“”You mustn’t think of us as omnipotent, no matter what The Continuum would like you to believe. You and your ship seem incredibly powerful to lifeforms without your technological expertise! It’s no different with us; we may appear omnipotent to you, but believe me, we’re not!”
–Quinn, Episode 2×18, Voyager

It’s a memorable quote because, not only could one argue that it’s better narratively-speaking, but much more realistic. Indeed, that line could very well sum up humanity in many ways — that we will continue to to conquer and master nature, ever-transcending it’s limitations in every way we can, moving toward a world ever more ‘utopian’ where the individual is ever more ‘god-like’ without, of course, ever reaching such things in a literal sense because such things are logically impossible.

At any given point in time, one may claim we have it all; and indeed, their is no better time then the Present….except the Future of course; though our world may appear to be a utopia the further and further you go back, we must obviously attend to the issues and concerns of today’s day, and that’s unlikely to change…but our world is the culmination of all progress thus far and generations far more happiness then any past time period; it has to be…though the future will undoubtedly have it’s own share of concerns and issues, from our eyes, it will appear as a magical place where everyone is seemingly more ‘god-like’ then we are, even though, of course, this is not truly the case.

But that’s okay, because even if these literal Omni’s don’t truly exist, our intelligence and capability will continue to rise…in Virtual Reality, one could snap their fingers like a certain someone and make stuff happen, and perhaps in the farther future with utility fogs, in real reality as well. The point is, through technology which is becoming smaller, more intimate and more effective, we are arguably reaching a state of existence that will eventually be pretty indistinguishable from the Q, without the narrative-induced negatives…yes we will, more likely the not, run up against finite limits to what we can do, but the “intelligence explosion” of the technological Singularity, if and when it happens, will create a level of capability that is hard to tell the difference, or probably make us even care.

How would such a society works where everyone is so connected and empowered? Hard to say…Kurzweil has his ideas in his books, particularly in the 2099 chapter of Spiritual Machines; in any rate, I feel though that it’s closer to the truth to say we’re moving closer and closer to a Q-state of existence without the narrative-induced negatives then the Borg….we will get there with technology, and without the blatant downsides of either.

I’d think that such an entity would likely see it as in its “self”-interest to lay low so to speak while deciding what is the best course to follow.

Of course, I will not know exactly where that information actually resides, nor how I retrieved it, but I won’t care.

Until that interface has been installed, though, I will just have to sit here, saying, “Lepidopterist… lepidopterist…” to myself until, after a while, the definition comes back to me. Maybe I will even “see” a kind of hazy image of some old guy examining butterflies on a board.

Of course, I will not know exactly where the information actually resides, nor how I retrieved it, but I won’t care.

I view the internet 2 ways in this context- positive and negative. For me the internet has always been THE dream invention. To quickly access almost any knowlege- it’s like tapping a keg and bathing in your favorite brew. In this sense, I agree with the professor from the article. The internet has slowly become an augmentation of my mind and I use it as such. It greatly facilitates my learning. Sure, I don’t bother memorizing everything I learn as long as I get my mind around the concept to my satisfaction. I can always access the exact data again if I need it.

The negative aspect is what I mentioned in another post- where people use the internet as an excuse NOT to learn. And the sheer volume of content on the internet, I believe, can lull people into believing they are knowledgable about a subject simply because they ‘see’ the knowledge all around them like water. But a man can die of thirst surrounded by the sea.

I fully agree with your comments about creating a universe inside the head while reading. This is exactly the pleasure I take from it. Some writers excel at compressing a whole world into the confines of a book’s covers (George R R Martin for example) and while you are reading them you have a sense of being completely immersed in the world they create while you unfurl it in your mind.

I quite like the way you describe the flow from cerebrum to nerve ending in the finger with something sublime happening in between that results in art. Beautiful. Thanks for your comments.

I just don’t have a problem with loading my brain with data from the “slow” memory in order to achieve comprehension. It’s the comprehension that gets inscribed into the wet brain as useful, permanent and personal “knowledge”.

I have met people who read ceaselessly and gather innumerable facts, but never bother to put it all together. I suspect that a good deal of pleasure that many of us derive from reading actually comes from building a working model of our universe inside our heads.
I am an artist by trade. My pursuit to fully understand anatomy is eternal and relentless. What I learn from life, videos, books and the internet sinks further and further down my brain stem to the point where the expression of my study is found in the instinctive flow of my shoulder, arm and hand. So yeah, I fully subscribe to your point.

First, there is evidently a correlation between a family wealth and the level of education of the parents, however the correlation is far from absolute.

For one thing, past a yet to be determined threshold, wealth becomes irrelevant, e.g. aging billionaires tend to marry (and have children with) models, or “trophy” women. They are beautiful, but really learned? Doubtful (and often enough, same question for the father).

There was a not so remote time where proper schooling and education was very emphasized in middle class too, not only in upper class. This tends to disappear as middle class people are dragged down with less and less spare time available for kids education in a typical median income family nor money to be spareable for children’s post college studies.

Add to this that on some countries (e.g. France), the most educated people (college degree + at least 5 years of university behind) can have low paid jobs, especially when they are teachers. Those have now a stressful life, low consideration from the authorities, their management and especially their students. Nevertheless most try to educate their own children well.

Finally, at the low income boundary, the price of an old or second hand laptop wired to public wifi will make the digital divide irrelevant, the real issue is the willingness and real availability of parents with low income to dedicate themselves in raising correctly their children. It’s not a matter of money but mainly a matter of emotional stability.

Now, whatever the income, I’m seeing more and more children not raised to their full potential because of the stressful life their parents have. They don’t pay enough attention in answering the relentless questions typical of a 3-4 year old. Those have their cartoons, game console, maybe a tablet or an old PC equipped with childish apps, but that’s mainly for the parents to have an alibi to leave the child unattended. Especially, nobody cares to teach the art of reading to a 3 years youngster, when it is (mostly) very achievable with proper patience, attention, and the additional help of clever and funny CBT.

Most people, even the learned ones, tend to minimize the importance of feeding optimally the plastic brain of kids from 3 to 7 leaving that “job” for schooling when typical schools, for various reasons, are less and less efficient in fulfilling those essential needs.

When the “human interface” is bypassed, (remember when the phone company wouldn’t allow electrical connection to their circuits, an acoustical coupler had to be used) expertise will be available as naturally as if you had done the 10,000 hour effort.

To me, that is pretty much like knowing the whole thing…just as long as the power grid stays up. It should, too, considering that half of our power bills from National Grid are not for the actual electricity, but for “delivery.” They are supposed to be using those delivery charges to keep the lines up. It will be a big scandal if they don’t.

The next big things come from things like wolfram alfa, computional thing, and from aps like that on apple store, people trying to make a word a beter place from whith aps

I can get babelfish to translate something from English to German. But I know for a fact that the structure and form of my mind was changed by learning to speak German. This is fact and I am certain anyone who has learned and actually used an additional language can attest to that. The process of learning the language and using it to interact with Germans made my mind into something ‘more’. I dream in German sometimes. I have memories in German. Learning German made me understand my own language even better and also gave me a new and better grasp of language as a technology than I had before. It also made studying the next language even easier.

I do not argue with much of your point. I grew up in a world without the internet or mobile telephony. I loved books and the greatest gift I was ever given was a set of encyclopedia. But I didn’t just have those volumes on the shelf to look at even though I could reference them if I needed to. I read them for pleasure. Just to be learning stuff. Without taking the trouble to learn that stuff, I would not be who I am now. I would not have had the same thoughts nor come to the same conclusions.

I use the internet too. Love it. But I don’t use it in the way you describe- as my knowledge store. No more than I have ever used the library for that purpose. My knowledge set is peculiar to me. That particular combination of facts and interests in my head is what makes me who I am. It is what makes my ideas my own.

I study and learn in order to be me. Not to make sure the species survives in case of internet failure. I agree, the internet is a great tool. But I don’t stop learning and creating a better me just because the facts may/may not exist elsewhere- whether in a book or on the net.

Learning is worhtwhile in and of itself. It’s not a bother. It’s a pleasure.

When an event that happened in “cyberspace” can affect the material reality in the physical world; and when an artificial intellect emerges from the depths of that collective knowledge in electronic form; it is a matter of time for the boundary between a mind living in a psycical container and its digital record become one and the same entity without any regard as to where either exist or manifests. I’m thinking… why a profesor speaks about it in the New York Times, while books like “Electronic Minds: Hypothesis, Observations and Theory on Preprogrammed Digital Sequences in Natural Evolution to Cyberspace” or Douglas Rushkoff’s Cyberia, or the last of Timothy Leary’s works are not mentioned anywhere as reference..

You and I understand different things then when we use the word consciousness. I speak of that portion of the mind that you are aware of as being your consciousness. That part that focuses the attention of the ‘rest’ of the mind on a particular thing.

The consciousness also gets switched off on occasion while we are heavily day-dreaming or getting in ‘the zone’ during a sport we are practiced at.

If we are making an analogy between the internet + human users as being equivalent to a sort of global brain then the individual human users represent individual brain cells or clusters of them. The closest thing to consciousness in this metaphor would probably be the News and Entertainment Media- they being that device that points the attention of the
rest of the organ at a particular thing or idea.

But this would mean that just as we feel that our consciousness is at least nominallly ‘in charge’ of our selves, the News/Entertainment Industry, being what focuses our attention, is in control.

Somehow, I don’t like that idea. Who put them in charge? I suppose that brings up a whole discussion in neurology and psychology- I’m sure there are parts of my unconscious mind (meaning the ‘other than conscious’ mind) that say the same about my consciousness- ‘who put that joker in charge of us? We do all the real thinking’.

To carry on with that theme- one can consciously control strong but irrational urges that are counterproductive to goals desired by the conscious mind. This points to moments when the two minds- conscious and unconscious- are at odds with each other.

I, pesonally, would liken the individual users on the internet more to components of the unconscious mind for we are the rowdy chorus muttering or roaring in the background- sometimes pushing rationality to the side but more or less trying to go along with the program in order to make the whole thing work.

This does go some way towards demonstrating that the consciousness is a working component of the overall mind and not the mind itself. But, if we claim to be the mind, we must then be able to point at that portion of the mind that directs our goals and attention (thus my use of the News/Entertainment media).

Also, a mind has an identity. So who or what is the identity of the hive mind if we are the individual components? Is it a nation? A person? At some point to carry the hive mind analogy to its fullest extent you have to call it a ‘who’ and not a ‘what’. The who would not be ‘us’ because ‘we’ are what we have always been. A mind spanning a planet is not human.

At some point a ‘who’ makes sentences like- ‘I want/like this. I will do that. I must go there.’

My question is who this ‘I’ will be, because plainly it has not shown up yet. I do not see the fractured, dysfunctional nature of the world at present- linked in or no- as being representative of a mind with an identity and consciousness and a demonstrable strategy for survival.

Creativity needs knowledge, and it needs that knowledge in the brain, not in some outside memory storage. Well, at least at the moment it still does. ;-)

in 20 years or so storage capacity will be so large that each connected device will independently be able to store the entire sum of human knowledge. No single person alive today can learn and remember all of this information in a lifetime. Especially considering that we are ever expanding knowledge across so many specialized fields at an exponential rate.

“…since I realized how often it feels as though I know something just because I can find it with Google…”

When the information is ‘out there’ in the hive mind sphere of things it is not in your head. When you have two or more facts physically residing in your head you greatly increase the odds that they might, even by chance, rub up against each other every once in a while and form an idea.

Simply knowing that unknown words are to be found in the dictionary, for example, does not make me a better writer. LIkewise with the facts in an encyclopedia on a shelf. This phenomenom is not new. We have had information technology for centuries (albeit not as pervasive or accessible as we have it now) but nothing has replaced the need to learn and develop a mastery of concepts in order to create new paradigms of thought or simply reach a better understanding of our own personal lives.

The analogy of the hive mind has, for me, always fallen short of the human mind in one key aspect- consciousness. The human mind is capable of intuitive leaps in reasoning but I think in most cases the conscious mind plays the key role of ‘directing’ the whole mind to ponder a problem- i.e. focusing our attention on something.

What provides this function with the hive mind?
Perhaps it would be better to ask- What could we create to provide this function?

Because I do believe that a fully connected, fully functioning hive mind (consciousness included) would be a truly awesome thing and a worthy goal to work towards.

As a negative aside, I would point out that many young people I meet today treat the internet as the professor describes- they feel that they know something simply because they can whip an iPhone out and google/wiki something into submission. I have heard the remark ‘why should I bother learning that when I can just look it up on the internet?’

And then if the worst happens and the dreaded EMP atmospheric pulse attack comes or the electricity grid collapsed (India?) all these people would be cut off from their store of knowledge and their mind’s eyes rendered effectively blind.