| The article "Evolving the Global Brain" was thought-provoking, especially in the context of our discussion about the history of information and the exponentially increasing amount of information for humanity to gather/produce, process, curate, archive. It's an attractive concept, that human society is structurally similar to a brain, and that an individual is a neuron. (If humanity is the brain, I suppose the rest of the Earth is the body. We're not doing too well as the self-appointed brain of the operation.) My first reaction to the analogy of "endocrinal" (one-to-many) and "neural" (many-to-many) decision making, is that it's missing a primal psychological/biological motivation of humans to seek to dominate others of its own kind as well as all of nature. I'm not familiar enough with biology to say definitively, but I'm pretty sure the endocrinal system does not actively seek to subjugate the neural system (or vice versa) and dominate the whole body. Social organization, it seems to me, is more a function of power, very small groups gaining advantage and dominance over vastly larger groups of people, than that of collaboration for mutual benefit. (I might be a bit too cynical of political motivations and authentic democracy these days.) From the final paragraph: > ..the current global brain is only tenuously linked to the organs of international power. Political, economic and military power remains insulated from the global brain, and powerful individuals can be expected to cling tightly to the endocrine model of control and information exchange. I'd disagree with this, and say that the global brain (if we mean the Internet and its empowerment of globally networked intelligence) was born from the wombs of "political, economic and military power". It never achieved escape velocity to become a truly free, autonomous and collaborative, neural model of decision making. To backtrack a bit: > Well-connected collective entities like Google and Wikipedia will play the role of brainstem nuclei to which all other information nexuses must adapt. The most powerfully well-connected collective entities are international political/financial/corporate entities, and indeed do they more or less dictate how all information nexuses (nexii?) must adapt. One biological analogy that comes to mind, is how propaganda and "disinformation" act like neurotoxins in the social brain, introducing noise/entropy, skewing its coherence, and preventing well-informed and orchestrated cooperation. Another is how established political powers have a well-developed "immune system", composed of mass media, legal structures, military/police force, surveillance of the public. This immune system could be seen at work, for example, at the environmental protests at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. The final sentence of the article: > This formidable design task is left up to us. By this I assume the author means, evolving the global brain. Quite a challenge! From my perspective, it's going to be a historic struggle: design or be designed. |