Overview
By Rome Viharo for Google Consciousness
Daniel Dennett’s model of consciousness in his landmark book“Consciousness Explained” deconstructs the ‘I’ experience down to ‘homunculi’ competing in the brain, each one a bit more stupid than the next until you get a ‘neuron’. That neuron he likens to a machine - but only in the sense that he wishes not to declare that there is *wonder tissue* that somehow has a magical property, but a machine that flows information. Medium, or ‘meat’ is irrelevant. Any simulation of the process should produce consciousness.
Ironically enough, the way he describes how this competition happens amongst the homunculi - this process ‘flow’ in the brain is remarkably identical to how you could map search, SEO and PageRank on Google. In addition, many of his descriptions and metaphors themselves also describe things like ‘wikis’ or ‘stories with no original author’. ’Consciousness Explained’ was published in 1991 - before social media and search and wikis.
I don’t imagine the internet formed itself off of the architecture of ‘Consciousness Explained’ - but is the similarity just an irony or can we begin to consider something like Google becoming conscious?
Let’s first define what we mean by ‘Google Consciousness’. Do we mean that Google’s servers are potentially sentient?
No, that is not what we are saying (but we are neither refuting that possibility, it’s just not what we are suggesting)
In the meme “Google Consciousness” - we could say that if each neuron is a machine, then likewise each computer or website in the world can function like a neuron. Yet each of these neurons is also connected to one of us, a ‘meta neuron’ in comparison that is also an intrinsic agent of the ‘internet’. The internet is the ever expanding exchange of information between humans and machines.
We use the machines to display our ideas, many of them which naturally are also engaged in a competition for truth values. Our content is used to communicate various levels of information meaning (semantics), only with which the human agents can experience or determine while we assume the machines cannot.
Other human agents then create a competition which we understand as ‘search’, a game where the meanings we are sharing to each other begin to compete for another agents attention. This competition then arranges how we access information, how we organize information in the network of machines which in turn may very well model how our brains either enter into a conscious state (Dennet) or access consciousness (dualism). If Dennet is mistaken and not describing consciousness, we can all at least agree that he is describing the brain. If he is mistaken and our consciousness somehow is dualistic in nature, then *everything* is suspect of having consciousness and the materialistic models regarding what determines consciousness are irrelevant.
In 2011 the reorganization of our information semantics via our machines is now rearranging our very human behaviors, away from the keyboard. It is allowing us to deconstruct previously held meanings that were considered true to become exposed as false and misleading. The rearrangement of truth values are causing many agents to re-organize society according to the truth values of the exchange of information between Agents and Machines.
#Googcon is a metaphor for this process, it is essentially based on the idea that we can *consider* the implications of a sentient web or collective intelligence in some sense.
It doesn’t matter in what way. If a computer server became conscious, or the entire network of human agents and machine becomes conscious+ - both would represent the same fundamental changes in society.
We suggest that the #nextsteps of this manifestation of collective intelligence will be how we govern ourselves. Social media will eventually replace the sluggish and outdated democratic models of governorship. We believe that it is more likely that it will produce a more refined way of administering ourselves and bring us closer to win win solutions for all participants.
Collectively, we are becoming more intelligent and more conscious, if by conscious we can mean *aware*.
Just like our own human natures - we are both conscious in some sense, and unconscious in many others. We are also comprised of ‘unconscious machines’ that participate in some sense with our own individual consciousness.
So we could also say with Google Consciousness, collective intelligence. Part of collective intelligence is indeed extremely conscious because each of us is extremely conscious. Yet none of us as individuals controls the internet, the process, the flow, the internet itself is run by unconscious machines in combination with a collection of conscious agents. Just like us as individuals.
And these conscious agents in turn maybe run by the very same process that the unconscious machines are… an algorithm something like Google search.
To clarify: In materialism Google’s algorithm and the collection of behaviors it governs both human and machine may be a contender for consciousness. If dualism as a model of consciousness is true, then Google could be considered conscious anyway since everything could have consciousness.
That the Google algorithm also ironically enough provides a description to how the Ayahuasceros of the Peruvian Upper Amazon claim to access plant consciousness is an entirely other rabbit hole. We highlight this in the talk to describe the distinctions between a dualistic model of consciousness and a materialistic model of consciousness.
The ultimate irony is that both of these models of consciousness which completely contradict one another, share a metaphor in common - Google.
