Web Space, Web Mind

AKMA continues his quest for a non-spatial metaphor for the Web. He wonders if the Web isn’t “a mind that we are building from the ground up.” AKMA is uncomfortable with the spatial metaphor because space is so familiar and the fit is so inexact that the metaphor may blind us to what is truly different about the Web. He likes the mind metaphor better because:

…we would be comparing something we’re only just beginning to apprehend (the Web) with something we’ve been misapprehending for millennia (the mind).

Nicely put, as always.

Given Akma’s misgivings about the spatial metaphor, I think he likes the mind metaphor not because we misapprehend the mind but because we are less certain of our understanding of the mind than we are of space, so we are less likely to fall into old habits of thought if we compare the Web to the mind. That is, the benefit of the mind metaphor is precisely that it’s less obvious to us.

There’s been a lot of thought given to the relationship of the Internet and the brain. My problem is that the more accessible that research is to me, the less I agree with it. The incomprehensible bits about the mechanics of the brain’s literal neural network seem promising and thought-extending. The parts I can understand talk about consciousness and suggest that the Internet as a whole is becoming aware, as foretold either by Nostradamus or Colossus: The Forbin Project, I forget which. This seems to me to make the old error of conceiving of consciousness as a set of formal, instantiate-anywhere processes (“Just add matter — of any type! — and stir!”)

People also intermittently notice that the Web is like Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere, which also has the advantage of comparing the Web to something we don’t understand. I find that the noosphere comparison helps to focus my attention up from the many individual ideas and rants on the Web, but I’m not sure what else it adds.

The question about the mind as metaphor is whether it fits well enough to be obvious but is rich enough to shine light on corners otherwise left dark. And there are dangers, as with any metaphor. In particular, I personally find almost totally unappealing the notion that the Web, like the mind, is self-aware and self-interested. And the concept of a “hive mind,” as some have suggested, strikes me as actually repellant. (Note: I am announcing my prejudices, not justifying them.)

So, now the task might seem to be to write a 100-word essay on “How the Web is like a mind” but I think it’s actually to think about what it would be like to talk about the Web in mind terms. For the talk about metaphors swirling through the blogthreads is in fact really about a new rhetoric, replacing the old spatial one of “going” and “leaving,” etc. I don’t see what that new rhetoric would be. But I’m sure my co-bloggers will have suggestions…

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Speaking of Akma, how could you not read a blog entry entitled “More Saints Endorse Plagiarism,” especially if you know that the blogger is a theologian?

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The Obvious?‘s Euan reminds us that Lawrence Haggerty’s “The Spirit of the Internet: Vol. I: Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness” talks about minds, the evolution of consciousness and the noosphere. (The implication that I have read it would not necessarily be warranted.)

Categories: Uncategorized dw