Twitter and the Global Brain
© 2009 Dean Pomerleau
An essay linking the nervous system and the global network.
My comments follow.
Interesting but flawed.
Collaborative filtering like this already exists. Even if twitter developed CF exactly as described it would not mean it was a conscious global brain, or that it it was not!
Perhaps the Net is already conscious?
Consciousness is a tricky notion. Are animals conscious? Robots? Other people?
Is consciousness a wave or a particle?
The world right now is evidence based mad, yet I know what I am thinking and that is totally private, not measurable, strange. I know I am conscious, but I can’t prove it.
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Yes a machine can light up in response to my thoughts but it will never know I am thinking of a tricorn, a new thing like a unicorn with three horns. I doubt it will even know when I think of a red brick.
Consciousness is right here in front of us, but it can’t be equated with brain function.
My talk here is all imprecise, meaningless muddle, the millennia of discussion in the field of the philosophy of mind has never really licked this stuff.
Quantum physics might? Quantum psychology? Zen?
What would happen to the Twitter global brain if we gave it LSD?