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Tuesday, May 27, 2008

"We are faced with..."

We are faced with a harmonized collectivity of consciousnesses to a sort of superconciousness. The earth not only becoming covered by myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope, a single unanimous reflection.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)

«[French Jesuit scientist and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin] believes that because human beings are self-reflective ... they constitute a new sphere of existence on earth; the sphere of thought, or the noosphere. The continued consolidation of all human thought into the noosphere is noogenesis. It is a continual increase in thought and consciousness brought about by the increased socialization of mankind on earth. As human beings continue to socialize, ... the more complex systems of communication and exchange they will form, thus increasing the consciousness of the noosphere. ...

Teilhard imagines that noogenesis will eventually reach a critical point of consciousness, brought about by a maximum tension of human socialization. This critical point will serve to detach consciousness from time and space and to converge on omega point.»
Wikipedia - Noogenesis

 

«Collective intelligence is a form of intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals. Collective intelligence appears in a wide variety of forms of consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans, and computers.»
Wikipedia - Collective Intelligence

 

«The Global Brain is a metaphor for the intelligent network formed by humans together with the knowledge and communication technologies that connect them.»
Wikipedia - Global Brain

 

«Metaman is the name given by the author Gregory Stock to the concept of a superorganism comprising mankind and his technology. It is close to, but not the same as, the concept of the Global brain.

While many people have had ideas about a global brain, they have tended to suppose that this can be improved or altered by man according to his will. Metaman can be seen as a development that directs mankind’s will to its own ends, whether he likes it or not, through the operation of market forces. While it is difficult to think of making a life-form based on metals that can mine its own ’food’, it is possible to imagine a superorganism that incorporates men as its ’cells’ and entices them to sustain it (communalness), just as our cells interwork to sustain us.»
Wikipedia - Metaman

 

«In sociology, the social organism is theoretical concept in which a society or social structure is viewed as a “living organism”.»
Wikipedia - Social Organism

 

«Mass hysteria, also called collective hysteria, mass psychogenic illness, or collective obsessional behavior, is the sociopsychological phenomenon of the manifestation of the same or similar hysterical symptoms by more than one person. A common manifestation of mass hysteria occurs when a group of people believe they are suffering from a similar disease or ailment.»
Wikipedia - Collective Hysteria

 

«World Brain is the title of a book of essays by English author H.G. Wells, written in 1938 ...

The essay “The Brain Organization of the Modern World” lays out Wells’ vision for “...a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared."»
Wikipedia - World Brain

 

«Crowd psychology, or social facilitation theory, is a branch of social psychology. Ordinary people can typically gain direct power by acting collectively. Historically, because large groups of people have been able to bring about dramatic and sudden social change in a manner that bypasses established due process, they have also provoked controversy. Social scientists have developed several different theories for explaining crowd psychology, and the ways in which the psychology of the crowd differs significantly from the psychology of those individuals within it. Carl Jung coined the notion of the Collective unconscious.»
Wikipedia - Crowd Psychology

 

«Herd behaviour describes how individuals in a group can act together without planned direction. The term pertains to the behaviour of animals in herds, flocks, and schools, and to human conduct during activities such as stock market bubbles and crashes, street demonstrations, sporting events, episodes of mob violence and even everyday decision making, judgement and opinion forming.»
Wikipedia - Herd Behavior

 

«Collective effervescence ... is a perceived energy formed by a gathering of people as might be experienced at a sporting event, a carnival, a rave, or a riot. This energy can cause people to act differently than in their everyday life.»
Wikipedia - Collective Efferverscence

 

«Swarm intelligence .... is artificial intelligence based on the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems. The expression was introduced by Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems ...

SI systems are typically made up of a population of simple agents interacting locally with one another and with their environment. The agents follow very simple rules, and although there is no centralized control structure dictating how individual agents should behave, local interactions between such agents lead to the emergence of complex global behavior. Natural examples of SI include ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, bacterial growth, and fish schooling.»
Wikipedia - Swarm Intelligence

 

«The term “collective behavior” was first used by Robert E. Park, and employed definitively by Herbert Blumer, to refer to social processes and events which do not reflect existing social structure (laws, conventions, and institutions), but which emerge in a “spontaneous” way.»
Wikipedia - Collective Behavior

 

«The Gaia hypothesis is an ecological hypothesis that proposes that living and nonliving parts of the earth are a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism. Named after the Greek earth goddess, this hypothesis postulates that all living things have a regulatory effect on the Earth’s environment that promotes life overall.»
Wikipedia - Gaia Hypothesis

 

«Mass collaboration is a form of collective action that occurs when large numbers of people work independently on a single project, often modular in its nature.»
Wikipedia - Mass Collaboration

 

«In philosophy, systems theory and the sciences, emergence refers to the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.»
Wikipedia - Emergence

 

«Groupthink is a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. During groupthink, members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of consensus thinking. A variety of motives for this may exist such as a desire to avoid being seen as foolish, or a desire to avoid embarrassing or angering other members of the group. Groupthink may cause groups to make hasty, irrational decisions, where individual doubts are set aside, for fear of upsetting the group’s balance.»
Wikipedia - Groupthink

 

«A smart mob is a form of self-structuring social organization through technology-mediated, intelligent emergent behavior.»
Wikipedia - Smart Mob

 

«Some transhumanists argue on the basis of the accelerating technological development inherent in The Law of Accelerating Returns, that within 20-140 years into the future we will arrive at what Vernor Vinge called a technological singularity or “prediction wall” in which humans will be semi-aware components of a computerised social structure of such complexity that no one person or group of persons can understand more than a tiny fraction of the whole.»
Wikipedia - Omega Point as a reference for technological singularity

 

«A group mind or group ego in science fiction is a single consciousness occupying many bodies. Its use in literature goes back at least as far as Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, a 1930 science fiction novel ... A group mind might be formed by telepathy, by adding brain-to-brain communication to ordinary individuals, or by some unspecified means. This term may be used interchangeably with “hive mind”. A hive mind is a group mind with almost complete loss (or lack) of individual identity; most fictional group minds are hives. The concept of the group or hive mind is an intelligent version of real-life superorganisms such as ants or bees.»
Wikipedia - Group Mind

 

«A superorganism is an organism consisting of many organisms.»
Wikipedia - Superorganism

 

«A Posthuman God is a hypothetical future entity descended from or created by humans, but possessing capabilities so radically exceeding those of present humans as to appear godlike.

One common variation of this idea is the belief or aspiration that humans will create a God entity emerging from an artificial intelligence. Another variant is the hypothesis that humanity will create or evolve into a posthuman God by itself»
Wikipedia - Posthuman God

[This post is GNU licensed. Content from Wikipedia except beginning quote. Emphasis mine. Hat tip to Siggi.]

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