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The Day My World View Began to Die

Well where do I start? How about from the beginning.

There I was back in September 1995 in my room in a share house in the Sydney suburb of Glebe getting ready for the day studying electrical engineering at Sydney University. Everything was normal, or so I thought. This was the time of the beginning the popular use of the internet and before the advent of Google. The previous day I had seen a television advertisement. It was for a large Australian telecommunications company and depicted the planet Earth with an animation of vast global communications networks stretching across the planet.

It had stuck in my mind for some reason.

Whilst readying myself I started thinking about the nature of the internet with how it was growing in size and complexity and then thought of the advertisement.

This was when the ‘penny dropped’.

Thinking of the animation of the world wide networks and then extrapolating by many orders of magnitude it occurred to me. “It might evolve into a brain!”

At this point I was stunned. Was I losing my mind? However, after a few moments it occurred to me that there was something to it. Why hadn’t I noticed it before? I was excited as I realised that I had come up with something which no-one I knew of was aware of. Something original in my mind.

I can honestly say that this was the ‘flashpoint’ which began to upend my personal ‘world paradigm’. It started me on a path of growth in which this seeded idea became central to the world paradigm and philosophy that has subsequently gradually ‘grown’ internally into what I hold today.

I’ll be honest I was a vehement atheist at the time and considered anyone who believed in God to be ‘intellectually suspect’. I considered all religion to be bunk and the philosophies therein to be nothing that one couldn’t work out for their self. To this day, in spite of all the growth I have undergone, I still hold most of what pre-established religions believe to be seriously outmoded and obsolete.

Anyway, after having this spellbinding insight, I soon realised that if I was correct then this would make the building of a planetary wide brain probably what humanity’s role on the planet should be. Rather than just building an ever larger ‘empire’ using more and more resources for more and more people we could connect the billions of people and computers together. Then through the study and application of neuroscience and of how consciousness emerges in such systems we can deliberately engineer the planet to become self-aware.

Then I had another epiphany. Just as one can theoretically connect billions of people and computers together and get a brain on a planetary scale the same principle can be applied to larger scales. For instance a galaxy has billions of stars and planets that can in principle be connected to form a self-aware ‘galactic brain’. One can take it to larger scale again by connecting billions of galaxies together to form a ‘universal brain’ and perhaps if possible connect many universes together to form a self-aware brain. It occurred to me that perhaps the role of life, especially life of higher intellect, in the universe is to create and proliferate conscious systems throughout the universe on grander and grander scales.

It was at this time that I remembered something called the ‘Gaia Hypothesis’. I first heard of this hypothesis in 1991 when a computer game called ‘Sim Earth’ was released. Created by the people who invented the game ‘Sim City’ in the late 1980’s it involved the player ‘playing God’, for want of a better term, by ‘evolving’ life on Earth. It started at the beginning by generating self-replicating molecules up to cellular, multi-cellular and all the lifeforms, including human life, we have on the planet now. Curiously it was heavily based on the then relatively little-known scientific hypothesis called the ‘Gaia Hypothesis’. This hypothesis states that the whole planetary biome on Earth and the planet itself can be considered a living entity unto itself with all the lifeforms acting as part of its ‘metabolism’ just as our bodies are made up of trillions of individual living cells. At the time, in my infinite wisdom, I considered the idea to be new age hippie claptrap. Anyway the game ended in a scenario where humanity leaves the planet and makes it a global nature park. At the time this struck me as rather dull and unimaginative, but it took on a new meaning when I saw the role of the internet and telecommunications systems. I simply termed the phenomenon ‘Global Consciousness’ and let it percolate in my mind for several months.

By December that year I figured that someone, sane or not, would have noticed the phenomenon at least thirty years before myself so I hopped onto the ‘Yahoo’ search engine and plugged the term ‘Gaia’ into it. Low and behold in the first few entries of the search result popped up someone named Peter Russell. Ironically the site was brand new only being released a fortnight before. As it so happened Peter Russell released a book called ‘The Global Brain’ in the late 1970’s and had relatively recently released a revised and updated version.

I decided not to buy it yet.

I admit I have a somewhat stubborn streak and wanted to work out as much of this hypothesis as possible before consulting the work of others. I suppose I didn’t want to be one of those people who reads the thinking of others and then parrots their thinking in a way that makes them appear to be a ‘deep thinker’ without an originally self-generated idea to lay claim to.

Nevertheless I shall continue.

As it was I didn’t get the book for eighteen months until early in 1997. In the intervening time I made some rather useful progress. I began pondering at which point of complexity and structure would the planetary brain become self-aware like humans. Would there be a point at which one could say throw a switch and BAM the planet was self-aware? What ‘senses’ would the planet have? Has the planet, through the activity of humanity, become ‘aware’ at some level of the danger posed to it from asteroids and comets? Would the planetary array of astronomical telescopes effectively give the planet some sort of ‘vision’? This has led me to ask some profound questions regarding the role of consciousness in the universe as a whole and to my surprise actually develop or ‘grow’ some answers internally with minimal input from others. I suppose I just wanted to see where this line of thought would take me.

Well that is a load off my chest! How are we feeling now? Bewildered? Sceptical? A bit of both or neither? Well I don’t know about you, but I have other things to do and so this is the end of this post. Believe me this hypothesising took a long time before I took it as a genuine candidate as a hypothesis for the nature of consciousness and its role in the universe. I can only look and see if science can back it up or not, but the ideas in this post are surprisingly well known now so as I have said I am somewhat ‘late off the mark’ with this blog.

May you have a more profound day!

Gavin

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When I Bought the Book

             It was about the early to middle months of 1996 when I made another observation regarding the nature of the universe, that being the role of ‘feedback systems’. It is an observation rooted in my high school and university years studying mathematics, physics and chemistry where I noticed that systems such as chemical equilibrium and electromagnetic induction seemed to behave in either of two ways.

            Firstly there is the case where a disturbance to the system results in it acting to counter or ‘negate’ the effect of that disturbance. For instance in the case of electromagnetic induction, where a magnet is passed through a metallic coil, the system generates a magnetic force that acts to counter or ‘oppose’ the magnet moving in the coil. This is called a negative feedback system.

            Secondly there is the case where a disturbance to the system results in it acting to amplify the effect of the disturbance resulting in a ‘runaway’ effect. A classic example is the situation of feedback between an electric guitar and a sound amplifier and speaker. When the output of the amplifier and speaker is ‘fed back’ into the input or ‘pickup’ of the guitar the result is an ever-increasingly loud and distorted sound. That is the signal cycles through the speaker, guitar and amplifier loop repeatedly with the signal increasing in amplitude each time until it reaches the physical limits of the system. This, in contrast to the negative case, is called a positive feedback system.

            Another example of positive feedback is the reproduction rates of organisms in ecosystems. When animals breed their population size is determined by the rate of breeding and the impact of predators with the population of each species of animal increasing naturally at a geometric rate. The more progeny that are able to reproduce the greater the increase in overall population with each generation and so on. This is another positive feedback system with the ecosystem using predators to moderate the population of each species.

            The final insight I had at this time is that every dynamic system in the universe appears to operate in an approximately cyclic manner. Thus, as in the case of negative feedback systems, dynamic systems try to retain stability when disturbed or, as in the case of positive feedback systems, they cycle in an increasingly unstable fashion.

            To be sure these are just observations I have made then and ever since, but I argue that the universe is made up of feedback systems and there is a link with consciousness in these systems.

            Anyway I eventually bought the ‘Global Brain’ from Peter Russell in 1997 and I was not particularly surprised by its contents. It has the concept of the telecommunications system and the internet forming a ‘brain’ for the planet and even the extension of the concept to the scale of galaxies and the universe. What is more I was pleasantly surprised that it discussed the concept of feedback systems, but here they are called ‘dissipative systems’ and they differ in respect to common feedback systems in that they are associated with life processes. They happen to operate outside of thermodynamic equilibrium and need a constant energy and material supply to maintain homeostasis. I will go into ‘dissipative systems’ in more detail, but for now it is suffice to say I have only scratched the surface here.

            By this time it was mid 1997 when what for me was a totally whacked out idea came up out of my subconscious. I was pondering my ideas one night when another penny dropped. My literal thought process was “oh I get it if alien civilisations were ever to bother to make contact with us it would be when we have a self-aware Gaia planet that could join a community of Gaia planets”.

           I was rather stunned.

          Had I lost it or was it right? If it was correct then I had developed a lot of ideas without outside help. I thought, “There is no way anyone else near me would have thought of this.” I was rather pleased with myself and somewhat scared at the same time, but I figured it was better than the scenario presented in the film ‘Star Trek – First Contact’ which was released a year before. In this film first contact is initiated by the Vulcans when they detect humanity’s first warp speed flight, but the Gaia community concept is in my opinion better.

            So how long did my original idea on first contact and Gaia communities last? Three weeks.

            Yes I was in a university tutorial for, of all subjects ‘Feedback Control Theory’, when I started discussing the significance of the internet with an acquaintance of mine. Eventually I asked him what he thought would happen and, I kid you not, I could tell he was about to say exactly what I had recently developed. In essence he said, “The internet and all of humanity will form a super-consciousness at which point we’ll attempt to join a community of super-conscious planets.” The thing is I wasn’t at all surprised and the irony of it taking place in a feedback control class didn’t skip my notice. When I asked him how he knew of these concepts he told me that he had read about the concept in an Isaac Azimov novel and partly read it and partly developed it himself. He went on to inform me there is a whole genre of science fiction books relating to the area.

            Of course I haven’t read them simply because again I wanted to develop my own world view and I admit that I didn’t want all my dreams of writing a novel based around this world view dashed. Besides if I relied on the work of others to guide me I may miss avenues of thought and enquiry and perhaps become, dare I say it, apathetic?

            Yes apathy that bane of productive existence. I admit I have been tempted by it, but then what would my life stand and be for if I gave into it?

            Anyway it was about this time that another novel insight occurred to me. How does consciousness arise and where is it seated? One of the big questions of science and philosophy I admit. Is consciousness ‘generated’ by the brain or is something more subtle occurring? What if the brain actually ‘tuned’ consciousness somewhat like a radio, television or an internet connected computer tunes signals in the form of light and electrical signals? This is when I started to worry about how odd the ideas ‘bubbling up’ from my subconscious were getting. Can the brain tune a ‘consciousness signal’ and where the hell would it be ‘broadcast’ from? I wrestled with this somewhat odd concept for a few days before I allowed myself to settle for the notion of a dichotomy between ‘brain generated’ consciousness, which most people unquestioningly assume and accept, and ‘tuned’ consciousness. I subsequently would discuss this with people at parties with the result of people having their minds blown or being sceptical, something which people are all allowed to be in the face of something I had no knowledge of any evidence for.

            Anyway I soon subconsciously shelved this idea without drawing the ultimate conclusion arising out of consciousness being a ‘tuned’ phenomenon and as such and to my shame did not pull it from the mental shelf for over a decade later.

            Well that has been quite a ‘brain dump’. I will leave this post on a positive note, that being that people should not be afraid to come up with a world view or paradigm for themselves, but one has to be prepared to have it subjected to scrutiny by others, just please don’t put it to the blow torch too hastily! Anyway the next post will delve into my thinking on no other than the nature of feedback systems and that of their role in and implications for the universe itself. Goodbye for now!

Gavin