Does it make sense to speak of "Universal Consciousness" or "Universal Intelligence"?

[MindForgedManacle]

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.

This is why you shouldn't advocate for the Devil; he makes you say silly shit.


Firstly, as you say, our ideas, beliefs, etc., are represented - or rather, encoded - on the Internet. It doesn't have an identity in the sense that we mean when we say an "agent" has identity. The internet is basically just a bunch of web servers connected by massive cables run through tubes all over the planet. But the cables and servers are, for wont of a better term, inert, not responsive to external stimuli, they don't maintain a sort of homeostasis autonomously. It certainly doesn't transcend our reality, it's one entirely of our own creation; I'm adding to it now in fact. :p

Secondly, what are you talking about? We, as you say, contribute to it. We are not a part of it in the way our brains are for us. It's merely a medium of communication; just think of it as a bigger version of the "connect two cans with a string to talk longer distances" thing kids do sometimes. The only real difference is that instead of using the vibration of strings to carry the information of our messages to the connected party, we use webservers to encode and store information via server-side programming languages, to be retrieved as requested.
I'm not really getting what you mean. What does the internet do autonomously that we have no expressly and demonstrably set it up to do? What sort of emergent phenomena can you point to, to show that's the case?

---

Stephen Hawking had some interesting things to say about computer viruses in one of his lectures.

Life In The Universe

For example, a computer virus is a program that will make copies of itself in the memory of a computer, and will transfer itself to other computers. Thus it fits the definition of a living system, that I have given. Like a biological virus, it is a rather degenerate form, because it contains only instructions or genes, and doesn't have any metabolism of its own. Instead, it reprograms the metabolism of the host computer, or cell. Some people have questioned whether viruses should count as life, because they are parasites, and can not exist independently of their hosts. But then most forms of life, ourselves included, are parasites, in that they feed off and depend for their survival on other forms of life. I think computer viruses should count as life. Maybe it says something about human nature, that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. Talk about creating life in our own image. I shall return to electronic forms of life later on.

Even if computer viruses can be counted as some kind of life there's no evidence, as yet, that they'll result in the internet evolving consciousness.

Maybe it's unfair of me to say this since I don't know the full contextm but I don't think Hawking knows what he's talking about there. With the way he presents his argument in your quote, you might as well say that ideas and beliefs are life. After all, they cannot exist without a host, they (especially deeply held ones) get their hosts to spread them to others,

I get the same vibe from that Hawking quote (especially from the end of it) as I do when I hear Krauss say that the universe came from "nothing": It just seems like he's trying too hard to be provocative.