Wednesday, January 9, 2008

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.

No comments: