Today I find myself musing on the connections between consciousness and networks. So their is a network called the Internet, connecting biological hub of humans, which also of course, has its own biological network. So humans and the Internet could represent an example of the intersection of two different network types. Well maybe, maybe not.
Or, is there some kind of natural evolution of networks going on, perhaps with a connection to consciousness? So once a network type reaches some level of consciousness, here it might be a biological network, it begets a new network type that treats the previous networks hubs, as just normal nodes, and creates a new network, with new hubs, and ta-da, imparts the new network with a "higher" consciousness. Well maybe, maybe not.
Or, the distinction between biology and technology is meaningless, it is all the same, and the Internet just represents a physical manifestation of a higher consciousness that we are not, and perhaps can not, be aware of, that is busy procreating itself by shooting itself into space, just like the whirligigs I wrote about in my second post. Perhaps this belief that we are acting on our own, is simply an evolutionary necessity, since if we believed anything else, it might alter our behavior, and screw up the system.
I had a chance to watch the the physicist Mark Buchanan give a presentation to Microsoft Research recently. Mark is what I would call a social physicist, trained in classical physics, but intrigued by the similarities between physics and collective human behavior, as am I (though I am not a physicist, just a creative dyslexic). As often is the case in presentations, one of the key points came in the Q&A, when one of the MS researches asked about whether or not awareness would change the outcome in one of the many experiments Mark had been siting, and he answered yes, but he didn't know how it would change the outcome. So unawareness maybe be a key requirement here.
Or, is there some kind of natural evolution of networks going on, perhaps with a connection to consciousness? So once a network type reaches some level of consciousness, here it might be a biological network, it begets a new network type that treats the previous networks hubs, as just normal nodes, and creates a new network, with new hubs, and ta-da, imparts the new network with a "higher" consciousness. Well maybe, maybe not.
Or, the distinction between biology and technology is meaningless, it is all the same, and the Internet just represents a physical manifestation of a higher consciousness that we are not, and perhaps can not, be aware of, that is busy procreating itself by shooting itself into space, just like the whirligigs I wrote about in my second post. Perhaps this belief that we are acting on our own, is simply an evolutionary necessity, since if we believed anything else, it might alter our behavior, and screw up the system.
I had a chance to watch the the physicist Mark Buchanan give a presentation to Microsoft Research recently. Mark is what I would call a social physicist, trained in classical physics, but intrigued by the similarities between physics and collective human behavior, as am I (though I am not a physicist, just a creative dyslexic). As often is the case in presentations, one of the key points came in the Q&A, when one of the MS researches asked about whether or not awareness would change the outcome in one of the many experiments Mark had been siting, and he answered yes, but he didn't know how it would change the outcome. So unawareness maybe be a key requirement here.
Leave a comment