Is the Web Conscious?

Systems have characteristics that their parts do not. This emergent phenomenon defines them. Your car got you to work today. None of its parts could do that. Not the engine. Not the wheels. Not the drive train. Systems are defined by the interactions of their parts rather than the action of their parts.

Which brings me to global consciousness.

James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, wrote an interesting piece in the New Yorker titled "The Collective Intelligence of the Web." The first example he uses of collective intelligence is of a project NASA began in 2000 to map Mars.

"There were two very interesting things about the results. First, although there was no financial incentive to participate, more than a hundred thousand people took part in the study, generating more than 2.4 million clicks. Second, and even more striking, the collective product of all those amateur clickers was very good—as a report put it, their 'automatically computed consensus” was “virtually indistinguishable from the inputs of a geologist with years of experience in identifying Mars craters.'"

He goes on to write about how Google ranks pages based on the actions of millions of users, and cites other examples. This isn't just about judgment. This is about creating. At one level this is not new. For centuries humans have been walking down trails that have been defined by the steps of thousands of people who have come before. But this capability of the Internet to knit together individual consciousness into something collective is something newly emergent, it seems to me.

Collectively, civilization can do what individuals can't. On our own, we really are just intelligent apes. But with one other person we can create a new human. With one million other people we can create a new community or set of institutions. And with billions of people online, maybe we can create a new sort of understanding that would be impossible for the individual or even any community within it.

It might just be that the web is enabling a new kind of consciousness to emerge, awareness and problem solving and project execution that would never be possible at the level of individuals or even teams traditionally managed. If so, it raises a fascinating question. Has the web developed consciousness yet? And if it was self-aware, would we be aware of it?

That Mind Virus Wants to Suck the Attention Out of Your Brain But Has to Call Itself a Meme Before You'll Let it Do That

If I remember correctly, when Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" he was not thinking about Facebook. Dawkins was trying to find a way to describe the cultural equivalent of a gene as a way to talk about practices that become a part of a culture. He thought it might add a little formality to the notion of social evolution as companion to species evolution, the mutation of memes changing peoples and cultures in the same way that the mutation of genes changes species. Practices that spread, like democracy and blue jeans, are memes. It's a great idea, and meme itself has become an incredibly pervasive meme. It's also radically mutated to look a bit like a virus.

Now, every bright shiny object on the Internet has become a meme. Or at least it gets called that. Of course a video of the world's smallest monkey eating elbow macaroni does capture consciousness, just like the Bill of Rights or the idea that we ought to drive on the right side of the road. But it doesn't actually inform behavior, doing less to inform who we are than distract us from that. Instead, it's just a distraction, a way to transform consciousness  into page views (which, in turn, can be transformed into advertising revenues). 

Consciousness is under assault. It's odd. Never before has humanity been more free to live as they wish and yet never before has the world offered so many alluring enticements from one's own thoughts, making it difficult for the individual to define novel ways to live. From movies and TV shows to books, art, museums, and lectures, the world offers thousands of options for structuring our consciousness for us, even outside of work. Worse, many of these same memes can become viruses, not so much structuring consciousness as distracting it. 

But I digress. To be distracted is to be human in this Information Age. We all do it. Trust me that I daily exceed the average quota of things found fascinating. But the notion that we're being distracted by something as sexy as a meme is a form of self-delusion. These aren't memes: they're badly mutated versions of Dawkins' original meme, something more akin to a mind virus than gene. I'm not suggesting that we stop being amused, intrigued, shocked, and entertained; I just that we owe it to ourselves to properly label the sources of all that.

[This blogger will leave you to determine if the preceding rant was a public service announcement, something akin to a meme, or was itself a mind virus, the blogging equivalent of a onomatopoeia.]

Bernard on Civilization as the Burden of Consciousness

Bernard didn’t waste anytime with small talk. Something had been keeping him up and the words spilled out even before I could read my menu.


“Civilization is the burden of consciousness. Our brains are big enough that it takes an enormous amount of complexity and work just to occupy them.”

“What?” I said, disoriented.

“We created all this society stuff to keep up with the development of our brains.”

I paused. I was irritated. Bernard knew that I rarely ordered the same thing twice and I needed to look at the menu each time. He wasn’t giving me time to do that. “So you’re saying that the Egyptian slaves built the pyramids because they were bored?”

“No. They had to create an outside world as complex as the one in their head.”

“Because?”

“Because otherwise they’d be bored.”

“Slaves?”

“Don’t be willfully obtuse,” Bernard sighed. “Communities do this. I has been a joint effort. Consciousness is like a vacuum that sucks civilization after it, inventing games, social constructs and technologies to occupy us.” He didn’t really need me to listen. He just kept on talking.

“But now the problem is that we Americans don’t really accept any rituals. It used to be that social complexity had to keep up with the complexity of consciousness, but now it’s reversed. We’ve made it too hard, made the construction of civilization and meaning a burden that we foist onto the individual.” Bernard did not even pause as the waitress came to take my order. I realized that he was again drinking espresso.

“We are a nation founded by Puritans who thought that rituals were a corruption of something pure. We threw away mass and art in church buildings. We reject rituals and social constructs and yet still there is a need for ceremonies, for some sacrament to mark milestones in life. But not many people have communion, or Bar Mitzvahs or whatever it is that ancient cultures have. We’ve been purified of rituals and still have a need for them so … we create them – rather poorly – on our own. What used to be a community tradition has become individual choice or responsibility.”

“So you are saying that it is not just that civilization is the burden of consciousness. You are saying that this burden is now personal?”

“Yes. And it’s an impossible task. By the time you realize what ritual is needed to become an adult or to leave home, you are a generation or two beyond that. The person immersed in the experience can’t be expected to also construct a way to commemorate, or symbolize it.”

“So I’m lost. You’re saying that we’ve purged our culture of rituals or that we just make them up ourselves? Civilization is the burden on consciousness or the burden created by consciousness?”

“I’m saying two things. One, civilization is a side effect of consciousness. Two, rituals are now left to the individual to choose or create. Now that everyone has to customize his own personal civilization – his own private culture – civilization has now become a burden to consciousness.”

“So we’ve gone full circle?”

“Everything living does.”

“So what is the prognosis?”

Bernard began to laugh. “Consciousness will become more complex. It has to, just to keep up.”

“Poof! Just like that? We’ll evolve more intelligence.”

“More social intelligence, yes. We already are.”

“We are?”

“Sure. What do you think the Internet is? Social sites like Facebook? We’re laying the foundation for new social inventions that can be shared. And we have huge networks to tap into.”

“Bernard,” I said laughing. ‘You’ve joined facebook?”

Bernard shifted uncomfortably. “Er. Yes. I have.”

I could not help but chuckle. “Bernard, I thought that was for college kids. No?”

“Not anymore,” Bernard said. “Everyone needs help constructing a life in a do-it-yourself culture. Not just kids.”

Is Consciousness Just a Trick of the Brain?

According to Tor Norretranders' fascinating book, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, your brain is tasked with an amazing responsibility. Your senses bombard it with about 11 million bits per second. Consciousness, however, can process only about 10 to 40 bits per second (estimates vary). So, the challenge of your brain is to process 11 million bits into 20 bits in way that accurately represents, or maps back to, the 11 million bits. The million+ bits flowing in from your eyes, for instance, have to be processed into familiar shapes ("Hey - that's my buddy Bill!") that shows up in consciousness as one bit rather than millions of disparate bits indicating colors, shapes, and spatial location. Cognitive processes below the surface of consciousness, processes that by definition we are unaware of, translate the millions into the few.

As it turns out, the brain takes about half a second to perform this feat - a remarkably rapid rate of calculation for processes so complex. But a half second is a really long time when it comes to awareness and sensations. This creates a challenge.

How is it that we don't seem to be going through reality with a time delay? Why aren't we aware of this half second delay? Well, for one thing, we' re only aware of what we're aware of and that is whatever is presented by consciousness . And consciousness performs an amazing feat: once it has processed the 11 million bits into the 20 bits to be comprehended by consciousness, it back dates this reality.

Let me repeat that. Tests indicate that although it takes a half second to process the sensations of reality into the perception of reality, consciousness basically tells us that it is instantaneous. It tricks us.

So, here's the real kicker. If consciousness lags reality and we don't, for instance, take a half second to decide to flex a finger or look up, what is the role of consciousness, or awareness? How is it that we interact with reality in real time even though our consciousness lags it by half a second?

It almost seems as though consciousness does less to make decisions than to trail after the cognitive processes that make such decisions - processes that are not even at the level of awareness - and explain, apologize, or rationalize what just happened. The role of consciousness may be less that of the driver of the car than that of the insurance agent who follows after the car, leaving behind claim forms in its wake.

If this is true, it raises another really important question. Who is writing my blog?

The Voice in Your Head - Or Why It's Difficult to Live Your Life as an Experiment

In keeping with the Welcome to the New Year! posts, I'd like to build on the notion of living your life as an experiment. Before delving into that, I'm going to argue that it is difficult to conduct your life as an experiment when you don't get data on reality - or perhaps more accurately, when all the data you get is so heavily narrated that it scarcely breaks through.

Your access to reality is obscured by the running commentary of the voice in your head. You have likely experienced reality only rarely since you’ve been about two years old. Babies are all possibility and potential. They can learn any language, assimilate any culture, or manifest about any personality. They learn more rapidly than a lecture hall full of students. As we age, the voice in our head matures and bombards us with questions, criticisms, commentary and meaning. It reaches particular conclusions and begins to filter out reality that doesn’t support those conclusions. As we age, our way of being is more prescribed, less malleable, and more defined. Why? I’d argue that it has nothing to do with the host of possibilities in the world around us. Reality has not changed. The voice in our head has changed. Or, rather, the voice in our head has increasingly taken the place of reality.

This may sound abstract, obtuse, or even odd. It might be all that, but it also aligns pretty well with research on cognition, on how the mind works.

It is true that you perceive the world around you, processing what comes in from your senses in the way of sounds, sights, and tastes. You are aware enough of the world outside of your head that you can drive down the street and safely stay off of people’s lawns. So how could the voice in your head really change your perception of reality? It can do this because the flow of data from the world to your senses is a fraction of the flow of information from your consciousness to your senses. Let me explain.

Research indicates that we process incoming sensations in layers. If something is before you, for instance, the brain first processes a blur of white, a crude shape. It next matches that color and shape to a database of shapes and determines it is a flower. At the next level of processing it determines that the flower is actually an orchid. Next, you determine that an orchid would please your Grandmother but not be particularly effective if you wanted to signal romantic interest. And then you start to think about relationships and the failure you had the last time you tried to turn a friendship into a romance, and how mortified you were that you were rejected. And suddenly you don’t see the orchid at all – you are lost in the ugly memory of rejection, of failed love and the voice in your head may even go so far as to conclude that you have no hope for romance. All of this because you saw an orchid. Your consciousness is informed by the flower – but it is filled even more with the memories, feelings, and conclusions that the flower triggered.

“The neurotic person distorts reality, makes demands upon it, imposes premature conceptualizations upon it, is afraid of the unknown and of novelty, is too much determined by his interpersonal needs to be a good reporter of reality, is too easily frightened, is too eager for other people’s approval, etc. It may be expected that as a culture improves, thereby improving the health of all its citizens, truth seeking should improve.”
- Abraham Maslow

There “are 10 times as many nerve fibers carrying information down [from higher to lower levels of the brain] as there are carrying it up [from lower levels to higher levels].”[1] The implication is that what we perceive does impact our consciousness, but that the impact of our consciousness on what we perceive is even greater. We have a mental construct that interprets a confusing set of data, making sense of it and calling that reality. Do you perceive orchids or rejection?

One well known but rarely reported fact of consciousness is this: “every single second, millions of bits of information flood in through our senses. But our consciousness processes only perhaps forty bits a second – at most. Millions and millions of bits are condensed to a conscious experience that contains practically no information at all. Every single second, every one of us discards millions of bits in order to arrive at the special state known as consciousness.” “A million times more bits enter our heads than consciousness perceives.” [2] Your perception of reality is, at best, filtered. Worse, and all too commonly, it is distorted.

If you have ever seen a hypnotist at work, you know that our senses can be overridden by suggestion, by consciousness. Have you ever considered that a state of hypnosis might be closer to your normal state than simply perceiving reality for what it is?

So, why don’t we embrace reality? One reason is that we are simply compelled to make meaning, to assign interpretation, and make judgments. That’s what it means to be human. Another reason is that reality can seem overwhelming, the facts can seem too harsh. We retreat from accomplishment, which lives in the domain of reality, into reason, which lives in our mind. More specifically, we retreat from accomplishment and goals into reasons why we can’t accomplish our goals. Consider the possibility that you can’t face facts without faith that those facts are not a prison but are, rather, stepping stones. Reality is abuzz with possibilities. It is only the voice in your head that has already defined and bounded your life.


[1] Sandra Blakeslee, “Hypnosis gains respect, helps to see brain work: Those susceptible to suggestion see change in ‘truth,’” New York Times News Service, The San Diego Union-Tribune, Thursday, November 24, 2005, A25.
[2] Tor Norretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size (New York: Penguin, 1999) p. 125 – 6.