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From: mckee@starbase.neosoft.com (George McKee)
Newsgroups: bionet.neuroscience,alt.consciousness
Subject: Re: internet and consciousness
Date: 19 Feb 1995 20:38:14 GMT
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Okay, ten cents on consciousness and the Internet:

The internet is a human organization, with high-speed interactions among
its members.  At a mathematical level of abstraction and rigor, most
people (including myself) are mostly clueless about what anyone could
possibly mean by "consciousness" that could apply to an organization.

However, you can look at other organizations with high-speed interactions
among their members.
- Is a symphony orchestra conscious?  Is the orchestra's consciousness
located in the conductor?  What about a string quartet?
- Is the basketball team the Houston Rockets conscious?  Only when
on the court, or all the time?
- Is Major League Baseball conscious?  No, it's in a coma from which it
may never recover fully.

Neurologists have a fairly standard set of tests they perform to determine
they perform when they need to determine (for insurance purposes, or
press announcements) if a patient is conscious or not.  I'm not a
neurologist, and don't have any textbooks handy that tell me what all
these tests are, but they include the ability to answer simple questions,
like "what is your name?", "where are you?", and "what day is today?"
The Internet has the ability to answer questions via posting to
newsgroups, but it doesn't talk about itself, only its users.
You don't have to post "Can you tell me where you are?" or "are you
the Internet?" in news.newusers.questions to know that the followups
won't be "I'm worldwide" and "yes".  And even if you did, you probably
would be skeptical about the truth of the answers.  Unless maybe they
came from Vint Cerf, though you'd probably get some argument on even
that, and you probably wouldn't find him responding to that newsgroup.

I don't think the internet is a unified consciousness.  I don't think
there's any question that it contains millions of interacting
consciousnesses.

        Cheers,
        - George McKee

--
Internet: mckee@neosoft.com
Voice: +1 713 890 8122


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From: kevin@brain (Kevin Hellman)
Newsgroups: bionet.neuroscience,alt.consciousness
Subject: Re: internet and consciousness
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Date: 15 Feb 1995 15:44:05 GMT
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In-reply-to: etabello@agora.carleton.ca's message of Mon, 13 Feb 1995 05:43:04 GMT
Xref: news.production.compuserve.com bionet.neuroscience:1212 alt.consciousness:5661

In article  etabello@agora.carleton.ca (Elias Tabello) writes:

>   I find the theory of collective consciousness can only be grasped
>   intuitively, or by the gut.  But I think that it would be great to be able
>   to measure such phenomena.
>   I think that the internet is cosmically synchronous with an emerging
>   collective consciousness which will be evident without intuitive aid.

  If consciousness is ever to become a science it will have to approached
from an non-intuitive standpoint.  We can approach it philosophically, but
until it has a foundation like cellular biology or physics we will
not be able to develop an atmosphere for the scientific method
to be applied.  It will not be easy to test or measure "consciousness."
In fact, it has demonstrated that it is impossible to develop a test or set of
measures for conciousness (e.g. the Turing test).  Nevertheless, consciousness is not
necessary for an intelligent system.  The internet is a fascinating complex
system... But, as much as it reflects society, it cannot be demonstrated it has
an intentionality.

--
*****************************************************
KEVIN HELLMAN           kevin@head.neurology.wisc.edu
*****************************************************
LAB: (608)-265-5343     University of Wisconsin
                        Neurology & Neural Simulation
*****************************************************
--
*****************************************************
KEVIN HELLMAN           kevin@head.neurology.wisc.edu
*****************************************************
LAB: (608)-265-5343     University of Wisconsin
                        Neurology & Neural Simulation
*****************************************************

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