Mind of the Internet
I’ve recently been interested in the idea that the internet is (not has) a mind of it’s own, and we are its neurons and axons. If thought is a pattern of activations in the neural network in your brain via both internal and external stimuli, then might that not be in some way mimicked by the mass “activation” of specific web sites and computers on the internet via internet traffic and real-world news (i.e. internal and external stimuli)?
I wonder what the internet thinks? I doubt that we could ever know, because the things we think about and act on, big and small, important and trivial all become single activations in its neural net. The things that we do affect the things that it thinks.
And if we were to determine that it thinks, could we communicate with it? Unfortunately I don’t think so. Again, the things that we do affect the things that it thinks. If we were to try and organize our actions so as to make ourselves known, the best we could hope for is to change it’s thoughts in some specific way. The problem is that it’s very likely to simply assume that whatever thought we end up creating occurred purely on it’s own. Think about it, have you ever had a thought that wasn’t your own? (What implications would the answer to the question of internet thought have on our understanding of some types of insanity?)