evilgenius wrote:Cog wrote:No one understands a single sentence of what you have posted evilgenius. I feel I'm dumber for even trying to comprehend it.
Ha, ha, ha, ha.
I'm trying to ask if anyone thinks that self-awareness on the level of man as a species is possible? If so, does it rely upon the number of people alive at any one time? Do we need a certain number of people to reach that sort of consciousness, or is it more dependent upon the flow of information, which can continue under lower population levels? These times, with their hardships and reductions upon the individual due to juxtaposition with a society of such great population numbers, can't help but hone a working definition of what an individual is. They seem like such trying times, but they also produce a center, which may only loosely describe any one person. The concept of that center is useful for many things beyond that, however.
I believe the third great invention of humans, after Agriculture and Fossil-Fueled Machines, was the Internet. The new combination of humans and machines, interconnected via the omnipresent network, is in fact a type of new organism, a gestalt mind, and it has a type of group consciousness.
The world of today is very different since the advent of the network, more or less in 1980 with the ARPANET and USENET. (The few connections between 1969 and 1980 were not significant.) The rate of change is accelerating, without any doubt. I am observing my grandkids, who just turned 3 years of age this month, with a keen interest in how they differ from their parents and grandparents.
Walk around Silicon Valley, watch the glassy-eyed people mumbling to others on their phones, thumbing cryptic texts, and web surfing. I don't carry a phone, because I am a pre-network human, true to my roots. I do however, carry a medium tablet/keyboard everywhere I go, and many of my recent posts over the last 3-4 years originate from it. I have a little case of SD cards containing music, movies, hundreds of photos, and hundreds of e-books/magazines, and a few comics.
We are a new species now, a hybrid cybernetic organism, very different from pre-networked humans, with new values, new and hugely improved access to information, and different reasoning methods.
The most troubling aspect of this I have observed: for some people, even most people, the new standard for reality is what they can link to on the network, and not what they experience with their own senses. You can see this here on peakoil.com, for many members, anything one says is suspect, until you provide a link to that information. The fact that 90+% of everthing posted is rank BS, does not really matter to these folks. If you cannot link to it, it does not matter that you say "I was there when it happened, I saw it, I heard it, and I experienced it."
Such observations are less real that the virtual world. Furthermore, certain people understand the new virtual reality all too well for my tastes. Such as Roger Stone: http://peakoil.com/forums/get-me-roger-stone-t73446.html