Some odd ideas I've been playing with recently....

From: Skye (skyezacharia@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Feb 29 2000 - 00:00:13 MST


I was thinking recently about neural nets and memes...
specifically, I was thinking that a sort of shoddy
analogy might be drawn to the way a particular
"neuron" in a neural net functions, with the state of
it's inputs determining it's outputs, to the way a
particular mind in a sort of memetic pool... *mutters*
I know, I know, I've used the word "Meme" twice in
here... I'll probably get half a dozen complaints from
one person or another on that account due to the fact
that some people hate the concept, some love it, some
think it entirely unrelated to reality... but it's
short for, in this case, information transmitted from
person to person that stays the same on some basic
point, or rather these points which remain the same...
*coughs* anyhow...
to the way a particular mind in the global memetic
pool tends to accept or reject ideas or beleifs based
on the previous ideas or beleifs which have been
absorbed... like as if you took a neural net and gave
each neuron a self aware history file and some kind of
bizarre algorhythm to solve for truth or falsehood (on
or off? 1 or 0?) based on all of the inputs that it
had previously received.... it sounds a little like
some of the things Turing was proposing for AI....
anyways... my idea being... doesn't this sound almost
like a giant, multiphase net of some kind? Obviously,
in the world of ideas, it does seem that there is more
than just accept and deny... there is, at the very
least, the simultaneous state of pass on or do not
pass on for whatever idea has been accepted. Or
perhaps remember strongly or forget, or half-phase,
where the idea sits there and bugs a person, and
they're not sure if it's true or false or some
intermediate state... it sounds rather complex, I
suppose, but it struck me that human information
transmission is a lot like the neurons of a brain,
only larger.
     Thinking further on this point, I figured that
whatever sort of brain was needed, it would probably
not need to be incredibly smart... in this particular
case, it's a "human species" metabrain... it might be
that all of life on earth transmits information to
some degree, or what have you... but anyways... that
this brain only needed to know a few things in the
case of humans:
how to get food to the parts that required it.
how to defend from outside forces.
since any individual mind is capable of small scale
solutions, it would be up to the larger metabrain to
be able to get the information where it needed to
go... by word of mouth or whatever, the sections of
the metamind would correlate, a supraidea would be
formed, and sally struthers would suddenly be doing tv
spots for starving countries. Of course, there are
other factors involved, one might say. It was....
say, the pity we had on that country... the actions on
the parts of individuals hearing the plight, not some
mass movement or idea within a giant supramind... (I'm
changing my terms at random to see which one sounds
nicest)... but isn't it all the same? It's just...
I think I'm introducing a paradigm more than something
concrete... generally that's how it is with a lot of
philosophical structures, it's more of a way of
looking at things than anything that's truly concrete.
 Some people might, upon reading this, refer me to
Lewis Thomas' The Lives of a Cell... and if not, I
refer *them*, because it's a wonderful book... but
anyways, I think it was more focused on how the planet
as a whole is like one interactive lifeform as to a
colony of ants... my thought is, the planet as a whole
is a lot more like a mind.
Which brings me back to my main bit, which isn't quite
over yet... if the planet is like a mind, then this is
the only mind that has ever existed where the
individual neurons evolve... it's analogously a higher
lifeform than we are... this thing adapts a great deal
without dying... *mutters* here I am, publishing
thoughts about "focus" and I get off the subject...
what I'm trying to say is...
remember Seti@home?
we've got one of the largest computers in the world at
our fingertips... six billion individual nodes of a
giant computer, which resides partly digitally, partly
written, partly transferred by word of mouth or hand
gesture, and partly in another sort of system
altogether, carbon based and using billions of
individual neurons to operate...
what sort of programs might we run? *shrugs* I was
bugging people in biology today with this idea... it
just struck me as sort of neat at the time.
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