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Question regarding internet and the mind/body problem...

complexcontext said:
This was posted in the philosophy category...I assumed most would understand the mind/body problem.
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Perhaps he was gently objecting to your referring to 'mind/body' as a problem. It isn't. Mind is an aspect of a functioning brain and is completely determined by that brain. No problem.
 
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Loss Leader said:
Calling the internet a "mind" is reasoning by analogy. Reasoning by analogy is logically faulty and will not necessarily lead to correct deductions.

Other than the fact that it's written in the context of how to teach Sunday school to christian children, this article does a great job of explaining what metaphors are and are not capable of: [see original, I can't post links yet]
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Good point, and good link!
 
phantomb said:
What was the context of this suggestion?

Tachikomas are these spider-like robots able to synchronize data between one another via antenna. This discussion was while their hardware/software was being upgraded, they were talking about what being "upgraded" means, and their interactions with humans.

Even though we lack a comprehensive understanding of consciousness (there exists no theory which, when given a specific brain, can predict what sorts of conscious experiences that brain will produce), the internet is arranged in a pattern so different from the one pattern we know can produce consciousness (the human brain) that I think it's safe to assume that the internet is not a consciousness, or at least that it's not a consciousness that is similar in fundamental ways to our own.

Fair enough

I don't understand the bolded part. Human consciousness is apparently emergent from the human brain. By manipulating the brain you can directly manipulate a person's conscious experiences and even affect their personality. So if the internet is indeed conscious to some degree, that consciousness would no doubt be emergent from the infrastructure that makes up the internet, which would mean that it isn't really generated by humans nor is it distinct from a physical body.

Hmmm...are you implying that the "infrastructure" is a distinct "realm"?

What does it mean for a consciousness to "grow"?
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Depends on how consciousness is defined, but would you agree that new information added to the internet changes it's "state"?
 
complexcontext said:
Depends on how consciousness is defined, but would you agree that new information added to the internet changes it's "state"?
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Sure, but so does fracturing a rock.

It is dependant upon the defintion of consciousness. So which one do you favor?

(I prefer a laundry list approach myself.)
 
It's going to be tricky defining consciousness-- that's a great way of going down a rabbit hole. "Awareness" and "consciousness" are basically synonyms.

So let's dive into it! Personally, I'm not sure that "consciousness" is a useful concept. It might be like the ether before Einstein. We assume that we are conscious and that other things (like rocks, etc.) aren't, but what does that mean? Consciousness may not be a single and is certainly not a simple property. (I suspect I'm agreeing with Dancing David and his "laundry list".)

We should also define what we're talking about with "the internet". For example, are you including search engines as part of the internet, or only the infrastructure? Certainly search engines are achieving results similar to what I would expect from an AI, and often with no further sophistication than Searle's "Chinese Room". Yet I would have a hard time calling them conscious.

I probably have more to say, but let's leave it here for now.
 
Only if we know it's lying, so we need another test anyway.
 
Sledge said:
Only if we know it's lying, so we need another test anyway.
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True. How would we ask? Google? Youtube?

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0001/fngm/index.html
Nat. Geo. said:
Every three years a bioastronomy meeting gathers many of the leading thinkers in the field. I went to the 1999 assemblage in August on the Big Island of Hawaii, and at the opening reception around a hotel pool a University of Toronto sociologist named Allen Tough offered a provocative theory:

“I think a probe is already here. It’s probably been here a long time.”

He didn’t mean flying saucers. His alien probes would be much smaller—“nanoprobes,” tiny robotic exploratory craft sent to Earth from advanced civilizations. The alien probes may, at some point, let themselves be known to human civilization. How? Where? “I think it will happen on the World Wide Web,” said Tough.
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So even if we did get an answer, it might be aliens trying to trick us!
 
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Reasons why the Internet may become conscious:

  1. It's really complicated.
  2. er...
 
I believe that few of us here at JREF would dispute as fact the theory that us humans, complete with hands, livers, kneecaps, brains and minds, became what we became through Darwinian evolution. Therefore, most of us would strongly suspect that our mind (regardless of definition - just assuming we agree that we have a mind) evolved through a process of inheriting genetical properties, sexual mixing, occasional random mutation and non-random natural selection.

The internet as a whole is so far an individual that's probably somewhere near infancy still. As far as I can see it has not yet spun generations of children and grandchildren that were tested in an environment that selected for better and better properties of "mind".

Also, no one designed the internet to have a mind.

Therefore I find it unlikely in the extreme that the internet has a mind or will develop one in the foreseeable future.
 
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