Philosphy of the Internet...Maybe.

[H Caulfield]

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.

[hot_pastrami]

I really need to NOT reply to your posts, HC... to an armchair philosopher such as myself, they are highly distracting from work. But, I must reply. I have no choice. I will be brief.

It sounds a bit like you're pondering whether the Internet has a mind, awareness, and/or sentience. I've gotta go with No. The Internet is not capable of pondering it's own existence, and to me, self-awareness is a prerequisite to sentience.

The Internet's best analogy is of a very large community. It is made up of many sentient, communicating individuals, but the community itself is not a sentient being. Salt Lake City is not a sentient being, though it may appear to behave as one if I step back and look at it from a distance, blurring it's individual parts.

You can only stretch a word's definition so far before you should acknowledge that it's not the word you're looking for. Such is the case with the word "living" here. The Internet is more than the sum of it's part due solely to the human contribution. Left to it's own devices, if the humans abandoned it, it would become a lifeless shell, just as an abandoned city would.

[Undertoad]

Just like Usenet!

[H Caulfield]

Tazo,
You're most convincing Pastrami. I think you're pretty much right on there. In terms of the future of the 'net, and what the progress god bestows upon it, I suppose any sentience relates to AI, Rodney Brookes type stuff.

I kinda dig the holographic thing though. Holograms rock. You know, Carl Pribram now has a theory saying the human brain stores memories holographically all across the organ...

Adam

[Elspode]

Required reading for the pragmatist philosphers among us:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...lance&n=507846

[Torrere]

Huh? I thought that the "long-term memory is holographic" idea was old, or am I mistaking an old idea for a new one?

The internet is an environment; and it is a society. It is a set of protocols, and a set of nodes which interact in accordance to those protocols.

Alas, I can't contribute much because that's what Alan already said.

I became lost as I wrote this post, and forgot entirely what you were talking about, in regards to holograms. I've re-read your post, and I think that the answer is no.

Another way to approach the question is to examine herds or flocks. Some flocks can be very advanced. Are they more than the sum of their parts (and not in a holographic way).

Another interesting question is: what happens when the wildlife (programs, worms, virii) attains sundry thresholds of becoming more advanced. Eg; The virus writers have all been working on propagation. At some point soon, someone will be able to make a Curious Yellow worm (I refer to it in the sense of worms whose methods of propagation can be changed). What is the net going to look like when worms (or various other programs) are self-modifying, and can change their methods of propagation?