We sometimes use the term "global brain." Here's a definition of that term...
>From: Francis Heylighen <fheyligh@vub.ac.be>
>
>Luis:
>>
>>Whether it is useful to explain the Global Brain, I don't know, because I
>>don't know what the Global Brain is or isn't, and no one else seems to know
>>either.
>
>I think I do have a clear picture of what the GB is, which I'll try to
>sketch below.
>
>1) the GB is the "mental", "information processing" part of a cybernetic
>system. A cybernetic system (aka goal-directed, purposive or control
>system) is a system that has its own goals, values or preferences (most
>basically, the goal is survival and development, aka autopoiesis or
>self-production), and that tries to reach these goals by taking the
>appropriate actions so as to reduce the difference between the situation
>that it perceives to be in, and the situation that it would prefer to be
>in. The "mental" part of a cybernetic system is the functional subsystem
>that processes the perceptions, compares them with internal values and
>goals, and on the basis of that evaluation or interpretation decides which
>actions are most appropriate. For more detail, see my paper with Cliff on
>"Cybernetics and second-order cybernetics".
>
>
>2) the cybernetic system of which the GB forms the "mind" is global
>society. The debate here is in how far society can be seen as a purposive
>or autopoietic system. I have argued in my paper "The Global
>Superorganism" that as society globalizes, integrates and differentiates
>it becomes more autopoietic (unlike the true autopoiesis theorists, I do
>believe that there are gradations of autopoiesis, and various intermediate
>states between autopoietic and non-autopoietic).
>
>More practically, society definitely has a system of collective goals and
>values (as mapped e.g. by the Union of International Association in their
>databases of global problems and values, as presented by Tony at the
>workshop), most of which are implicit (e.g. in the "demand" variable that
>steers the market). And society definitely has a collection of information
>gathering, interpretation and decision-making mechanisms (some
>centralized, most distributed) to select the actions that seem most likely
>to achieve these goals.
>
>3) the above would be sufficient to define a "global mind", but you may
>ask why I prefer the term "brain". The reason is that the most fundamental
>functional organization of the brain (a self-organizing network of neurons
>and synapses along which activation travels, fed by sensors, and ending up
>in effectors, and which learns by adapting the weights of its connections
>to the way they are used) seems like a most useful model for understanding
>the present and future evolution of distributed hypermedia systems such as
>the web. See my paper "The World-Wide Web as a Super-brain", whose
>subtitle is "from metaphor to model". The latter means that in this view
>the GB becomes more than a metaphor for understanding the web, it can be
>turned into a genuine model of (at least) a future web system.
>
>_________________________________________________________________________
>Francis Heylighen <fheyligh@vub.ac.be> -- Center "Leo Apostel"
>Free University of Brussels, Krijgskundestr. 33, 1160 Brussels, Belgium
>tel +32-2-6442677; fax +32-2-6440744; http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
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