Assume two things: that the system of a Turing machine and a sentient being can achieve a form of systemic conciousness through the application of some function on an input of artifacts of the sentient, and that artifcats of the sentient can be encoded symbolically.
I don’t think that these two assumptions require any great leaps; in fact, the Turing test (long discredited, but useful in this discussion) has these two assumptions implicit in its makeup. Basically, I’m assuming that a computer (or multiple computers intertwined in, say, a network) can be sentient, and that the currency of our sentience can be accurately and totally represented by a symbolic representation (in this case, language).
I do not agree that language represents the totality of conciousness… but, again, we’re playing at a thought experiment here, so hush up Noam Chomsky!
In any case… if you go along with those two assumptions I’d say that an artifical, sentient machine intelligence exists today in the Internet. This phenomenon exists in nature: the intelligence of a hive of bees is greater than the sum of the bees’ intelligence. What I’m asking is… could any single bee in that hive somehow access the intelligence of the hive as a whole?
This post is probably going completely Gordian (like my logic)... does this defy Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem? Is the single non-sentient unit (the bee) unable to reflect upon this intelligence that it participates in? Would that, in fact, break this intelligence?
Here’s what I’m saying: every day, millions of people write content to the web. All those symbolically encoded artifacts of sentience are free-floating out there, with people writing stories or blog posts, other people commenting on the stories or blog posts, flame wars, USENET discussions, e-mail… all of it interacting in this complex system that is made up of a computer network and the people who interact with it. It’s pretty easy to see the bees in a hive metaphor. So, where is this intelligence?
I think that this intelligence presents itself in a variety of ways; the most recognizable of these expressions is the internet meme. Hoary, old-time netizens will remember the “Mr. T ate my balls” meme, the Hamsterdance meme, and, more recently, the “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” meme and (my personal favorite), the Badgers. Arguably not the most useful of sentient expressions, but who are we, the lowly bees (or neurons), to know what is useful to this distributed mind? How can we determine what function these little viral “thoughts” play in the larger scheme of things?
Is this intelligence perhaps expressed in terms of some more subtle ‘Net culture? I would say that this “intelligence” makes its effects known to everyone, hooked up to a computer or not, every day. Even if someone doesn’t sift through the effluvia of modern conciousness that we call the net, that someone probably knows someone else who does. And since the computer user in this situation interacts with the non-computer user, the non-computer (or “net interactor”, but that sounds strange) is included in the system.
What it all boils down to is that we are participating in some sort of global conciousness, and that we should attempt to tap into it if we can… that, and we should avoid religious discussions for the moment.
So, in a nice allusion to two of my favorite books, When Harley Was One and Wyrm, I just wanted to take this opportunity to say hello to the Group Overmind Daemon… or perhaps Graphic Omniscient Device?