RE: Does it make sense to speak of "Universal Consciousness" or "Universal Intelligence"?
May 12, 2014 at 10:44 pm
Let me take this further-- as devil's advocate only.
We know mind exists, because here we are. Whether we believe in substance dualism or not, it's clear that the minds we have are somehow related the brain, specifically the flow of information among the cells of the brain. Well, we have a complex flow of information among people, especially on the internet. It's possible to think of humanity now as a unified entity in some degree, as we are (almost) all interfaced through the internet-- our ideas, preferences, changing beliefs, etc. are represented in that context. Somehow, the Internet has an identity of its own that transcends our own reality.
So is the Internet a living thing? Does it have its own awareness, somehow greater than the sum of the individual human minds which contribute to it? I think somehow you could say it does. While some individuals contribute greatly to certain causes, there's a kind of cloud processing there which produces actual results that nobody could predict. In that sense, we are tools of the Internet rather than vice versa.
We know mind exists, because here we are. Whether we believe in substance dualism or not, it's clear that the minds we have are somehow related the brain, specifically the flow of information among the cells of the brain. Well, we have a complex flow of information among people, especially on the internet. It's possible to think of humanity now as a unified entity in some degree, as we are (almost) all interfaced through the internet-- our ideas, preferences, changing beliefs, etc. are represented in that context. Somehow, the Internet has an identity of its own that transcends our own reality.
So is the Internet a living thing? Does it have its own awareness, somehow greater than the sum of the individual human minds which contribute to it? I think somehow you could say it does. While some individuals contribute greatly to certain causes, there's a kind of cloud processing there which produces actual results that nobody could predict. In that sense, we are tools of the Internet rather than vice versa.
