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Showing posts with label zeitgeist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zeitgeist. Show all posts

Monday, June 30, 2014

Internet vs Central Nervous System

As per Wikipedia, "The central nervous system (CNS) is the part of the nervous system consisting of the brain and spinal cord. The central nervous system is so named because it integrates information it receives from, and coordinates and influences the activity of all parts of the bodies.."

If the same analogy is applied to the physical world, what do we get? Internet, it does seem the closest match. It connects the world like nothing else. Any part is reachable from any other part at incomparable speed. And its not just the connectivity, its also knowledge and data that it holds, and it does hold a lot of it. 


Last I checked, there were 3,124,647,889 live users on the internet !! And looking at the continuously ticking live internet stats, you might feel overwhelmed, like more than 2 million smartphones were sold today (and ticking!!), but that's the thing, Internet is growing at a sprawling pace and thus, consolidating itself. Its unstoppable .. (Homo Sapiens listening..)


But can the Internet become intelligent in itself? Its scary to think so but Internet does have all the fodder and time for thought! Its knows our history, our present and our also future thoughts (imagine a program reading this article and getting inspired!). It knows our habits, our psychology, our technology, our research and so much for the love of books that we have machine readable eBooks now. It also knows what we are thinking currently and may be laughing at how stupid we are sometimes - twitterati, behold your world consciousness. 

Check our other thoughts on zeitgeist, thoughts in the air.

Some say, its a matter of time before we get taken over. Who can forget the conviction by which Agent Smith puts it across "Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet."

So what's stopping THEM? Number of synapses, complex data structures, processing power, efficiency? For one - spirituality, for those who believe, you either have it or don't. Its a connection, a feeling that can't be learnt. It gives us character and ideas. It all boils down to feelings and emotions that we, humans display and witness. Non-believers though, would still argue that feelings & thoughts are nothing more than chemical reactions. The arguments continues and all we can say is - we'll see.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Thoughts In The Air

If something is in the air, you feel that it is happening or about to happen. The 'feel' part here is interesting as it suggests that somehow one is able to perceive something extra (extra-sensory?). Even in day to day life, thoughts (& events) are connected and it often is the case that one leads to another in completely observable fashion. The whole world seems to conspire then and bring out the prevalent thoughts. There is a feeling of a “global mind” that is spawned by the interconnections of many individual minds, popularly called Global Consciousness or World Consciousness.

World consciousness is not a new concept and even has its place in many cultures. Here is a quote by Swami Vivekananda from one his talks -

"We are the spider in his huge web, who can go on the varied strands wheresoever he desires. The spider is now only conscious of the spot where he is, but he will in time become conscious of the whole web. We are now conscious only where the body is, we can use only one brain; but when we reach ultra-consciousness, we know all, we can use all brains. Even now we can "give the push" in consciousness, and it goes beyond and acts in the super-conscious."

A scientific take on the topic has produced various research projects and the most prominent one is probably the Global Consciousness Project, created originally at Princeton University, and aims to gather & study correlations between Random Number Generators placed across the world. The data is correlated to specific events, for example, analysis done on the latest earthquake that hit Nepal. There is though some pertinent questions about the basis of choosing events, as pointed out by a critique.

How could we leave out Social Platforms from the Zeitgeist? Now a days social platforms have enabled us to capture the "thoughts in the air" and many services dig live content from various parts of the internet, apply aggregation, co-relations and fancy algorithms to present the current trends or the 'Zeitgeist'. A simple Google search on 'current trends' is sufficient because : INTERNET KNOWS.

Internet might just be our new spiritual belonging and Google Trends being the Collective Consciousness...