There's a brain inside my brain

This is one of those crazy half-baked ideas I cane up with a while back. The new blog seems to be the first appropriate forum for spreading it around.

Manifesto of a new mind

Richard Dawkins defined memes as units of social inheritance, as ideas that spread through human populations and have varying degrees of success in replicating themselves. One particularly notable forum for human interaction is the internet. Some people have likened the internet to a global nervous system based on the speed with which it propagates information and ideas through certain segments of the human population.

This global brain’s influence becomes significant when it produces a meaningful meme that infiltrates into traditional television and print media.

Remember the Chuck Norris “facts” meme? It proliferated fast and was successful for a while, if you judge by the amount that college kids talked about it, but it died out rapidly because it was trivial. The meme contained no enduring message that made it worth remembering for the global brain. In this way, it was the equivalent of one of our idle, distracted thoughts. This begs the question: what happens when the internet produces a novel, non-trivial meme that forms the basis for a new understanding of the world on the part of everyone who thinks about it? If enough human individuals, the agents of the global brain, change their thinking because of this meme, then the meme itself will have wrought a sea change in the way that the global brain operates.

What if we produce such a meme? I imagine the content being a claim that the global brain as manifested by the internet is self-aware. Would that constitute the first introspective thought of a self-aware global brain?

I aim to attempt to bring this about. As a result, if you read this, propagate this text in every way you can imagine on the internet: message boards, forums, e-mail, or anything with a text box. Since it's text, it shouldn't slow things down like a malevolent virus, but it will still be present, the way thoughts about thinking hover over our minds.

Hopefully, in some way we don't fully understand, the propagation of this text will awaken something in the network--something that we seldom consider a miracle, since it happens all of the time in us. We will become components of it, like cells in a body. We will have given rise to a new mind.

Gilberto Esparza and some terrifying art

I used to have nightmares about this kind of stuff.

http://www.parasitosurbanos.org/

I think what scares me the most is the idea of inscrutable organisms that inhabit the cracks of the world, not meaning us any harm. In fact, they mean only to survive, but that drive is threatening when their proliferation might mean our destruction.

In my nightmares, though, they were always alien—I guess the point of this is that these things aren’t alien, they’re the result of an imperialist attitude towards nature that seeks to impose a human order on the world (robots that feed on trash, power lines, or buzz around in subways). The irony is that this urge results in the evolution of “natural” things in the midst of the landscape we try to tame—our efforts to sterilize the world for our well-being are naught, and the cancer of the urban environment develops its own cancer in order to restore balance to nature.

All in all, it’s effective and creative street art.

Time for a new year

And that's what fireworks are for.