your rig that number, which activates the production of a corresponding level of cortisol in your brain. The amount of stimulation is kept proportionately lower, though, so it stays in your perceptual background rather than directly affecting your mood. It’s as if you were aware of a family member being anxious.

 

When there’s a catastrophe, you as governor feel the state’s anxiety level surge long before it hits the news. When times are good, the anxiety level drops. Each individual measurement means little in itself, but over time, as you get to know your state and how it reacts, the feeling becomes more meaningful to you. With advancing technology other metrics become available: the ability to differentiate between fear and anxiety, between one region and another, between the state and the rest of the country. You feel your state.

 

In fact, we have something a little bit like this now with Google’s flu tracker. It estimates the incidence of flu around the world by monitoring how often people in a given region search for information on flu. The presumption is, of course, that people who are sick or caring for the sick will run searches. The more searches there are, the more flu. Google’s estimates of flu incidence have turned out to be nearly identical to the U.S. government’s data of actual incidence. It’s not hard to imagine rigs detecting the cluster of physical feelings related to flu—achiness, tiredness, and so on—and sending them directly to the Centers for Disease Control. A physician might be able to feel, in the back of his mind, exactly how sick his neighborhood is. A nurse in an ICU might be able to know instantly who is in distress.

 

With humanity telempathically linked in a World Wide Mind, moods would spread among far larger groups. Entire ethnic groups, or entire countries, might have moods from day to day. We would hope, of course, that the collective effect is positive. Perhaps it would be; in a test given to 3,050 American adults to measure their happiness at the moment, the average score was about 7 on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being ecstatically happy. That’s not bad. But even if the collective mood wasn’t always good, it would serve the purposes that emotions have always served. Emotions propel the organism toward the desirable and away from the undesirable. A collective limbic system would make injustice harder to bear and prosperity all the more pleasurable.

 

The Internet now has nascent versions of a limbic system. Some companies are experimenting with “sentiment analysis,” the mining of the Internet for people’s feelings. By analyzing Twitter and blog feeds, companies are assessing how people feel about particular products. One algorithm observed angry postings on blogs after rain delayed a Yankees–Red Sox game. At first, the company owning the stadium refused to make refunds, but the anger was so great that it changed its mind. This is not an example of “the Internet getting mad.” It’s people getting mad. But the Internet can pick up their anger somewhat the way the forebrain can pick up signals of arousal from the amygdala. An angry Twitterer ripping on the Yankees–Red Sox game doesn’t feel like part of a larger entity, even though he is in fact part of a collective amygdala.

The most profound possibility of all is feeding the system’s output back into each individual. If everyone is aware of the system’s behavior, it could become autopoietic, that is, self-creating. Local changes in one area—say, a death in a community—would affect the whole, and the whole would affect the community in turn. One gets the possibility of nonlinear feedback loops generating complex, unpredictable behavior.

I am sure that everyone has experienced such a feedback loop in their lives. When I was about 20, I spent two months working at a Jewish summer camp in New York State. On one Shabbat, a small group of girl campers stood on the stage and sang an old Jewish folksong:

And the old shall dream dreams And the youth shall see visions And our hopes shall rise up to the sky. We must live for today We must build for tomorrow Give us peace, give us strength, give us life.

 

The girls were maybe 12 or 13, in the spring of their lives. I could see their faces light up as they realized that they were singing in perfect harmony, their energies perfectly synchronized, the words, theirs, their meaning clear and evanescent, the old song suddenly as fresh and new as blossoming daffodils. The campers in the audience stopped fidgeting and held their breaths. The cooks and archery instructors and swim teachers stopped cleaning and shushing and watched. The energy of that absolute attention converged on the singers like light coming to a focus in a concave mirror. And those girls picked it up and reflected it right back. The song soared. I felt it. Everyone felt it. That bunch of suburban girls in that garden-variety summer camp created an outpouring of thrill and joy that I have never forgotten.

 

It was so transcendent that they did an encore the next day, clearly hoping to have the same effect. But it fell flat. Campers fidgeted and counselors shushed. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions! The nonlinear feedback cycle failed to ignite. Energies dampened rather than ignited, went awry rather than convening. One of the girls might have been off, a bunch of kids might have been wiggling at the wrong time. It was just another camp song. Just the sum of its parts. The girls fell silent and edged back to their benches.

 

That spark, that alighting, is what happens when a nonlinear feedback loop launches itself into motion. Multiple energies come together and form more than the sum of their parts. The outcome is constantly surprising and new. Many-to-many networks generate these kinds of events, and if the system is robust enough, the feedback loop never stops. It regenerates itself like a living flame.

 

Collective Cognition

Telempathy, as powerful as it is, is noncognitive. People wouldn’t be able to use it to add two plus two. Would a World Wide Mind be able to think cognitively? Could it tackle the unification of quantum mechanics with general relativity? Fermat’s Last Theorem? The cure for cancer?

This kind of problem solving requires an acutely high level of self-consciousness. It requires awareness of past work, considerable domain knowledge, a sense of what is important and what is not, the ability to make creative analogies, and the ability to see problems from fresh perspectives. This would seem to require self-aware, integrated thinking. Writing a book, composing music, designing a database, coding a compiler—these all require a sense of self.

 

Today’s Internet lacks that sense of self. Even massive distributed computing projects such as SETI@Home, which by June 2010 had harnessed 2.65 million personal computers to search for extraterrestrial radio signals, are just number-crunching on a large scale. Each computer runs the same algorithm and examines the same kind of data. The system can’t think creatively about new ways to analyze the signals, let alone figure out the meaning of an intelligent signal if it received one. It has no ability to say, “Well, maybe we should be looking at gravitational waves instead,” or “Maybe the smartest species in the galaxy right now is the one that invented us.” That’s still the province of human programmers and linguists.

 

Simply adding more and more processing power doesn’t make an algorithm self-aware. SETI@Home isn’t any smarter than my laptop. It’s just faster. So it’s not easy to say how a World Wide Mind would be smarter than any individual in it. One can argue by analogy that, since self-aware brains are massively parallel, any properly organized massively parallel system should be self-aware, too. But that analogy doesn’t tell us how to organize computational resources to yield self-awareness. And it certainly doesn’t tell us how individual brains would contribute to it.

 

But I can offer another hypothetical scenario. We know from neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s research that emotions are supremely important to cognition. Emotions tell the forebrain what is worthy of attention. A hunch would go nowhere without a sense of excitement accompanying it. So imagine a far-flung group of physicists thinking about how to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity (the most important unsolved problem in physics). One of them has the germ of an “aha” idea, but it’s just a teasing sensation rather than a verbally articulated thought. It evokes a sense of excitement that her rig can pick up. Many cliques in her brain would be activated, many of them subconsciously. The sensation of excitement alerts other physicists that something is up: They suddenly feel that sense of aha-ness themselves. The same cliques in their brains are activated, say these: unification problem, cosmological constant, black holes, Hawking radiation.

 

An apparently random assortment, but brains are good at finding patterns in randomness. New ideas often come from a fresh conjunction of old ones. In a group intimately familiar with a problem, the members don’t need to do a whole lot of talking to understand each other. A few words are all that are needed to trigger an assortment of meaningful associations. Another physicist pushes those associations a little further in his own head, evoking more cliques in the group. Another goes to his keyboard and types out a few sentences that capture it, which go out to the group; perhaps they are shared on a communally visible scratch pad. The original physicist adds a few more sentences.

 

Fairly rapidly, the new idea is sketched out in a symbology of words and equations. If it holds up, the collective excitement draws in more physicists. If it doesn’t, the group falls apart and everyone goes back to what they were doing. This is brainstorming, but it’s facilitated by the direct exchange of emotions and associations within the group and can happen at any time or place.

 

Or consider this possibility: Scientists are beginning to get access to the dreaming experience of a brain. The chaotic nature of dream imagery may come from cliques activating each other willy-nilly without input from the outside world, which during waking life inhibits the activation of irrelevant cliques. Indeed, neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás has suggested that wakefulness is really a kind of dreaming in which neural activation is constrained by sensory input. In other words, the brain is constantly activating various cliques, but when it is awake, the ones that don’t correspond to “reality” are suppressed.

Brains arguably generate much, indeed most, of conscious experience. The senses are mere triggers of full-blown sensations derived from earlier experience. If all of this is true, then it should not be particularly difficult to identify which cliques a dreaming brain is triggering, and evoke them in other brains. In other words, to share at least some aspects of dreaming.

 

But why bother, if dreams are just a mishmash of randomly activated cliques? Freud and Jung argued, of course, that they are not random. A detailed discussion of dreams is beyond my scope here, but many people do obtain powerful insights from them. Much of the insight undoubtedly comes from confabulation, the brain’s desire to impose order upon chaos. People generate new insights from unexpected juxtapositions of images, and upon waking they selectively remember the ones that seem meaningful.

 

Until now, the experience of a dream has been knowable only to the dreamer. Therefore, only the dreamer can construct a story from it. But if dreams become shareable, then people might deliberately tap into other people’s dreams to see what stories they can construct. And it could go the other way around, with dreamers willingly accepting input from awake brains. The greater share of the World Wide Mind’s bandwidth might be devoted to sharing dreams. From those shared dreams new ideas may emerge. Perhaps the old will dream dreams, and youths will mold them into new visions.

 

How Would We Know a Hyperorganism Existed?

Maybe we can’t know, by definition. A cell can’t know the goals of an animal. A neuron can’t grasp the thoughts of a brain. But we might see new phenomena that can’t be explained in the usual ways. For example, today we can come up with reasonable-sounding explanations of stock market crashes. The 1987 crash has been blamed on program trading. The 2008 crash is explainable in terms of human behavior, such as irresponsible lending that fed a housing bubble. But if a crash happened that couldn’t be explained in those kinds of ways, then we might be entitled to ask if some higher-level entity was having a higher-order problem.

 

Advances to higher levels typically lead to higher-order problems. For example, while the evolutionary leap to language was a great advance, it also opened up the possibility of an entirely new kind of problem: schizophrenia. The hallucination of voices is thought to result from the inability of the brain to distinguish its own inner speech from the speech of others. It is uniquely a disorder of a self-conscious, language-using mind. Tim Crow, a psychiatrist at Oxford, writes that “schizophrenia is the price that Homo sapiens pays for language.”

 

Thus, while chimpanzees can become neurotic, their brains are not complex enough to become schizophrenic. Imagine, for the sake of argument, chimp doctors clustered around a chimp that had magically acquired language but sadly went schizophrenic in the process. They wouldn’t know what the chimp was saying. They wouldn’t even understand the concept of language. But they would know that, whatever strange illness this chimp had, it was like nothing they’d ever seen before.

 

Therefore, evolutionary progress does not mean that a species outgrows all of its problems and proceeds to live in an earthly paradise. To the contrary, ascent to a more complex state creates more complex problems. When agriculture became sophisticated enough to meet the Western world’s food needs, it ended the problem of hunger but created the new one of obesity. When the printing press solved the problem of information scarcity, it created the new problem of information overload. When the automobile abolished limitations of mobility, it created the new problem of urban sprawl. Thus, while a civilization with a transpersonal mind will be capable of doing marvelous new things, it will also certainly have problems of a kind that have never been seen before. To humans, those problems may manifest themselves as troublesome phenomena that can’t be explained or solved in the usual ways.

 

In fact, we may be seeing an analogously inexplicable phenomenon with the ants. Ant experts say that ants have reached a dead end and will evolve no further. They say that individual ants can’t become smarter because their heads would become prohibitively heavy if they got bigger. (As an exoskeleton gets larger, it becomes much heavier, just as a sphere’s volume increases by the cube of its radius.) Nor can ants physically interact with more ants than they do now, which limits their ability to evolve more sophisticated signaling behaviors. So the amount of storable information in a colony and its transmission speed can’t increase by very much. Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson write, “Social insects are still ruled rigidly by instinct, and they will remain so forever.”

 

Yet there is something funny going on in the ant world. Recently, scientists have discovered ant colonies that theoretically shouldn’t exist. Called unicolonies, they have billions of members and stretch over thousands of kilometers. Only 31 were known in the world as of 2009. While they are composed of many adjacent nests, the nests are together considered a single colony because the ants cooperate even though they’re not related. (Unrelated ants smell different to each other, which normally induces them to attack each other.) It’s as if alien anthropologists deduced that the United States is a single country because the people in its states don’t go to war with each other. By what we know of ant law, the unrelated ants in unicolonies shouldn’t cooperate. Why should an ant bother to help unrelated ants, since doing so may divert resources from its own relatives? Yet the unrelated ants in a unicolony do cooperate. Thus freed of the internecine battles that normally decimate ant colonies, a unicolony can become far larger than an ordinary ant colony.

 

And they are even more successful than ordinary ant colonies. A unicolony in Arizona made of crazy ants went to war with human beings and won. It invaded Biosphere 2, a two-year, $200 million experiment in creating a sealed and self-sustaining ecosystem. It wiped out all eleven of Biosphere 2’s purposefully introduced species of ants. It also wiped out all of the crickets and grasshoppers. In the end, it took over the entire biosphere, forcing the humans out.

 

“Swarms of them crawled over everything in sight: thick foliage, damp pathways littered with dead leaves and even a bearded ecologist,” reported the New York Times. “The would-be Eden became a nightmare, its atmosphere gone sour, its sea acidic, its crops failing, and many of its species dying off. Among the survivors are crazy ants, millions of them.” The experiment was shut down in total defeat. Another unicolony literally took over Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, killing off 10 to 15 million crabs and a large percentage of the trees and birds.

 

Scientists’ response to unicolonies has been, “They can’t last.” They predict that the ants in different families will eventually stop cooperating, which would make the unicolony break up into ordinary colonies or erupt in a massive war. One researcher writes, “Whereas evolutionary biology can rarely predict where any species is going, it does predict that, despite their short-term ecological success, unicolonial ants are an evolutionary dead end.”

 

Perhaps, but evidence shows the unicolonies are doing pretty well so far. Something peculiar is going on when a collective entity that should collapse in fact takes over islands and wins wars with humans. I’m not seriously suggesting that unicolonies have outstripped current theories by making a leap to a higher evolutionary level, because it may be that some expansion of an existing theory will explain them. Rather, my point is that this is, broadly speaking, the kind of anomaly we might see when any species makes a leap to a higher level.

 

Our perplexity with unicolonies may foreshadow an analogous perplexity with the Internet plus humanity. There may come a day when we start seeing activity on the Internet that simply does not make sense in terms of what we know about hardware, software, and human behavior. We might decide, after much study, that a new form of intelligence is at work.

 

If the Internet plus humanity becomes a hyperorganism, we might see that something very strange is going on. We could collect data, run analyses, and build models. We might figure out that a new entity had come into being. But we would never know its inner life.

But then, we never know each other’s, either.

 

About the Author

Michael Chorost is the author of Rebuilt:

How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (2005).

 

From WORLD WIDE MIND by Michael Chorost.

 

Copyright © 2011 by Michael Chorost. Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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Wikinomics-i4CQuest03.pdf

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Brian_Wang_Technology_5_years.doc

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Also see: The wisdom hierarchy representations of the DIKW hierarchy - Jennifer Rowley, 2007.pdf

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