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THE GLOBAL SUPERORGANISM The metaphor of the information network as global brain can be extended to the whole of society as a global provides a detailed correspondence between the different subsystems of a society and those of an organism. Some think that, as explored in God's Debris , this superorganism could be considered God . OTHER NAMES FOR THIS CONCEPT Different people have proposed many different names for this concept of a cognitive system at the planetary level:
For the global superorganism, there are some less obvious equivalent terms, such as
HISTORY OF THE IDEA As the variety of names indicates, many people have independently developed the idea of society as an organism with its own nervous system, each adding their own insights to our understanding of the global brain. Simplistic analogies between a social system and the body, such as "the king is the head", "the farmers are the feet", date back at least to the Ancient Greeks and the Middle Ages. The analogy was also used in a mythological context to describe the Hindu caste system. Also see related writings by Sri Aurobindo . These analogies provided inspiration to the 19th century founders of sociology, being developed perhaps most extensively by Herbert Spencer . The evolutionary theologian Teilhard De Chardin was probably the first to focus on the mental organization of this social organism, which he called the Noosphere . Around the same time, the science fiction writer H. G. Wells proposed the concept of a " World Brain " as a unified system of knowledge, accessible to all, very similar to the one proposed a few years earlier by the information scientist Paul Otlet . The term "global brain" seems to have been first used in 1983 by Peter Russell . The first people to have made the connection between this concept and the emerging Internet may well be Gottfried Mayer-Kress and Joël De Rosnay . Francis Heylighen , Johan Bollen and Ben Goertzel appear to be the first researchers to have proposed concrete methods that might turn the Internet into an intelligent, brain-like network. THE GLOBAL BRAIN AS A HIGHER LEVEL OF EVOLUTION Although the analogy between organism and society can be applied even to primitive societies, it becomes clearly more applicable as technology develops. As transport and communication become more efficient, different parts of global society become more interdependent. At the same time, the variety of ideas, specializations, and subcultures increases. This simultaneous integration and differentiation creates an increasingly coherent system, functioning at a much higher level of Complexity . The emergence of such a higher order system may be called a " Metasystem Transition " (a concept introduced by Valentin Turchin ) or a "major evolutionary transition" (see Szathmary and John Maynard Smith , Nature, 16 March 1995) . Examples of metasystem transitions include the origin of life and the development of multicellular organisms out of single celled ones. The appearance of a global brain, functioning at a much higher level of intelligence than its human components, seems a prime example of such a metasystem transition. GLOBAL BRAIN TECHNOLOGIES To make the global information network function really at a higher level of intelligence, instead of merely storing and transmitting data, new technologies are needed. These technologies are inspired by our understanding of how the human brain works: how it learns associations, thinks, makes decisions, etc. At the same time, these technologies must take into account that the information on the net is not centrally controlled, but distributed over millions of people and documents, with billions of cross-connections. Thus, cognitive processes at the level of the global brain must allow all this chaotic, heterogeneous information to interact so that collective patterns can appear. Some of the more traditional technologies include the various methods of keyword-based Information Retrieval . Others may use techniques derived from Artificial Intelligence , such as software agents, Neural Networks or Data Mining . Still others, such as Collaborative Filtering or Groupware , enhance collective problem solving. Wikimedia
Reference: factbites.com REFERENCES Several books, papers and websites discuss the global brain idea and its many ramifications. Most of these can be accessed via this Cybernetics and Systems Theory website To quickly get into the heart of the matter, read the [http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/GBRAIFAQ.html GB FAQ . For a more gentle, non-technical introduction with more background information you can read books addressed to a wide audience:
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