(this is my final paper for cybernetics class and for graduate school. it is a theoretical metalogue between myself and gregory bateson. many of his phrases and passages are pulled directly from the book Steps To An Ecology of Mind)

vm: i want to understand the ecology of mind, how it works. I want to understand how technology is accelerating intentional evolution, and what the Web is becoming… a collective intelligence? a global mind? a path to destruction? How do you propose i begin?

gb: You certainly are full of questions.

vm: Yeah, it’s a curse. I’m insatiable.

gb: Perhaps, but an exploration of mind and self is a worthy endeavor. To begin, we might say that in creative art man must experience himself – his total self – as a cybernetic model.

vm: Please explain.

gb: We are complex, self-corrective systems. As a simplified example, take a steam engine. It is simply a circular train of causal events, regulating itself to maintain some type of status quo. It is the same principle for processes of civilization, or human behavior, human organization, or any biological system. We check for irregularities, and correct against internal disturbance… keeping the system in balance. Continue reading →

This is part 5 in a 12 part series.

:: conscious awareness ::

A recent article in the New York Times, Building One Big Brain,  prompted me to write up the next skill in this 12 part series. The piece quotes Nicholas Carr’s opinions about how the Internet is reducing the “capacity for concentration and contemplation,” scattering our attention and reducing our ability to focus.

It goes on to posit that “technology is weaving humans into electronic webs that resemble big brains.” (It’s nice to see this concept going mainstream… we talked about that idea here last November in the ‘Twitter’s Intelligent, Welcome to Web 3.0” post ). The next stage in the line of thinking is that this process is part of our species evolution:

Could it be that, in some sense, the point of evolution – both the biological evolution that created an intelligent species and the technological evolution that a sufficiently intelligent species is bound to unleash – has been to create these social brains, and maybe even to weave them into a giant, loosely organized planetary brain? Kind of in the way that the point of the maturation of an organism is to create an adult organism? Continue reading →