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H Caulfield · 10-29-2003, 02:18 PM

Tazo everyone,

I've recently become most facinated in the philosophical ideas of what the Internet is...is it a living creature, or a psuedo-living creature? Is it just another system of information cycling? Is it an extention of each conscious input from everyone who uses it?

My thoughts of late have tended toward this: that the Internet can best (and most interestingly!) be modelled as a holographic manifestation of each and every person who uses it.

Why holographic? Well, here's the interesting thing about holograms: say you have a 3D holographic image. One small part of that image has the information encoded in it to reconstruct the entire 3D image--it's a product of how the lasers reflecting off of the source image come together. So if you had a 3D hologram of a dog. The dog hologram was made such that if all of the hologram dissapeared except, say, a bit of it's hair, that little piece of hologram has all the information necessary to reconstruct the entire dog image.

Now, consider the internet as the full 3D dog image. The information comes not from lasers bouncing off of the source image and interacting, but from the consciousness of each person who logs on and does stuff. Consider here that a person's experience online is shaped by what others have done online--websites they've built, ideas they've posted on forums, colors that they decided to use, etc, etc. And even their decision to post the website, or word something the way they did, was influenced by someone else.

So to the best of my vision, it works out that every piece of information online is characterized by the characteristics of every other piece. Certainly some more than others; were talking about influences so small as to be considered practically negligable, but still, they're there.

So...yes: all information on the 'net is stored as 1's or 0's, we all know. But more tangibly than that, each 1 or 0 state is represented by a small electric "switch," wee little magnetic switches on hard drives. So, the internet's composition is actually all physical, material things.

Or is it?

With the above in mind, is the Internet more than the sum of it's parts? Is abstract information derrived from the states of countless physical switches, greater than those very switches?

What do you guys think?
Adam.

10-29-2003, 02:18 PM	#1
H Caulfield Non-Newbie Sort Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: Grand Junction, CO, USA Posts: 6	Philosphy of the Internet...Maybe. Tazo everyone, I've recently become most facinated in the philosophical ideas of what the Internet is...is it a living creature, or a psuedo-living creature? Is it just another system of information cycling? Is it an extention of each conscious input from everyone who uses it? My thoughts of late have tended toward this: that the Internet can best (and most interestingly!) be modelled as a holographic manifestation of each and every person who uses it. Why holographic? Well, here's the interesting thing about holograms: say you have a 3D holographic image. One small part of that image has the information encoded in it to reconstruct the entire 3D image--it's a product of how the lasers reflecting off of the source image come together. So if you had a 3D hologram of a dog. The dog hologram was made such that if all of the hologram dissapeared except, say, a bit of it's hair, that little piece of hologram has all the information necessary to reconstruct the entire dog image. Now, consider the internet as the full 3D dog image. The information comes not from lasers bouncing off of the source image and interacting, but from the consciousness of each person who logs on and does stuff. Consider here that a person's experience online is shaped by what others have done online--websites they've built, ideas they've posted on forums, colors that they decided to use, etc, etc. And even their decision to post the website, or word something the way they did, was influenced by someone else. So to the best of my vision, it works out that every piece of information online is characterized by the characteristics of every other piece. Certainly some more than others; were talking about influences so small as to be considered practically negligable, but still, they're there. So...yes: all information on the 'net is stored as 1's or 0's, we all know. But more tangibly than that, each 1 or 0 state is represented by a small electric "switch," wee little magnetic switches on hard drives. So, the internet's composition is actually all physical, material things. Or is it? With the above in mind, is the Internet more than the sum of it's parts? Is abstract information derrived from the states of countless physical switches, greater than those very switches? What do you guys think? Adam.