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I deleted it due to lack of interest, in a huffy snit. Only asthmatics can throw a true huffy snit.

Here it is, minus some happy BS:

Why hatrack works
I changed the title because I didn't like it. Originally it was "Those wonderful nodes out there in the dark..."
I can't go on with the scene. I'm too happy![cut sentences] There's nothing else - just us - and the cameras - and those wonderful people out there in the dark. All right, Mr. De Mille, I'm ready for my close-up.--last lines of Sunset Boulevard

I've thought since right after I joined HR, that it was a fundamentally different type of social interaction. I thought of it as electronic telepathy, at first. A few months ago I read The Lucifer Principle by Howard Bloom, which extends Hobbes' ideas from Leviathan. In that book, Hobbes claims that the king is the head of an organism, his kingdom, with his subjects making up the body of the Leviathan. The ancients had similar ideas, not as fully fleshed out as Hobbes did.

Bloom showed that Hobbes had a point, that any society could be considered a neural network and analyzed in that way. Bloom goes on to show how this affects individuals and how societies compete to be at the top of the food chain, but I won't go into that here. Marshall McLuhan had expressed similar ideas as far back as the 50s in his Understanding Media and other books. McLuhan believed that electronic communication networks such as radio, TV and telephones extended the human nervous system, in a very real and not just metaphorical sense.

My point is that any intenet forum can be considered a neural network, and we are all nodes in the HR brain. This is why people are constantly exclaiming how HR makes them smarter--because it does. The interaction between large numbers of individuals allows us to quickly solve problems that would be time-consuming, very difficult or impossible on our own. Besides problem solving, HR allows us ready real-time access and interaction with a variety of differing POVs, cultures and philosophies, that would be difficult for anybody except rare socially plugged-in individuals to achieve in RL.

Neural networks are basically any system with
* processing nodes (that's us in this example)
* a high degree of interconnection (provided by the internet and the HR forum)
* adaptive interaction between nodes (our lovely discussions/arguments)

I just found this site while doing research for this post. The "Global Brain" metaphor is exactly what I'm trying to express.

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The "Global Brain" is a metaphor for the emerging collectively intelligent network formed by the people of this planet together with the computers, knowledge bases, and communication links that connect them together. This network is an immensely complex, self-organizing system that not only processes information, but increasingly can be seen to play the role of a brain: making decisions, solving problems, learning new connections and discovering new ideas. No individual, organization or computer is in control of this system: its knowledge and intelligence are distributed over all its components. They emerge from the collective interactions between all the human and machine subsystems. Such a system may be able to tackle current and emerging global problems that have eluded more traditional approaches, but at the same time it will create new technological and social challenges which are still difficult to imagine.

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Interaction, together with the presence of individual capacities for modelling, can be a source of new complexity in open systems. Structures, specializations, processes, and institutions emerge in a way that presumably would not be possible without interaction between individual members with social potentials. Communities of cells build organisms; communities of ants build complex anthills. In the human social context we are familiar with systems of government, justice, education, health care and so on which arise as emergent properties of individual social interactions. If we form a conceptual link between these creative activities of social systems and the adaptive behaviour of neural networks, then we begin to have a better understanding of emergent properties, including consciousness.

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http://www.nurseminerva.co.uk/fractal_networks.htm

Links:
Good overview of social networks on the web, with links to scientific papers.:

http://www.sztaki.hu/conferences/sunbelt21/15.html

Defines artificial neural networks, I cribbed from it in my definition.
http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~lss/NNIntro/InvSlides.html#what

This site discusses a paper that examined the social network in the Marvel comics universe.
http://www.nature.com/news/2002/020218/pf/020218-17_pf.html

Mph, now I'm just rambling--I'll let another jatraquernode pick up the ball and run with it.

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Thanks, I'm glad you liked it.

Consciousness is a higher-level attribute of brains, so ASFAIK dendrite growth cannot be directed consciously. I guess attention and learning can influence dendrite growth, encouraging certain paths while inhibiting others. But I don't know neurophysiology beyond the high school level.

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I was thinking about whether consciousness is separate from our neural network, and how free will differs from our dendritic connections.

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This is more complex. Lots of speculation on the topic, but nobody has a firm grasp on the causes of free will and consciousness, IMO. It's fun to wonder about, though.

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To this end, he suggested that the Earth in its evolutionary unfolding, was growing a new organ of consciousness, called the noosphere. The noosphere is analogous on a planetary level to the evolution of the cerebral cortex in humans. The noosphere is a "planetary thinking network" -- an interlinked system of consciousness and information, a global net of self-awareness, instantaneous feedback, and planetary communication.

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This convergence however, though it was predicted to occur through a global information network, was not a convergence of merely minds or bodies -- but of heart, a point that he made most fervently.[---from the website author]

"It is not our heads or our bodies which we must bring together, but our hearts. . . . Humanity. . . is building its composite brain beneath our eyes. May it not be that tomorrow, through the logical and biological deepening of the movement drawing it together, it will find its heart, without which the ultimate wholeness of its power of unification can never be achieved?"[--Teilhard de Chardin]

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But each poster sees herself or himself as Robin Hood and the "others" as Prince John and the Sherriff of Nottingham. Everyone thinks their own views are the honest reflection of OSC's philosophies while decrying the errors of the titular authorities.

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