Global Mind
[The article below is dense enough to give me a headache, but among the abstruse and intensely complicated conceptualizations, there are some interesting nuggest. In particular, the pointer to the Global Consciousness Project got my attention. Demonstrates that reality is wilder than Science Fiction. My now deceased partner, Chris Schefler, was really into the whole Global Mind thing… as the “Gaia” site he put together ages and ages ago demonstrates. -Thomas]
Minding the Planet: From Semantic Web to Global Mind
by Nova Spivack
INTRODUCTION
This article presents some thoughts about the future of intelligence on Earth. In particular, I discuss the similarities between the Internet and the brain, and how I believe the emerging Semantic Web will make this similarity even greater. I also add a few notes about how my company, Radar Networks, approaches the Semantic Web, and some of the key concepts, such as the use of Knowledge Objects and Knowledge Networks, in our forthcoming Semantic Applications Platform which will be released as LGPL in mid 2005. This article is not a technical article, nor is it a product brochure — rather it is just my (admittedly optimistic) view of the big-picture future of the Internet and the significance of the Semantic Web.
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Another project that takes a completely different approach is the Global Consciousness Project which mines statistical deviations from randomness across a network of random number generators around the world and then correlates these deviations with global events — nobody knows why this works but the statistical data speaks for itself (this project may in fact point to yet another interesting connection between consciousness and quantum physics, similar to the famous double-slit experiment but on a global scale, but nobody really knows — all we know so far is that the data is sound.) This project might be described as an EEG for the planet. While it cannot provide insight into particular thoughts taking place in the global mind, it does provide a window into the activation and dynamics of the global mind.
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
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