I often make analogies about technology to explain certain aspects of mysticism, or quantum physics, but today I was thinking about the internet and the opposite occurred. I have noticed a interesting pattern about the way information is diffused throughout the World Wide Web that seems to mimic the movement of information through a nervous system.
Think about it. Most blogs, forums, and news outlets, this site included, collect information through the web itself, they process the content, add their opinion or commentary and in turn become accessible to the rest of the network. We are like neurons, brain cells.
This made me start thinking about the way the mind formulates ideas. Ideas start with a wave of electrons that ripple out through the network of the brain. Not every cell receives that information, and each mind has its own patterns and capacities, but if the information does reach a cell what happens? What if each cell plays a part in whether or not an idea is accepted, rejected, or improved upon?
What I am suggesting is that perhaps the individual cells of the mind make their own miniature decisions and innovations. If you really think about it it’s a reasonable proposition. After all, what are we anyway? We think of ourselves as individuals, but nothing could be farther from the truth. We walking colonies of individual cells working in perfect symbiosis, a symbiosis so seamless that we have all but lost contact with our cellular identity.
So if our individual neurons are the microcosmic precursors to a unified mind, what would the unified mind of the internet look like? Clearly if the internet is a mind it is a mind in its early infancy. It is taking information and responding enthusiastically, yet as of now it has not managed to gather together the unified volition of the people. I see its power developing though. Like a toddler struggling to pull its self up to take its first steps.
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