Internet Correlates of Consciousness

Consciousness is a heterophenomenon; an ensemble of dispositions registering mental life phenomenon that support an emergent presentation of reality selected from a vast population of less fit presentations of reality. There are humans which are not fit by lack of various mental substrates to participate. There are vast numbers of the 7 billions of us which cannot or have not yet joined the world mind. Some are to old and have minds in brains that were not plastic enough. Some have not yet moved to urban centers. In 2050 4.5 billions of us will plug-in to the urbanized interior milieu - our cosmic environment will be the world mind.

The internet plus the world wide web is a heterophenomenon; an ensemble of computing and routing dispositions supporting an emergent presentation of reality selected from a vast population of less fit presentations of reality.

The Interwebs

At present both conceptions of reality - human plus machine - culminate in full waking life consciousness within human brains. However, a human cognition integrated with the web proto-cognition form an ensemble of dispositions which emerge from the full flower of the Technium. We, as humans entangled with a web of several billion clusters of interconnected cognitive/computational means, incorporate the web into our consciousness. We have integrated in a world mind.

The two portions of this super-mind, meat and silicon, share the varied machines which lend support to a response policy for collective human action. Think of it this way. Every packet on the network shown terminates at a machine and many of those machines display the results of that response on a screen.

Further "the internet of things" - the digital toaster and the digital thermostat - enhances greatly our collective homeostatsis. We are more comfortable inside the Technium than out. We are hermit crabs who have taken on a silicon shell.

The conjecture, we live in an interconnected matrix of biology and technology, an artifact of biology, which co-mingles human imagination with the substratum of conscious modules. These modules, like the human visual system, are built in a hierarchy that was not intended to be a vast, networked visualization contraption. My computer alone does not think but my computer and I think together with both constituents as super-cognitive mutualist. The hermit crab does not make her shell and the shell was not made for the hermit crab. But the tool using crab saves time and energy with an unintended mutualist pact with all shell making crustaceans.