World Wide Brain 323

12 World Wide Brain 323

Yes. This is why the Principia Cybernetica project came into being. Our goal is to develop—on the basis of the current state of affairs in science and tech- nology—a complete philosophy to serve as the verbal, conceptual part of a new consciousness.

My optimistic scenario is that a major calamity will happen to humanity as a result of the militant individualism, terrible enough to make drastic change neces- sary, but, hopefully, still mild enough not to result in total destruction. Then what we are trying to do will have a chance to become prevalent. But possible solutions must be carefully prepared.

More positive than Turchin or Russell, though less so than Stock, the physi-

cist Gottfried Mayer-Kress expressed the view that, perhaps, the global brain itself [AU3] might represent the solution to the problems of individual human consciousness, rather than merely transplanting these problems onto a different level:

I thought a coherent world civilization was what we expect to emerge from a GlobalBrain.… For example, on a global scale it is still cheaper for most nations to choose to pollute the environment and waste energy. In a GlobalBrain world China would recognize that it is better not to introduce large-scale individual transportation (cars) and Brazil would fi nd it better for its own economy not to destroy the rainforest.

Regarding the “cancer” metaphor, Meyer-Kress observes that even an “embryonic global brain” would be a coherent global structure and thereby directly contradict the basic defi nition of cancer. I would see the cancer analogy more as the global spread of a drug culture. Essentially, Mayer-Kress’s point is as follows: Saying that humans are “individualistic” is the same as saying that humans represent the “top level” of a hierarchy of systems. An individualistic system is just one that has more freedom than the systems within it, or the systems in which it is contained. Cells within individual organisms are individualistic only to a limited extent; they are behaving within the constraints of the organism. Cells that make up single- celled organisms, on the other hand, are far more individualistic; they have more freedom than the systems of which they are parts.

The global brain, according to Mayer-Kress, is almost synonymous with the decrease of human individualism. We will still have individual freedom, but more and more, it will be in the context of the constraints imposed by a greater organism. And so, in this view, Russell’s idea that the global brain might inherit the problems caused by human “self-centeredness” is self-contradictory. The global brain, once it emerges, will be the top-level system and will be individualistic—but, as Russell himself notes, the nature of its individualism will be quite “inhuman” in nature.

Mayer-Kress, in this post, did not address the question of whether the global brain would be sane or insane in itself; rather, he defused the question by breaking the chain of reasoning leading from human neurosis to global brain neurosis. In my own reply to Russell’s message, on the other hand, an attempt was made to take the

324 Ben Goertzel

bull by the horns and answer the question: What would it even mean for a global Web brain to be insane?

About sanity or insanity. Surely, these are sociocultural rather than psycho- logical concepts. However, they can be projected into the individual mind due to the multiplicity of the self. An insane person in a society is someone who does not “fi t in” to the societal mindset, because their self-model and their reality-model differ too far from the consensus. In the same vein, if one accepts the multiplicity of the individual self (Rowan, 1990), one fi nds that in many “insane” people, the different parts of the personality do not “fi t in” right with each other. So the jarring of world-models that characterized the insane person in a culture is also present within the mind of the insane person. Because, of course, the self and mind are formed by mirroring the outside!

What does this mean for the global brain? View the global brain as a dis- tributed system with many “subpersonalities.” Then, the question is not whether it is sane with respect to some outside culture, but whether it is sane with respect to itself (a trickier thing to judge, no doubt). Do the different components of the global brain network all deal with each other in a mutually understanding way, or are they “talking past” each other?

A key point to remember here is that the global brain can be, to a large extent, real-time engineered by humans and AI agents. So that, if any kind of “insanity” is detected, attempts can be made to repair it on the fl y. We are not yet able to do this sort of thing with human brains, except in the very crudest ways (drugs, removing tumors, etc.).

The belief I expressed in this post is that the sanity of the global Web brain is an engineering problem. By designing Web software intelligently, we can encour- age the various parts of the global Web brain to interact with each other in a har- monious way—the hallmark of true sanity. The various neuroses of human mind and culture will be in there—but they will be subordinate to a higher level of sanely and smoothly self-organizing structure.

The biggest potential hang-up, in this view, is the possibility that forces in human society may intervene to prevent the software engineering of the Web mind from being done in an intelligent way. Perhaps it may come about that a maximally profi table Web mind and a maximally sane Web mind are two different things. In this case, we will be caught in a complex feedback system. The saner the Web mind, the saner the global brain of humanity, the less likely the forces of greed will be to take over the Web mind itself.

One thing is noteworthy about this particular thread on the Global Brain Study Group: In spite of our disagreements on details, everyone in the Study Group seems to concur that a healthy, sane global brain would be a good thing. An alter- native view was given by Paulo Garrido in a message on the Principia Cybernetica mailing list, forwarded by Heylighen to the Global Brain Study Group. Garrido made the remark that if human society becomes an independent organism in and